JESSE JACKSON'S GAME PLAN
Druska, John
JESSE JACKSON'S GAME PLAN JOHN DRUSKA Will Jackson's concern be defeated by his methods? When I attended a parochial school in Chicago we used to spend weeks practicing for perennial...
...Whil~ traditionally we have let sports serve us as a way of reaching intractable youngsters, and as a source of hero-models for privileged and under-privileged alike, today we need to look more critically at the way sports, like our sexual relationships, are being purveyed and perverted by our so-called communications experts, at the ways in which people are performing and the ways they are being portrayed as performing to masses of other people...
...He locates his criticism of decadence especially within the black community, where he challenges a "welfare mentality" that 29 September 1978:624 prevents blacks from assuming enough responsibility for their own lives, political apathy, and 'Tom-calling ("the ideal ought to be for all of us to suceed...
...Coaches and commentators and quiz show hosts hand down the tablets of our deca(dent)logue...
...Both magazines echo the National Observer quote that PUSH to Excel uses in one of its publicity leaflets: "To the surprise of many, the chagrin of some, and the utter delight of Jackson, the response to his impassioned, austere and--his critics say--reactionary message has been almost uniformly the same: wild enthusiasm...
...At St...
...A recen, t Push financial plea even describes Jackson as "a tall, athletic, young, black minister...
...My role required that I walk crosstage wearing my White Sox cap and, when I passed two girls costumed as nuns, be sure to tip my cap and greet them loudly enough for the audience to notice...
...Certainly Jackson's fingering of "decadent" media as arch-villains in the PUSH economy is arguably sane...
...Both points were more welcome basics than the media-mixed pablum of "basics" that we've had to regurgitate the last couple of years, and with which I'd initially iderrtified Jackson's view on schooling...
...But I ain't no professional educator...
...moratorium on media-consumption, a homework period similar to daily sports pra~:tice...
...Louis Jackson called for discipline, but as therapy rather than punishment...
...Illich claimed that, in contrast to his less-programmed childhood, subsequen.t especially to the growth of TV and the pervasive impact of modern media, children today consume programmed language, rather than participating in the development of their own authentic languages through conversation and other human situations, at about a 9-1 rate...
...tip my cap to the nungirls, mumbled my greeting, and probably passed them with my hands in my pockets...
...I have a liberal education, went to grad school, did a lot of reading and a vchole lot of observation...
...and Operation Breadbasket veteran who used to be pictured wearing blue jeans in the vanguard for black power, has assessed correctly that the issues of the late '70s are of an entirely different order from those of the late '60s...
...When somebody like Nauer centers her praise of Jackson on his "good power," which she perceives in opposition to all the permissive teachers for~ whom "Drill, memorization, and systematic absorption of information are abominations," it amuses me...
...I forgot to II I I JOhN DROSK^ i~" a writer who currently teaches high school in Indianapolis...
...I'm a mass educator...
...Although he fiercely attacks the content of media and of other decaden,t sectors in our society, is Jackson, through his choices of sports and a morality-based massappeal to youth, relying on some of the same techniques the media use, perhaps decadent in themselves, and pushing some of the same methodology (athletic-like competition in studies for example) that might be responsible in other contexts for a good deal of our decadence...
...Newsweek cites Jackson's opposition to "distracting costumes and the use of street language in the classroom...
...To acknowledge this is ,to have the good power...
...It may be that he has calculated the moment and his audience correctly and chosen the means necessary to concentrate that audience upon behavioral problems important to their success as human beings...
...Is Jackson doing more than marketing a language package of his own, like a TV exec concocting a program with special appeal for young black audiences...
...He acknowledges that the sacred exists and that it is as real and alive as the dross...
...When I attended a parochial school in Chicago we used to spend weeks practicing for perennial schoolwide variety shows...
...He called for teaching by motivating s, tudents through personal attention to them...
...Surveying the press and other public reactions to Jesse Jackson's nationwide stumping for his PUSH to Excel program (begun at Chicago Vocational School early in the '70s, piloted in ten other Chicago schools soon afterward, and since eargeted for thirty other cities) has forced me to recall this thespian failure...
...Because of the predominance of such programmed language in our culture we allow ourselves to be seduced regularly into harangues or pre-plotted dialogues, and we're losing the capacity ,to use language in order to discover ourselves, to explore our relationships with one another, to educate...
...Though in a less-commercialized atmosphere we once might have been able to indulge in games almosr as if in contests of ritual and mythical import, and though some of my teacher-friends still find the coachauthority role valuable in dealing with their s,tudents, we now too often see sports, in concert with the mediaindustry~ coming to form a kind of single mass-religion, a colossal commercial jockstrap that shapes, manipu1;~tes, sanctions our lives, promotes the itches of competition and consumption, limits our vision of ourselves...
...Italics hers...
...I've been struck by the emphasis in these reactions on manners, for example on Jackson's insistence tha~ the high school students remove their hats while he's speaking...
...And so Jackson, taken up as a hero by some of the right, has been vilified by some of the left as a reactionary...
...Under the glare of the footlights, though, and the sense of the pa=ked house, I reverted, to, instinct...
...It encourages the fads and pseudo-philosophies of a~y number of educators with gripes or axes to grind to feed on those superficial signs of Jackson's influence...
...They came with their hats off...
...But it's those instantaneous mass-gut responses that Jackson gets--students taking up his chants or taking off their hats--as much as any sensible sentence within his inspirational delivery, that we've seen our media harp on...
...In the same Ebony article Jackson foresees using the media to "give students awards for artistic, cultural and academic excellence just as they have created all-city and all-state athletic teams," and in the Newsweek report Jackson describes school principals as coaches: "I still like the responsibility that the coach assumes . . . if you play on his or her team, all wear the same uniform and .have the same goal . . . somebody has to be the supreme in.terpreter...
...In a recent National Review paean to Jackson ("Hats Off to Jesse Jackson," June 25, 1976) Barbara Nauer...
...If we could penetrate the obscurantist right4eft tissue of labels and interpr~ations that press coverage imposes on our public actions, it would seem we coutd better evaluate, as one of many possible ways to educate people, Jackson's PUSH to Excel program...
...I remember one, during fifth or sixth grade, for which our class had been designated to produce a skit meant to dramatize the important tenets of our Christian Courtesy book...
...His keynote address to the National Catholic Educational Association convention at St...
...Today's Education's interview with Jackson quotes him as warning that "The ot~tlandish costumes some students wear _9 . . are counter to their best interests," in meeting prospective employers, for example...
...His athletic model might work for those who use it as a system for collecting facts, assembling a version of knowledge...
...Recently, just after hearing a public radio report on one of Jesse Jackson's addresses to a student assembly in Washington, D.C., I listened to an interview of Ivan Illich, which Illich subverted by assuming the interviewer's role...
...And, to boot, a mass-educator using athletics as a prime model for education...
...Surely his experiences in the civil rights movement have shown him the efficacy of certain kinds of mass action...
...Louis speech, his message comes through not just forcefully, but much more sensibly than it sounds in any TV news snippets or radio excerpts of his performances...
...It aids and abets all those who'd like to conceive of education, and of life, as us verses .them, those apostles of two sides and two sides only...
...We got our parts down to hypnotic reflexes...
...Perhaps while Jackson is pushing his students, others will be renovating the rest of our society...
...The "decadent TV shows and motion pictures" he mentions, and the disc jockeys who purvey corru~ values through chatter and music that Jackson calls "a mishmash of decadence" are targets that daily prove to us they could use some critical scrutiny...
...Perhaps Jackson, .the S.C.L.C...
...He advocates a 7 p.m...
...Amidst sniping at subversives who have taken advantage of our democratic ma.~hinery for their own ends, other Americans whom two hundred years of democratic freedom may have left unprepared to deal with the ruthlessness of The aforementioned, and high- (but fuzzy-) minded liberal academics, she congratulates Jackson on his commitment to righteous values: For such a man has dared to assert that he is or has something special and that he feels neither ashamed nor guilty abou,t it...
