Youth, Learning and Mrs. Hicks

...a novel about young people trying to "find themselves" in a world that offered nothing to rebel against except comfort and security...

...later, a window sash fell out of its frame during class, but Kozol was able to catch it before it hit anybody...

...Kozol quotes Edgar Z. Friedenberg's remark that former prisoners make bad jailers...

...Character development," as the teachers' handbook describes it, turns out to be a euphemism for the destruction of freedom of spirit and originality of mind...

...Kozol's The Fume of Poppies was very much a book of the fat and prosperous '50s...

...Two weeks before the end of the school term he was fired for having read Langston Hughes' "Ballad of the Landlord" to his class of slum children...

...Now Mrs...

...His tone is all wrong...

...Yet his new book may well reveal the inadequacy of the language of one decade for discussing the disasters of another...

...Incidents stick in one's mind: Stephen, a mentally ill nine-year-old orphan whose only talent is an ability to draw, has his pictures ripped up in front of the class by the art teacher because they are not accurate imitations of the work the class has been set to copying?paintings done years ago by the Jewish children who used to live in the neighborhood...

...he can't read at all, wants to learn, but can't find any appropriate textbook at his school...

...he is willing to take on a job that too few men of talent will accept...

...Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age is an account of a year spent teaching in the Boston schools during Mrs...

...Out-of-date textbooks with slurring references to Negroes are used to teach history and geography in the ghetto, and there aren't enough copies to go around...

...The broken window was repaired when a television crew came to the school to report on its "enriched" curriculum...

...This lady teacher contributed regularly to the naacp while proudly stating that she felt her chief function in the ghetto school was to "save" the handful of Jewish children...

...Dickens described the process in Victorian England...

...While both classes were in session the auditorium was simultaneously used for glee club rehearsals, sewing-machine lessons, and remedial reading tutorials...

...The Boston zoo is indeed a shabby place, but the schools in which Kozol taught sound worse...

...The products of such an education are now running the public schools...

...But an old-fashioned, reasonable, generous voice is not adequate for describing a world as patently crazy as the Boston of Louise Day Hicks...

...His benevolence, however, has spilled over into areas where it does him and us no good...

...Reviewed by PETER BEREK Assistant Professor of English, Williams College Defying truth as well as decency, the Boston School Committee voted in 1965 that there was no de facto segregation in the Boston public schools...

...A lady colleague explains there is no reason for the boy's mother to be angry: The teacher had "done the whipping right," according to school regulations...

...Kozol says he "found it discordant and disappointing to think that this schoolteacher, who spoke so proudly of her Judaism, could hold herself a liberal and even contribute so generously to the various Negro causes, yet move through life and through the lives of countless Negro children with an outlook of such overt and unjustifiable favoritism...

...But there are times and places where savage insistence on the depravity and fatuity of one's opponent is more appropriate than a genteel attempt to give him the benefit of the doubt...

...Surely these facts are more than "discordant and disappointing...

...Instead, he tells us about the children he taught, the teachers with whom he worked, and the buildings they occupied...

...The official syllabus includes lists of artists who can qualify as examples of "good workmanship": Raphael, Michelangelo, Millet, Grandma Moses...

...Although Kozol's subject offers material not for tragedy but for a Comedy of the Absurd, he takes an earnestly naive stance as narrator—¦ as when he tells us about a rattaning that sent a boy to the hospital...

...And those are the animals...

...no man need wonder about the morality of beating a child...

...As a matter of school policy, nine- and ten-year-old children are regularly taken down to a urine-smelling basement and beaten on the hand with a rattan whip...

...One could allegorize Kozol himself and label Death at an Early Age "The Eisenhower Generation Grows Up...

...At a special Junior High School for "discipline problems," a teenage Negro boy asks Kozol, with much embarrassment, to please get him a first grade primer at a library or bookstore...

...Kozol grew up in Boston, graduated from Harvard in 1958, published a novel about the life of an undergraduate, won a Rhodes Scholarship, then returned after some years abroad to Boston, where he joined the civil rights movement and (for reasons he does not explain) decided to become a school teacher...

...His fourth grade met in a corner of the auditorium, screened off from the neighboring class by rickety portable blackboards...

...Without irony, one can call Jonathan Kozol a benevolent man...

...The plainest fact about the Boston public schools, as Kozol describes them, is that they are run by fools...

...A deputy superintendent calls a fourth grade class "cultured" because the pupils stand and say "good morning" to her energetically...

...Jonathan Kozol ought to re-read Jonathan Swift...

...It's a zoo," says one of Kozol's colleagues...

...We should be grateful to Jonathan Kozol for talking about black and white in unapocalyptic language, and for standing in front of a classroom where our consciences tell us we all belong...

...But the destruction of the hearts and minds of children has been the business of schools for generations...

...Hicks is running for Mayor of Boston, and the polls indicate she may win...

...During the 1964-65 academic year he was a temporary teacher, shuttling from one substitute job to another until being more or less permanently assigned to a Roxbury fourth grade class...

...A School Committee claims to have done something meaningful when it votes that there is no such thing as de facto segregation in Boston...

...I wondered," Kozol says, "whether she felt this could in any way justify the injury or whether she believed it could in any way provide exoneration either for herself, as the teacher in charge of the child, or for the man who did the whipping...

...Kozol makes no plea for our sympathy or support, although it is perfectly clear his firing was an outrage...

...One day, a blackboard collapsed on a girl's desk...

...the author's meek last words undercut the initial judgment...

...Kozol's moral fuzziness is the result, no doubt, of his benevolent unwillingness to think ill of anyone for long, and perhaps his admirable dedication to helping Negro children arises from the same decent nature as his generosity towards the foolish and malicious...

...Even this delapidation is less horrifying than the intellectual shabbi-ness of the curriculum...

...the Birchers who demand the return of McGufiey's Reader to the grammar-school curriculum understand that the 19th-century educators who "Americanized" Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants outdid the Boston School Committee in devotion to discipline, self-denial, and the acceptance of lower-middle-class white Protestant values...

...When the Committee chairman, Louise Day Hicks, led members in rallying the citizens of Boston to preserve "neighborhood schools," both her admirers and her opponents understood the euphemism...

...Hicks' reign...

...This place isn't a school...

...Orwell's "Cross-gates," for all its upper-middle-class swank, vies in filth as well as heart-lessness with Boston's slum schools...

...But he is also charitable to the point of absurdity toward public figures in the Boston educational hierarchy and the members of the School Committee...

...He has fictionalized, he tells us, the teachers and students he describes, and one can understand his not wanting to embarrass private individuals, even though the fictionalization cannot help but weaken the force of an argument that depends so much for its effect on our horror at the truth...

...A Committee member gives a speech (Kozol prints it as an appendix) which must surely be one of the most remarkable documents of the age: One of its more lucid passages is the argument that only a bigot would want Negroes outnumbered by whites in every classroom, as they would be if the Boston schools were desegregated...

...Kozol counted over 100 pupils at work in the room at some times...

...Kozol's story amply justifies his subtitle: "The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools...