Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Teachers Strike The schools of Greenburgh, New York, opened this year or rather were restrained from opening with a teachers' strike. Our younger son, a high school senior...
...the heady period of faith in education is behind us...
...Hard lessons for liberals, but valuable ones...
...At any rate, instead of attending to the bread and butter issues of our local strike, my thoughts kept turning back to the 1960s, which my children passed in our district's classrooms, and forward to the 1970s, which, I presume, they will pass in college lecture halls...
...We knew that some rare and admired persons might reject it...
...our '73-'74 school budget was beaten down twice...
...Our teachers, understandably edgy about the future, seek security while the community, understandably cynical about the past and anxious about the present, seeks accountability...
...Our children were to be all that we were not, and in this dream many of us sought to become their cheerleaders...
...the definition was handed down to us and did not admit to much tampering...
...But we wanted contradictory things...
...our school board has been taking an increasingly hard line against "frills...
...And all at once we found that we who had derided the notions of As and Bs and College Board scores were pressing him to perform well in school and so receive the rewards of performance there just as he always had from us...
...The economic pinch is pinching...
...For, simply, we feared that they might fail...
...No doubt my attention should have turned to the issues of the strike what set our friends and acquaintances among the teachers against our friends and acquaintances on the school board, and, in a sense, against us parent taxpayers...
...Much, perhaps most, of what has been written about the Generation Gap rested on the conceit that it was an accomplishment of our place and time...
...There are old young men and young old ones, and the challenge is not only to reconcile the generations but to examine and reconcile the conflicts in one's own responses to the world, a more demanding prospect than to celebrate the beauty of jeans or the truth of rock lyrics...
...we led him from success to daily success...
...We wanted them to share our revulsion at the inequities of the system, our anger at the exploiters and their henchmen and hangers-on, our scorn for the phonies and the sell-outs...
...So we were too guilty, too anxious, too worried, too disappointed, too full of hope to pass judgment on campus rampagers or counter-culturists...
...Children Strike Our genial faith in education and understanding carried us away from the hard fundamentals of human experience...
...We could not kid ourselves about success...
...Then, like mere ethnics, we could have sent our sons into business or a trade and our daughters into marriage with joy on all sides...
...Such discoveries would have been in accord with the liberal trust in progress, education and the constant improvement, if not the perfectability, of mankind...
...No liberal was surprised that a child of the benighted republicans, churchgoers, whatever would in time offend his parents' faith and break their hearts...
...Our son will be back in school, and my wife and I, self-deprecatory about our zeal but no less zealous, will he doing our darnedest to root him into the best possible college...
...And we wanted them to be successful?and not in stringing beads...
...They taught us that we were no longer young and therefore out of it...
...The liberal's stance is thoroughly unheroic except at surprising moments, surprising even to himself but to try to live the heroics or the imagined heroics of others is a pathetic evasion...
...The grading of generations, comparing ours with theirs, is among the oldest and most foolish of barroom and beauty parlor pastimes...
...A modest acquaintance with Western history or literature or even journalism ought to have been enough to dispell the delusion that generational discord was as new as open-heart surgery or as American as the Grand Canyon...
...It is better left to those Madison Avenue swingers who for a time were wearing expensive denim workshirts and Che Guevara mustaches and who, we may be sure, will be showing up in Chinese Army gray any day now...
...We found that for all our understanding, our tolerance, our strained attempts at easy-goingness, we could not quite resist pressuring them or manipulating them to meet standards we mocked at dinner parties, to pursue ambitions we affected to disdain in others...
...Still, the Gap, though not new, was real enough...
...In ignorance or defiance of history, we sought so much from techniques of advanced child-rearing and schooling that we could not fail to be disappointed...
...We gave the phenomenon a name, that is all...
...Some of us even joined with the young to abolish the law that the lessons of age are worth something...
...Perhaps it would have been better, and truer, to have thought of the Generation Gap as existing within every generation and within each man and woman as well as between establishment parents and their insurrectionary offspring...
...But we appear to have believed that our own enlightenment could achieve what other generations had not managed, that it could reconcile the impulses of youth and anxieties of parenthood into happy accord: Never again would the bond be cracked twixt son and liberal father...
...One is already away...
...Liberals, recognizing that the clucking of tongues over young people is merely an exercise in self-parody, indulge in it less often than their contemporaries on the Right...
...Some of us even began to worry about haircuts...
...yet we also knew well the costs of rejection...
...We could have done worse...
...If the present middle-aged generation can be distinguished for anything, it may be for our thrashing about after principles and methods of education that held out the promise of being able to create liberated and successful individuals in a system where success does not flow naturally to the most liberated...
...In elevating them to Consciousness Three, we were only reassuring ourselves about the premises of our own hopes...
...Indeed, most noticeable through the '60s was the eagerness on the Left to find in the youth movement a regenerative truth and goodness that could save us all...
...Part of permissive child-rearing, as most of us understood it, was to encourage the subject by telling him how good he was at whatever attracted his fancy...
...one does not "raise" children, one is only the accomplice to their own realization of themselves...
...But I suspect it was more than that...
...We discovered, of course, as the children came out of infancy, that our adopted theories were lost in the realities of their development...
...We, who knew from first-hand experience the limitations of college, wanted him and her to get into the best of colleges...
...It was a part of our liberalism to try to bring up our children in a free and open way, to instruct without punishment and lead without threats, to prepare them to live together in the love and peace that we wished for the world...
...if it was not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, it was sufficient to cause pain and bewilderment to all...
...By deferring altogether to the young, numbers of us insulted our own experience and deprived our successors of whatever we may have had to give them...
...the other is filling out applications...
...and the job market is shrinking...
...Our younger son, a high school senior now, announced that he could not bring himself to cross the teachers' picket line, except for soccer practice his first show of social consciousness...
...Parents Stricken Had we been stupider, less educated, less liberal, life would have been easier all around...
...Well, then, here we are, middle-class, middle-aged, more or less well-meaning, waiting to see what the young have to offer for this decade in place of the New Politics and the counterculture...
...That, in the liberal view, was a price of progress, and a bargain at that...
...Federal money is not forthcoming...
...Oh, one may talk of war and prices with some semblance of dis-passion, but middle-aged parents are not dispassionate about their children, not liberal parents at any rate...
...The teachers say they walked out over a question of job security...
...we had been passed by...
...A ludicrous posture...
...We asked too much of our schools in the past decade or two, and the educationists promised much more than they could deliver...
...By the time this appears in print, the teachers' strike will be ended...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 20
