in 1960; there was a wide consensus that voter registration was a good thing. But voter registration among sharecroppers in Mississippi was radical, and resulted in massive interruptions of the Southern, and eventually of the national, political and social systems.
The Marxist frame—that schools reproduce class structures—is certainly helpful to an extent. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis give a detailed explication of how educational reproduction works in America.4 The limitation of the Marxist frame, however, is that we will need to wait until the revolution for schooling’s role in the reproduction of class dynamics to change. There is an important body of work that understands working-class young people as resistant to the reproduction of class in schools. Part I of this book centers on a particular interpretation of this resistance in the context of the black freedom struggle in America. But understanding the students as resistant is not quite enough to help us understand how they will become educated in a pre-revolutionary era.
The problem is chicken and egg. To the extent that schooling simply reproduces existing class dynamics, no changes in how schooling works will matter till class dynamics change. But class dynamics are unlikely to change until a revolutionary or insurrectionary consciousness develops among the young—and their consciousness develops largely through schooling.
The obvious solution to this problem is to reduce the scale of the task. Subversive parents try to raise subversive children. African nationalists try to raise African nationalist children at the scale of the family or on the somewhat larger scale of a cultural organization or church, for example. The approach to creating a mini-society that will reproduce specific human dynamics can sometimes be extended to the size of a private or charter school. Such schools try to insulate children from the oppressive forces that determine the shape of schooling as an unhelpful or degrading institution. Some small schools of this kind have been relatively successful in giving children and adolescents an experience of human interaction that is very different from the norm. Some have been less successful.
The example of positive mini-societies nevertheless demonstrates that the Marxist view of cultural reproduction is not the last word on how children grow up. Though schools do reproduce oppressive relations, there are potential paths through which small trickles of something different may leak out, until a larger revolution or insurgency takes root.
The question this book explores is how to understand the actual dynamics of public schools of poverty in such a way that potent mini-societies can be created right inside them. The charter or private school is one route. But the great mass of oppressed young people are in normative public high schools. That mass possesses almost unfathomable energy. We want to develop a frame through which their energy could become foregrounded not only as unorganized resistance, but as actually constructing an insurgency.
To understand the terms and ways of thinking presented here, it is important to reflect on two particular inadequacies of the dominant ideology as it relates to education. (1) Schooling tends to treat persons as things, subjects as objects; (2) discussions of the roles of young people generally suffer from a pervasive literalism.
Treating persons as things is an ethical error analyzed over millennia in many different cultures. Capitalism or the West or Whiteness are particularly egregious violators in this mode: we have regularly bought and sold human beings and continue to monetize everything we can name. Another way to understand the ethical error of treating persons as things is to consider certain traditional forms of thinking that refuse to treat even animals, plants, mountains, or rivers as mere things. Thanking the buffalo or the bear for their meat, cherishing the returning rain or sun, are “superstitions” to “scientific” minds, but in other ways of thinking these are acts that establish our own humanity: it is an ethical requirement to be conscious and aware of our relations to the world, to be “in relation” to the world as opposed to merely using it. Though this traditional awareness may go too far for many of us brought up differently, it highlights the distinction between parts of the world toward which we hold ethical obligations and parts of the world toward which we don’t. In western terms, this distinction is between “persons” and “things.”
The factory or laboratory analogies and the everyday practice in schools of poverty encourage this ethical error. Young people are often objectified, and young people whose ancestors were slaves, legal property that a person could own, may be especially sensitive, at least emotionally, to such a category mistake. In general, however, the disregard for young people’s full personhood is taken for granted. This is explored in detail below. For now, we simply point out that in the official, normative view, young people are of doubtful personhood. Unlike adults, their will and identity are not thought to be fully autonomous. Having committed no crime, having made no positive choice to participate in any organization or institution, adolescents are compelled wholesale to attend schools and to follow school rules, or they are humiliated and punished. This is a condition generally not suffered by persons officially categorized as autonomous.
We have no consensus as a society about when a small child, maturing into an adult, attains a fully autonomous will and identity. It is clear, however, to most people today, far more than in, say, 1787, that treating Africans as things rather than as persons is an egregious trespass. The case of adolescence is less clear, but young people challenge older adults to think about the consequences of making a mistake in evaluating their autonomy. If it is an error to treat a person as a thing, then it is an error to treat someone who possesses full autonomy as if they do not. For many years women, of course, had trouble convincing men of the strength of this argument, and in much of the world still do. With regard to young people, the case is still far from obvious, especially in schools of poverty, and pushing the point is one of the aims of this book.
The second major inadequacy in most discussions of education is an unfortunate literalism. Literalism is the idea that words refer directly or transparently to things in the world, and that confusion in communication can be eliminated by simply finding the right words to represent any intended meaning.5 Language, however, is less straightforward than literal-minded people would wish. Words are full of overtones and undertones, shadings and associations, and they carry immensely complicated histories with them wherever they go. We call speakers “tone-deaf” who seem oblivious to how context might modify, limit, or expand the significations of the words they use. Consider, for example, the Columbia Law School trustee who recently asked a black applicant interviewing for admission: “If you say ‘people of color,’ what’s wrong with my saying ‘colored people’?” The literalist is baffled by the distinction, while anyone with a sense of how history intertwines with language will understand that the stylistic choice between “people of color” and “colored people” today, in 2013, communicates something about the speaker’s stance and values.
Much of the language used by schools of poverty—or by bureaucracies or researchers about schools—suffers from the stylistic defect of literalism. I argue in accordance with a long rhetorical tradition that the stylistic defect is actually an ethical defect. Tone-deafness in speech often goes hand in hand with cruelty in action. The trustee who has trouble distinguishing between “people of color” and “colored people” is likely to reinforce the institutionalized cruelties of racism.
But the argument goes far beyond the political correctness of specific terms. The rhetorical tradition we are invoking advances a strategic approach toward language as symbolic action. The bad style of school bulletins on truancy or test protocols, or the bad style of most official “standards” describing curriculum or behavior, abet and enforce reactionary attitudes toward the struggle of young people in poverty. This point is discussed explicitly in Part II on teaching Brown vs. Board in a segregated school, and is relevant throughout. Actual or pretended ignorance about how our official language clatters against reality is in itself a kind of wrong-doing and contributes to making schools of poverty unlivable for human beings.
But even more important is the
