TWO CRITICS OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL

...The rug my shoes are soiling costs at least three thousand dollars...

...Yet this is what Kozol offers us: a world in which everything is black and white, in which the lines between the villain and victim are drawn clearly...

...It is essential that we be precise...

...School also helps the privileged to enjoy their privileges-in Kozol's parlance to say yes rather than no...

...Second, Kozol's inability to distinguish appearance from reality pushes him into all the absurdities of overstatement which debars the American school child who takes the Pledge of Allegiance seriously from the possibility of becoming a social critic rather than a some twisted embodiment of H.L...

...He does his work...

...So do I. For without any universally applicable criteria of per-sonhood, it is extraordinarily difficult to determine when one is being violated or one is being respected...

...public schools is not to educate good people, but good citizens...

...On this view, Mr...

...Instead, this Self is an entity defined as an "open-minded process of continually integrating internal and external experiences about the center...

...Yet the Flag Pledge and those condemned civics classes may also help to create social critics...

...Kohl begins by misunderstanding psychoanalytic theory thoroughly-despite his own years in analysis...

...Rockefeller and the welfare mother whose medical assistance just got cut can both be exploited and oppressed...

...Jonathan Kozol, however, is incapable of either a judicious look at himself or at the schools and individuals he saddles with the responsibility for everything from the inculcation of social insensitivity, the maintenance of privilege, the inculcation of blind patriotism and rampant chauvinism and the creation of moral mutants whose ethical capacities have been blunted, to My Lai and Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...Within Kohl's pages, we lose the language of "right" and "wrong", or "just" and "unjust" and replace it with the sanitized mystifications of "intense perverse centrificity", of "devastated" or "nonexistent centers"-a typology which reifies people and social life into a chart of empty categories within which nothing guides them to true "centeredness," for that, Kohl states, "cannot be defined in words...

...Kohl also claims that psychoanalysis defines "health" in terms of "adjusting oneself to the world as it is...

...As for Kohl's ultimate definition of a "healthy" existence- wholeness, openness, specificness, commitment-it sounds like something the current purveyor of pop panaceas, John Denver, should set to music...

...Kozol rejects the task of a critical inquiry which would puncture appearances and the surface of things in order to probe deeper realities...

...It occurs to me, as I am sitting here, that this would make a nice school...

...Basic training does not begin in boot camp...

...The impoverishment and vulgarization of language is exemplified in perhaps its paradigmatic form in Kohl's re-definition of exploitation and oppression...

...He wants us to prefer what he prefers and to reject what he rejects...

...The result is over-kill rather than illumination...

...Kohl unlike Kozol, who has taken to the lecture circuit and the "radical think tank" in recent years, still works in schools and retains his commitment to the creation of classrooms in which connections are made to students, parents, and the wider community which allow for reasonable, measured responses from everyone...

...army that transforms an innocent boy into non-comprehending automaton in six months...

...The first goal and primary function of the U.S...

...Herbert Kohl's criticism is tempered with a measure of ironic distancing coupled with a recognition that schools exist in an asymmetrical relationship to those economic and political structures and arrangements which are primarily determinative of American life...

...I begin with Kozol's verbal assault and battery...

...But there are problems within Kohl's more thoughtful approach which can, I believe, be traced to his embrace of modes of thought, particularly Jungian psychology, which are distorting and fundamentally misleading as theories of both personal and social praxis...

...Again, the misreading (presuming, perhaps incorrectly, there has been any reading at all) of Freud is nearly complete...

...Kant would find this a bit disconcerting and ultimately incompatible with a moral point of view...

...So he arbitrarily defines a citizen as a person who has been dehumanized, debilitated, and rendered bloodless...

...He sees psychoanalysis as a theory which turns on the "interpretation of personal pain as solely an internal matter to be mediated by the parts of one's psyche...

...This is the stuff of Never-Never Land...

...The assault on Attica was something which occurred when action took place-a repressive and murderous "something...

...Mencken's species, boobus Amer-icanus...

...BOOKS TWO CRITICS OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Half the House HERBERT KOHL Bantam, $1.95 The night is dark and I am far from home JONATHAN KOZOL Houghton Mifflin, $7.95 The public school, again, takes its lumps-this time in books by two young social critics, now in their early thirties, whose thought was tempered by the tumultuous politics of the 1960s and the bitter revelations about politics of the 1970s...

