is potentially helpful in directing us toward good and humane action inside of schools, and can help us dig in and survive there. What we find as we explore this topic is that human beings are naturally graceful and sensitive to the complexity of the symbols and language they use. We find that young people are almost obsessed with stylistic nuance and shading—in language, dress, gesture, or stance. And we find that any elaborate series of stylistic choices can add up to a strategy for action, to a way of taking on the world as it presents itself to us, and possibly of transforming it.
The more literal-minded we are, the more we will despair of getting out from under the bureaucratic mass. But using and appreciating language that is multi-layered and alive can give us a different perspective. If we understand the roles of young people in schools of poverty as part of an enormously rich and heroic drama rather than simply despairing at their mistakes or at our mistakes or at the administrations’ mistakes, we will be much more hopeful. We can take a bit of the action and language and interpret it; and then we can apply or try out our interpretation on another bit and see if it helps us make sense of something that was troubling us. This sort of functional interpretation then becomes a pragmatic tool that actually helps move the action along in a desired direction. Through public speech and action attached in an aesthetically sophisticated way to radical traditions of speaking and acting, we may find ourselves “stepping into history,” making things happen.
By resolutely treating persons as persons, not as things, and by celebrating and putting to use the historical and aesthetic complexities of public speech and action, we counter the ersatz “science” of the education world. Bad “science” tries to expunge ethical categories from its descriptions and procedures. “Scientists” claim that they have no horse in the race, and only want to know the facts. This is ignorant or disingenuous. Science, like all human inventions, contributes to human purposes, but those purposes are not determined scientifically. How we act toward each other, the field of ethics and the beginning of politics, results from our attitudes, habits, and decisions, not exclusively from observable data. We all know this, of course, but the pose of determining action “scientifically” from data alone is often authoritative in twenty-first-century America. The authority of “science” will pass, but in the meantime we who believe in freedom should heap up barricades from whatever materials we can find to create protected regions that operate under a different authority.
In designing our barricades, I look to two deeply thought out and long-practiced traditions. They may not seem on their face to be traditions of education, but they are rooted in education nonetheless.
The first is the organizing tradition of Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This tradition is exceedingly old and is beautifully described by Bernice Johnson Reagon, another disciple of Ella Baker, in a chapter called “The African American Congregational Song Tradition” from If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me:
In congregational singing, there is no soloist, there are only songleaders. The difference between a soloist and a songleader is that with a soloist, they have a part by themselves and, if there are other voices, they are in a part of the background. With a songleader, you can start a song, but you cannot give it life without the participation of other voices. You may have verses, or you may have a call with others responding, but there is no sense that you could stand by yourself. Songleaders get nowhere unless the congregation takes the song over as its own—then the songleader has something to do, a song to lead, a song to move to another level. Songleaders can start the song, but they cannot finish it.6
Robert Parris Moses, born and raised in Harlem, a young math teacher and student of philosophy, went south in 1960 with a letter of introduction from Bayard Rustin to Ella Baker to get started on some civil rights work. At the time, Miss Baker was the Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, a coalition of black ministers. Ella Baker had already been active in radical circles for thirty years, creating worker cooperatives, developing grassroots leadership for the NAACP, and connecting activists across the country. When Bob Moses met her at the SCLC, however, she was frustrated for a number of reasons. In his book, Radical Equations, Moses writes that “her style strained an already uncomfortable political relationship and finally made it impossible for Miss Baker to continue with SCLC. ‘She wasn’t church,’ one SCLC minister said. She wasn’t deferential. She wasn’t a man in an organization that was patriarchal as well as hierarchical. And what I think was probably the most critical tension: her concept of leadership, that it should emerge from the community and be helped in its growth by grassroots organizers, clashed with SCLC’s idea of projecting and protecting a single charismatic leader.”7
In 1960, Miss Baker convened young people of the sit-in movement at the founding of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and urged them to let their new organization take root independently of the older adults running the SCLC and the NAACP. The young people had to figure things out on their own. They had to believe in their own ability to lead. They had to find motivation for action through their own experiences, discussions, and decisions, without requiring sanction from anyone else, if they were to bear up under the onslaught white America had in store for them. Their discipline was not to be the discipline of an army that follows a chain of command from generals down. Their discipline conformed to a different tradition: the discipline of communal responsibilities among peers who consciously agree to share a common purpose and way of living.
Organizers are crucial to the tradition represented by Miss Baker and Bob Moses. The organizers know it is hard to excavate a common purpose out of all the different tendencies, needs, and views any collection of people has, especially when the pressure merely to survive is very great. The organizers also know that it is hard for people to remember their own power, since most of us are only too happy to surrender our power to charismatic leaders who will just tell us what to do. But effective organizers like Bob Moses and Ella Baker succeed in helping people define a consensus about what they are working on, what they are trying to do, and also succeed in establishing structures whereby a group with a consensus about what their work is can organize themselves to get it done.
When Bob Moses found himself in Mississippi, the consensus turned out to be around voting rights, and the structure turned out to be voter registration drives, the Freedom Summer campaign and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Many histories have been written about this work because it affected the lives of millions, and still affects us today. The right to vote is not a radical enough goal, but it was the issue a consensus developed around and therefore became a powerful organizing tool. Organizers and theoreticians might think they know more than the people, but it takes time for the people to learn to trust themselves, paths may be winding, and unexpected, powerful things may happen on the way. Trying to short-circuit the winding path to communal learning usually backfires, because the “experts,” charismatic leaders, or vanguards take up the space that the people must learn to structure for themselves. Voting rights was an organizing tool, not an end goal. Thousands of sharecroppers, day laborers, and domestic workers in Mississippi were willing to risk their lives for the right to vote, and that willingness created the opportunity for a mass movement that had previously been impossible to grow in the Deep South. Others who prefer to focus on different goals must not only articulate why their preference makes sense, but must also find a way to get people to risk their lives for it.
For Ella Baker and Bob Moses what is more radical than voting rights is education. The Civil War had the effect of freeing the slaves and making them citizens, but “education,” Moses says, “is the subtext of the right to vote.” Citizenship, due process, protection under the law, and the right to vote hold little meaning without full access to the benefits of education. More importantly, the viability of an oppressed population as a culture and people is inextricably linked to the way its children are raised, to their control of how young people are brought up and for what purposes. And this question is not one to be answered top-down. It is a question whose answers must emerge from
