Liberal Guilt As a Philosophy

...The effect of all this temporizing and intellectualizing is to steal foot-soldiers from the revolution that Kozol devoutly seeks...

...Kozol blames the public schools for the low state of radicalism in America...

...The formative years in public school are intended to prevent children from becoming "brave and subversive human beings,' from getting upset "about sick people, dead black infants, napalm, war-machines.' Teachers are "the ideological hand-servants of the leading counter-revolutionary nation on the face of the earth...

...He is angry at the disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor...

...It teaches children to study problems instead of acting on them, to be reasonable instead of angry, to consider both sides of issues instead of siding with "truth" and "justice...

...Teenagers should fast to protest CIA murders...

...It teaches children to obey orders, to go along, not to be negative...

...Kozol intends his book to be a call to insurrection, yet I suspect that what lurks beneath the surface is a wistful rebuke of the once-impassioned middle-class young who worked in the civil rights and peace movements and subsequently abandoned the revolution for homes, lawns and mortgages...

...He holds that society shapes the schools by using them for a political function, and the schools shape society by indoctrinating students to accept a corrupt social order...

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

...The truth doesn't always lie in the middle, but in this instance I would argue that there is something of a reciprocal interchange...

...Wealth and high culture are so intertwined that both appear as enemies of the people...

...of professors who get foundation grants to study the poor and then write books for profit...

...Army that permits a man to murder first the sense of ethic, human recognitions in his own soul...

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

...on the other are the bloodless automatons, everyone who does not share the author's anger...

...A wealthy family in the suburbs should trade homes with a poor family in the inner-city...

...And when Paulo Freire, the Marxist educator from Brazil whom the author venerates, leaves the country, he grasps Kozol's arms and gives him this benediction: "A young man is going to have to die in certain ways in order to become the kind of man he needs to be...

...Moreover: "It is not the U.S...

...How does the public school perform this massive job of indoctrination...

...Over and over he makes the point that X is poor because Y is rich...

...he substitutes emotion for thought...

...The line is drawn quite clearly: On one side are Gandhi, Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, and Jonathan Kozol, all good and righteous people...

...Kozol warns: "We must not fool ourselves...

...Reviewed by Diane Ravitch Author, "The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973" One of the age-old debates among educators is whether the schools shape society or society shapes the schools...

...X gets bad medical care because Y has a private doctor...

...Since citizens want their institutions to represent their values, and schools are publicly controlled institutions, they do support the social system...

...Unlike the faithless, unlike the hypocrites, he is still on the barricades, and by his own testimony, knows the ingredients of sainthood...

...On the whole, therefore, it seems fair to conclude that the schools both mirror society and have a generally beneficial impact on it...

...He is angry that some people eat steak while others—no less deserving—starve...

...Such considerations of policy would force him to work within "the system," and this he cannot do...

...He is angry that some people get fine private medical care while others die for lack of basic services...

...He fails to note that many slum buildings are owned by municipalities that lack the financial resources to restore them...

...At the same time, they have the capacity to make students more open-minded, more thoughtful than they would be if they were educated by their parents alone...

...The vast majority who come through 12 years of "state indoctrination" have been made so cold and self-interested that they don't really care about injustice, he says...

...of would-be rebels who spend a year or so in the ghetto, then return to their middie-class pleasures...

...There is something unmistakably elitist about Kozol's attitude toward public education...

...of school reformers who do not realize they are merely making the prison more tolerable, spreading joy when they should be spreading awareness of pain...

...He relies on consciousness-raising where politics and economics are needed...

...If they accurately represented the wishes of the voters, well then the voters too were indoctrinated...

...He is angry that accidents of birth, race and circumstance determine whether people's daily lives are to be easy or tragic...

...He resolves his dilemma thus: "I tell myself that all funds in an unjust social order are inherently corrupt and that the only real choice is with what integrity a person puts to use, and in all possible cases, shares, what he can manage to obtain...

...Kozol is consistently anti-intellectual...

...He excoriates the grant-getters who turn their convictions into contracts, yet wrote his book with grants from the Ford Foundation, the Field Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation (on a half-dozen occasions, he writes scornfully of the Carnegie Foundation, but never a word about his own benefactors...

...Hundreds of rich kids should refuse to go to the doctor, for example, until poor kids get better medical care...

...Here are some representative statements: The public schools "mass-produce murderers, or else soul-broken automatons, for an unjust social order...

...Army that transforms an innocent boy into a noncomprehend-ing automaton in six months...

...X lives in a slum because Y is a slumlord...

...He writes disparagingly of people who listen to Vivaldi, who "explicate" Chaucer and Auden, who try to make rational judgments...

...He is his own best example of the ineffectuality of the revolutionary in an open society...

...The mission of public education, he writes, is to serve the state...

...What infuriates him most, though, is that relatively few people share his sense of rage...

...Kozol is outraged by the inequality and injustice he sees in America...

...Thousands will be out on battle lines for decades...

...Ten years hence, some of us will no longer be alive...

...If an elected school board were to insist on patriotic exercises, Kozol would say the board members had been efficiently indoctrinated...

...Children must be "etherized" against the moral horrors perpetrated by their society, and it is the schools' job to deaden their moral sense, their capacity for outrage, their sensitivity to pain, poverty and injustice...

...And further, educational attainment is correlated with economic gains...

...It educates them not to see the connection between the too-much of their own lives and the too-little of the poor...

...It will change nothing, however, except possibly the author's royalty statements...

...Intellectualizing and rationalizing are excuses not to act, in his view...

...Only in America could a self-proclaimed revolutionary not simply get foundation support to write a book calling for subversion and insurrection but have it published by a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange...

...And among those who do, fewer still are willing to act and commit their lives to their convictions...

...There should be hunger strikes or "carefully stage-managed interruptions of expensive dinners at the local country club or in the homes of certain people who live nearby on the profits gained from exploitation of the poor...

...Jonathan Kozol, who tackles the question in his latest book, agrees that schools and society reciprocally affect each other...

...But his starting assumption is that the United States is the most murderous, evil nation in the world, and that the schools are the state's efficient vehicle for thought-control...

...He never suggests political action aimed at income redistribution or universal health insurance...

...He tries to turn middle-class guilt feelings into a philosophy, but it doesn't work...

...School instills the "Myth of Progress," teaching children that everything is getting better all the time...

...It begins in kindergarten...

...Consequently, his exhortations for action seem as naive as his assumptions...

...Even the minority who do care soon sell out and separate the way they live from the way they think and feel...

...Especially distressing to Kozol is the hypocrisy of those who care during the day but go home to comfort in the evenings...

...Although Kozol's indignation is genuine, his analysis is shallow...

...He speaks warmly of democracy, but accepts only those outcomes that conform to his own opinions...

...My Lai, we also learn, was "an atrocity on the same level as the worst that Hitler's soldiers ever did...

...School teaches passivity...

...While heaping opprobrium on those who "profit, analyze or publish" instead of doing, Kozol himself analyzes, publishes and hopes to profit...