...On a grand Hollywood scale we get the morality of a Star Wars...
...After teaching for part or all of a dozen years it's my belief that few .things are becoming as destructive to learning in our schools, let alone to life in our nation (remember Nixon's game plans...
...Language thus becomes reflex without reflection...
...Hearing Jesse Jackson speak leaves little doubt that he possesses an uncanny ability to create enthusiasm...
...His articles in these pages have covered a wide range ot subjects, including the recent Nazi rally in Chicago...
...In its uncut format, as in the St...
...bad force which is so reassuring in our complex world...
...Asking questions of himself, of the inter-viewer, of the audience in general, Illich, answering some of them, assailed the nature and the qua.liCy of our public language, its predictability, the sterile sets of packaged language that people routinely exchange, the severely limited expectations inherent to such exchanges...
...Because of some of Jackson's own language, though, and the methodology he advocates through it, I think PUSH itself helps to obscure its human concerns (,PUSH stands for People United to Save Humanity) and contributes to oversimplifying public response to education...
...Louis last spring was one demonstration of how, often by way of the rhetorical parallelism common to fundamentalist preaching, he can build himself and his audience up to a fever pitch...
...by curtain time we were as primed as zombies answering a Hollywood east call for another '50s horror movie...
...I got some educational theories...
...This talk has been challenged by some well-placed blacks, but wha~ interests me in Jackson's social criticism, what I find problematic, is his promulgation of the criticism to black students through the mass medium of himself...
...In addition, Jackson's athletic bias risks perpetuating the fallacy that the brain works like a muscle...
...who describes herself as having spent a de:ade in "black education," bewails the treatment she has been receiving from her recent students and dotes on her earlier ones: "Do you remember how generally trusting and Commonweal: 623 amiable, how teachable, the black kids were who first flocked into our college programs in the Sixties...
...My own experiences teaching and working with young blacks in the late '60s, in Washington, D.C., Cleveland and Chicago, and talking with blacks who teach currently in the public school systems of Chicago and Indianapolis, suggest r me that the problems in black and/or any education today are so intricately varied, so ingrained and involved with the labyrinthine underpinnings of our commercial society, that though Jackson's highly emotional campaign might be effective ~t impact and does contain a crucial interest in the lives of students that all of us might do well to share, it could be more cosmetic than substantial, could even, ironically, be co-opted by some its own language and its marketing techniques into established social structures harmful to the psychic health of students and other people...
...as sports and the vocabulary of sports that has permeated our everyday lives...
...On slightly lesser scales the morality of a lot of the Jesus movement, or of Human Rights declarations, or perhaps of PUSH to Excel...
...When Ebony writer Alex Poinsett asked Jackson about educational theory, Jackson replied: "I don't presume to be an educational theorist...
...But meanwhile I'm worried about how his emphasis on sports methodology, sold with a mass market in mind, appears to be aiming the students Jackson reaches toward the status quo our TV siteoms have been able to stew in the last decade...
...to 9 p.m...
...Such national coverage also obscures, in pan, what's bene~cial in Jackson's message, his real concerns for students and for our society...
...His action announces that he stands for things that are greater than individuals-awesome, important things~ For me there is something in such a man that is akin to that which in.formed the priests and nuns I knew as a child...
...The black youngsters in those first waves came respectfully...
...Jackson's choice of sports as an educational model and his idea of generating a mass appeal to young blacks to shape up in school are, for me, cruxes of the PUSH to Excel program...
...Italics hers.] Newsweek, Today's Education and other mass-appeal and professional journals also feature Jackson's approach to dress-and-appearance issues, while testifying to his power to influence high school students...
...What happens if Jackson's listeners all Commonweal: 625 get their asses in gear, only to find later that the machine is out of whack...
...Her words "good power" seem to class Jackson with the heroes of Star Wars, that simplistic popfilar celebration of good force vs...
...I'm not sure any of it will make us any be~ter than the old Christian Courtesy 'book we used in that part of Chicago where we emulated baseball heroes on a gravel field, and which some power greater than ourselves later christened the "inner-city...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 19
