ON "RADICALIZING" OUR STUDENTS

...Another kind of art was needed...

...others found it boring...

...She had her "pettybourgeois and working-class English composition classes read Big Bill Haywood's Autobiography, hoping to stir them through its "proletarian" style...

...At a time when everyone prates about participatory democracy, it would be fascinating to hear from some of "the raw material," the victims of "false consciousness," who were the object of Cantarow's experiment...

...Many of them are now, degrees in their pockets, teaching at universities and trying to relate their academic training to their political thought...

...I identified not with the poet, but with those people of whose revolutionary activity Yeats had written only that it had turned their hearts to stone...

...She felt alienated because she was taught that literature deals in universals unrelated to her personal experience...

...On the whole, most saw the book as remote from their experience...

...Still more, if people like Cantarow troubled to find out something about the reallife experiences of actual, living American workers and lower-middle-class people and about the children they send to college, it would become clear that in a city like Boston, where there is a large population of Irish and other ethnic groups, many of them members of the AFL–CIO building trade and craft unions, the Wobblyism of Haywood (whatever its romantic appeal to the children of the bourgeoisie) is likely to seem alien, perhaps even incomprehensible...

...One such person, Ellen Cantarow, a Wellesley and Harvard graduate, here describes her experience as student, revolutionary, and college instructor...

...This is feeble, both logically and historically...

...Nor is it true, as Cantarow suggests, that such a view of literature becomes a way of reconciling human beings to onerous or sterile work, by providing them with elevated "diversions...

...As an English major at Wellesley, Cantarow learned the techniques of the New Criticism without, she claims, being able to relate them to the feelings she experienced while reading...

...Haywood's book has historical value, but it can hardly be offered as a model to young people who need to be taught the rudiments of writing English prose...

...Indeed, I understood that revolutionary activity might in fact embitter one, turn one's heart to stone, but it was surely not the resignation, the dreamy sorrow, the pious, paternalistic lament of poetry like Yeats's that would turn such bitterness to confidence...

...It became natural for me to question the political and social assumptions embodied by the literature I read...

...2) Revolutionary though she takes herself to be, Cantarow shows a painful lack of concrete historical knowledge and tact when she assigns Big Bill Haywood's Autobiography to her freshman comp students...

...To speak of this great writer's poems as "the patronizing sentiments of the pious bourgeois" is to rouse memories of Michael Gold on Thornton Wilder and Granville Hicks on the whole of American literature...

...For they came to see that there was a great cultural heritage, one that should be available to all humanity, but a heritage of which class society had cheated them and that socialism promised to make universal...

...Many did not even read the book...

...A few points of com ment: 1) Her account of Yeats's poetry inspires no confidence in her capacity to read...

...To realize that events had real causes, and to know that our lives were governed by real political and historical influences, was enormously liberating for the way we understood our own experience in relation to history and politics...

...They were the patronizing sentiments of the pious bourgeois who bemoaned the falling away of misguided souls from the light...

...3) Cantarow has no belief in the humanistic tradition of education that has been sustained over the years both by the liberal and socialist outlooks...

...The explanation presupposes a natural order in which only one kind of experience is `rich,' existing solely to `enrich' all other experience, which is thin and poor...

...The apology of liberal ideology," she writes, "is that literature `enriches' one's life...

...But more important is the fact that she shows no particular signs of learning from her sad experiences at the U. of Mass...

...To say that literature enriches life— which, indeed, it does—is not at all to reduce it to "an adornment...

...But this explanation turns literature into an adornment, an isolable unit that confirms the sterility of life under capitalism...

...The Movement, especially the women's movement, gave meaning to her education...

...She discovered, for example, that William Butler Yeats's "sorrow, his resignation, his fatalism, his nostalgia were treacherous...

...If she were to acquaint herself with the history of European and American socialism during their heroic periods, that is, at about the turn of the century, she would learn that it was precisely the workers whose imaginations were stirred by reading Tolstoy and Ibsen and Chekhov and Hauptmann who were inclined to be most fervent in their socialist beliefs...

...More could be said, a great deal more, in criticism of Cantarow's opinions, which are neither better nor worse than those of other young New Leftists who mistake their elitist preconceptions for revolutionary intransigeance...

...on the contrary, it is to insist on its centrality, its moral and social urgency...

...As a graduate student, she found that "literature became a professional ego cult...

...One would give a penny or two for Change, a magazine dealing with educational problems, to find those students who had to submit to Cantarow's unearned certainties and to ask them what they thought of her ways of teaching...

...In other words, to make her courses more successful, Cantarow proposes to organize a campus movement, rather than change her teaching approach...

...Rather than attributing her teaching difficulties to inexperience or her own shortcomings, Cantarow blames the isolation of radicals on campus: "The absence on the campus of radical activities that might arouse their [the students'] sympathies and galvanize their energies ensured, moreover, that the Left would continue to be remote from their experience...

...The Radicalizing of a Teacher of Literature," by Ellen Cantarow...

...Sympathizing with the Czech freedom struggle helped her to realize that "at the heart of every great piece of literature was some profound human truth...

...It is then possible to accept work, for example, as something that is naturally burdensome, onerous or sterile, because there is always that other part of experience the given nature of which is to divert one from work...

...Cantarow's account is an absorbing one, with flashes of intelligence, and it thereby reveals all the more the faults of political snob bism and the elitism that characterize many New Left academics...

...But her experience at the University of Massachusetts at Boston was not altogether satisfying...

...If Cantarow was interested in actually making contact with her students, rather than imposing upon them her own ready-made ideology, she would almost certainly have chosen another text...

...a few were intrigued...

...But it is also to insist that it has an 654 autonomous existence, an independent value, which is not to be debased by efforts to put it at the service of one or another party or movement...

...Though the energies of the radical student movement seem to have ebbed, thousands of "movement people" are still seeking ways to act upon their often valid critique of American society...

...DAVID BENSMAN q IN THE MAGAZINES...

...The students' reaction was mixed...

...Evidently, a process of gross vulgarization has occurred that cripples the no doubt impressive abilities of people like Cantarow...

...With this realization, Cantarow turned to teaching, so as to "change our students' experience and their conception of what they will do in life . . . to construct with . . . students new, revolutionary ideas of culture...

...Is it at all conceivable that some of them might feel they had been manipulated...