...This is nowhere more in evidence than in his declaration that the Flag Pledge "works" in one way only, to create monsters...

...The approaches of the authors may be compared to the differences between a skilled surgeon who would excise a cancerous growth carefully so as not to destroy surrounding healthy tissue and the butcher who dispatches his victim with a mercilous bludgeoning because it takes much less time, care, and thoughtful effort...

...People are left to "define" their own centers...

...studios or in the boardrooms of large corporations, the bias of the schools is clearly anti-ethical and anti-human...

...The book features a touching, provocative discussion of Kohl's attempts at collective, alternative ways of teaching and living...

...Kozol would "solve" the problem of inequality in medical provisions for the rich and the poor by having the "liberal, sincere" man of conscience who sends his own wife and children to the finest doctors he can afford say no to this privilege if he would witness to his beliefs and escape Kozol's high-minded wrath...

...The Nazi extermination camps were a lived vision-a sick and repugnant one...

...To "solve" the problem of maldistribution of wealth, Kozol would have the wealthy say no to privilege-not work to eliminate a situation which allows some to accumulate and to wallow in luxury as others groan in misery...

...Rather than examining the interrelationship of personal and social life as an ambivalent, dialectical working through of a series of conflicts and contradictions which are never totally harmonized, Kohl views life as a rather lofty interplay of archetypal and transcendental opposites which must, somehow, be held "together about a center he [Jung] calls the Self...

...But his own analysis, if one spins out its normative implications, conduces to precisely such claims...

...emphasis mine] These definitions, as stated, provide no basis for choosing between a mode of direct action tied to fascis-tic aspirations rather than those Tho-reauian or Gandhian aspirations Kozol celebrates...

...To somehow equate, on a laundry list of possible "root-causes," the economic system and T.V...

...Kozol has spent a good many of his own waking hours surrounded by, observing, and then repudiating these trappings...

...A public school lad no doubt...

...He eats his meal...

...I ask myself how much the house itself is worth and I decide: about one hundred thousand dollars...

...To speak, as Kohl does, of "uncen-tered centers," "hardened centers," or "perverse centers" (which may be either permanent or temporary) is to descend into the vacuum of a thoroughgoing epistemological and moral relativism...

...But this "core," "being," "center," "centered life" or "personal center" (Kohl uses each of these phrases, in turn, on a single page) has no clear boundaries either, for the center is also in flux...

...And that is something no radical theorist nor person of conscience can accept...

...Yet his explicit repudiation exists in a tension with his own salacious descriptions of the very things he would have all condemn-a tension lost on Kozol himself...

...studios is to engage in distinction-eroding sophistry, not careful analysis...

...This is a view Freud repeatedly and explicitly rejected...

...Kozol either has or would condemn both...

...But Kozol has no theory of democracy...

...His is a hard, reductionistic literalness couched in maudlin mean-derings and self-righteous condemnations of others...

...Surely Kohl would label such a claim outrageous...

...Kozol calls American public education an "ice-cold machine...

...Why My Lai...

...A few characteristic samples of Kozol's shrill hyperbole should suffice to defend my rather harsh criticisms...

...I, for one, am not quite certain...

...To destroy the placid bourgeois way of life and its handmaiden, the school, Kozol would have school children refuse to take food or to obey school attendance rules...

...It begins in kindergarten...

...All of -this is unfortunate for Kohl would have been well served through a serious turn to Freudian theory...

...I do know, however, that Kohl's Self is not a person who, by definition, has certain incorrigible moral responsibilities to self and others...

...Third, the theoretical thinness of Kozol's diatribe provides "solutions" to social problems with structural roots and outcomes which are thoroughly trapped in an elitist individualism and are inefficacious and even pathetic...

...This is not surprising for Kozol tosses out, in an insouciant, casual fashion the following sentence which betrays his own disconcern with the causes of the contemporary malaise: "Whether the root-cause lies in 'the whole economic system,' in neighborhoods, in T.V...

...He lifts his fork...

...He carves out the beef...

...All groups and individuals devoted to social change must, Kohl urges, devote themselves to a continual, critical look at themselves...

...I add up the value of the things that I am sitting on or things that I can touch...

...The sofa . . . covered with silk from Shanghai from before the war, is worth at least two thousand dollars the lamps . . . must cost four hundred dollars each...

