Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary
Jordan, Ruth
LIVES ON THE BOUNDARY, THE STRUGGLES AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF AMERICA'S UNDERPREPARED, by Mike Rose. The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc., New York, 1989. 288 pp. $22.95. As immigration...
...But the SPRING • 1990 • 271 experience made him particularly sensitive to the needs of those not heard or understood...
...As immigration swelled at the end of the nineteenth century, the nation's "real" Americans dug in their heels and created an oddly romantic and destructive notion of democracy called the "melting pot theory," which they applied relentlessly to immigrant schoolchildren...
...They are less likely to have participated, in any extended way, in such discussions in the past...
...All students require such an opportunity...
...Recently, that myth has been replaced with one that describes our nation as a "rich, multicultural tapestry" of peoples...
...They won't have the confidence or the moves to enter it, and can begin to feel excluded, out of place, put off by a language they can't command...
...How can I best understand that and how can I unlock the secrets of the world of education so that they can come in too...
...After all, since drug taking, criminal behavior, early sexual experiences, teen pregnancy, and school dropouts are consistently linked with poverty, and since these are matters of human behavior, it must be the behavior of the poor that causes their problems, not their poverty and powerlessness...
...But, when it comes to measuring educational achievement, we're still stirring the melting pot...
...Why didn't his parents protest...
...This can only be done by humanists who, like Mike Rose, know their fields and use their skills and instincts of love and respect to help the young...
...The people I grew up with were retired from jobs that rub away at the heart or were working hard at jobs to keep their lives from caving in or were diving headlong into a barren tomorrow: junkies, alcoholics, and mean kids . . . looking to throw a punch...
...Rose contends that our schools are wedded to methods of evaluation that set the stage for failure—both for the student and the schools...
...Created at a period in the nineteenth century when educators thought they could apply the standards of an industrial age to the educational process, they concentrate on right and wrong answers, and right and wrong language usage...
...At enormous sacrifice his parents sent him to a rigid Catholic secondary school where he and his fellow inmates were bullied or bored into submission...
...Teachers, personnel directors, college professors, admissions officers, and other gatekeepers stand at the doorway to success...
...Before they shut that door they need to analyze the "logic of error," as Rose calls it, in the unexpected responses they receive to tests and interviews...
...Educators then search for "handicaps and disabilities" that block the student's grasp of the information as it is presented and as it is tested...
...Rose says that not least among the problems of the poor is that they are taught early on to think of themselves as stupid, unsuccessful, and pathologically unable to meet the standards of middle-class America...
...We honor cultural differences by noting the contributions of immigrants, but we're quite clear that the core American culture is white Anglo-Saxon...
...Worse than that, a terrible mistake was made...
...These conflicting messages permeate our educational system, giving mixed signals to children and teachers about what it takes to be a successful student and just who is smart and who is not...
...His was a childhood marked by family failure and crises...
...Excerpts from their notebooks give insight into the harmful assumptions built into our academic life...
...What did it all mean to them...
...His work with very young African American and Latino children showed him that their interpretation of the school's curriculum often made them appear stupid or learning-disabled to their teachers, when in fact their responses were simply different...
...This approach seeks to find explanations for deviation from the "right" way by finding "defects" in the student's learning abilities...
...And not surprisingly students in the vocational track lived out these expectations...
...Like his parents, Rose's teachers trusted the system, not bothering to wonder about his placement...
...Rose asks us to reject these measures and tools and proposes a more challenging course...
...Mike Rose sets out a difficult task...
...He warns us that the current wave of school reform will be no different from those of the past if it is rooted in achieving standards that are merely a reflection of the dominant culture and life ways...
...He demonstrates what it means to ask them respectfully why they have answered questions in an unexpected way...
...He applied this same carefully individualized approach in his work with Vietnam veterans and older students who entered college under the open admissions policies of the seventies...
...Overlayered on testing has been the growth of medical theory that disease can have an impact on behavior...
...Rose, now associate director of UCLA's writing program, was born to poor Italian immigrants who might now be called part of the "underclass...
...And the poor, says Rose, believe it as much as do the privileged...
...272 • DISSENT...
...That meant placement in a vocational track where academic subjects were replaced by low-level English, typing, and business math...
...How could they know...
...He shows ways to analyze their work to find out what it is they are saying...
...But those . . . with lessthanprivileged educations, especially those from the lower classes, are particularly in need...
...They were surly, unruly, didn't pay attention in class, did not progress...
...One does not have to be a cultural relativist to avoid ethnocentric arrogance...
...But, as Rose points out, they were far from brain-dead: they constantly engaged in enthusiastic discussions about cars, sports, and street philosophy...
...In Rose's case, the school's mistake was discovered and his future took a different turn...
...Standardized tests—even when properly administered— are useless because, he says, "They focus on failure...
...If, as a society, we continue to judge those who fail as stupid or clinically disabled or even morally warped, we will compound the inequities of our economic system and continue to isolate the poor, minorities and all other outsiders...
...And he urges us to honor their years of experience as workers, mothers and fathers, community activists, survivors, and say to ourselves: "These people have made it in cruel circumstances...
...To fulfill the promise of democracy through education, we must approach our learners where they actually are...
...They are able...
...They are used to regarding the world in a certain way...
...W]hen years later, I was introduced to humanistic psychologists like . . . Maslow and . . Rogers with their visions of self actualization, or even Freud with his sober dictum about love and work, it all sounded like a glorious fairy tale, a magical account of a world full of possibility...
...This need to categorize and judge by standardized values and the damage that it does is the central issue Mike Rose addresses in this extraordinary book that is at once biography, sociology, and educational theory...
...The problem was that they were unable to conduct their discussion in the style of academic life: The discourse of academics is marked by terms and expressions that represent an elaborate set of shared concepts and orientations . . . you could almost define a university education as an initiation into a variety of powerful ongoing discussions...
...We treat the nation's schoolchildren as though they were all the same, judging them by norms that require a large number to fail in order for some to come out on top and others to fall in the middle...
...He begins by discussing his own origins and development...
...It is the pedagogy of efficiency, an educational theory founded on quantification...
...The results of his standardized Stanford-Binet test were mixed up with those of another Rose who had scored at the low end of the scale...
...Then, perhaps moved by his own sense of being an "outsider," he joined the Teacher Corps and taught minority children...
...I developed a picture of human existence that rendered it short and brutish or sad and aimless or long and quiet with rewards like afternoon naps, the evening newspaper and walks around the block...
...They are smart...
...Under the tutelage of some extraordinary teachers, Rose entered college and began moving along a track to university tenure...
...This isn't done by prescribed curriculums or required book lists and predetermined compilations of facts every child should know...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