...Kozol's diatribe fails for it suffers from fatal flaws at its analytic core...

...Yet he refuses to ground these "preferences" in a moral theory which rejects mere "preference" as a morally important statement...

...Indeed, when he does proffer definitions of "truth" and the "ethical" they are chilling in their potentially repressive and nihilistic implications...

...It continues with a vengeance for the subsequent twelve years...

...First, although Kozol rails incessantly about ethics and the ethical, he has no coherent moral vision...

...Kozol apparently believes that anything worth stating is worth over-stating...

...How on earth would social change and the American medical establishment be served if yet another child died or suffered from medical neglect...

...This is a retreat from reason and a celebration of that feeling-reason split which is the essence of bourgeois society, not its opposite...

...It is not the U.S...

...Answer: 'This man [a participant in the massacre] is six months out of public school...

...It is so normal, so amiable, so hearty, so routine, to speak about starvation over a forty-dollar lunch...

...I will discuss three of these flaws briefly...

...He insisted that psychoanalysis could not provide any "positive model" of health which bifurcated radically the "healthy" from "unhealthy...

...And what moral person would not see the parent who allowed such a tragedy as his "testimony" to his ethical beliefs as a twisted and confused figure at best, a monster and murderer at worst...

...As for truth, it, in Kozol's belief, "is something which occurs when actions take place, not when phrases are contrived...

...One might think that a democracy requires good citizens...

...Teachers are "the ideological hand servants of the leading counter-revolutionary nation on the face of the earth...

...No longer the necessary features of an inegalitarian society, they become those purely subjective responses which occur when one's own energy is "dissipated, exhausted, consumed" by another without any "exchange of psychic energy or at least some equilibrium of energy" being established...

...Instead, he has moved into a language and a mode of analysis which not only offends the literary palate but, more importantly, vitiates critical explanation and understanding...

...He draws his salary...

...He visits with friends in an upper-class suburb and promptly acts as if he's in training for "The Price is Right" Every so often, however, my head begins to do arithmetic...

...Kozol, like Mencken, has contempt for most people...

...There are all sorts of "lived visions" the moral person must and should condemn...

...Thus Kozol's "solutions" are precisely the kind capitalist society has always encouraged because they are soporifics, personal expiations of guilt which soothes the conscience without threatening the social order...

...Why is Kohl concerned that "people in process" wonder about their sanity...

...The reader of The night is dark and I am far from home is forced up against the wall: either he must reject or embrace the book's abstract anguish in toto for Kozol allows no middle-way...

...Neither oppressed nor oppressor emerges as a real, complex person in his book...

...But that is not my point...

...I know because I am one of those who first saw the discrepancy between the American promise and the American reality as a public school child who took the Pledge of "liberty and justice for all" seriously and recognized that it did not and never had existed save as a worthy ideal...

...For example, he calls "the ethical" an "invocation to a lived vision-to action...

...He is six months from the Glee Club, Flag Pledge, textbook grammar-exercises, Problems of Democracy...

...Moy-nihan...

...He manipulates his knife...

...If "five hundred kids" did this, he claims, it would "shatter the patterns and shake up the mold of life in Salt Lake City, San Diego, or Seattle for one hundred years...

...It contains many valuable critical insights, including Kohl's reluctant recognition that a simple devotion to "smashing" modes of domination in capitalist society does not immunize those thus devoted from recreating modes of domination within their own "small, tight groups...

...People are not processes and when we make the claim that they are we give ourselves over to the flux of history rather than staking ourselves against its terrors...

...And what is this Self...

...We are left, finally, with fuzzy hopes afloat in clouds of ineffability...

...One brief quote from his 1925 essay, "The Resistances to Psychoanalysis," must suffice: "Thus society maintains a condition of cultural hypocrisy, which is bound to be accompanied by a sense of insecurity and a necessity for guarding what is an undeniably precarious situation by forbidding criticism and discussion...

...instead both exist as mere foils for his purposes...

...moreover, a bland adjustment to the "world as it is" is symptomatic of an overly severe repression which works Jo avoid critical self-reflection and criticism of repressive societies...

...He writes of the seductive evils of "linen tablecloths and lighted candles and the gentle ripplings of Vivaldi or of Boccherini," or of a friend's "words, so gentle, earnest and aspiring, drift in the quiet space of air and lamplight, rugs and Paris posters...