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I've been reading for tomorrow's graduate class for nearly 6 hours straight, with only an hour or so break for a run in the park and a quick supper.
My mind is too full for articulate writing.
Jonathan Kozol's book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America is, perhaps, the single most compelling piece of writing I've ever read for a college course. I've not finished it yet (some of my reading time was spent on textbook chapters before I got to the book), but I'm half ready to up and move to the inner city to teach there.
No--I'm not that hasty. I am so very aware of my own finiteness. I'm no hero, and if I went to the city there's a very real likelihood that I would just end up being one of the hundreds of teachers who end up burned out by an ethos of education that wears you down and chews you up before spitting you back out into the safe haven of suburbia (although I'd be more likely to retreat to a hut in the middle of the forest behind my mom's house). But part of me is hearing a siren call. I'll leave the up-and-moving part to God; if He wants me to go, He'll make the coals start burning hotter. For now, I'll just think heated thoughts and be caught up in a well-written-book-induced fervor.
Most of us are well-cocooned from the realities of inner-city America. Education is perpetuating vicious cycles, and the overt and explicit business mentality, curriculum, and language of some of the schools I read about were scarcely believable.
Kozol's right--"a healthy nation needs its future poets, prophets, ribald satirists, and maddening iconoclasts at least as much [more, I say...] as it needs people who will file in a perfect line to an objective they are told they cannot question."
But these mavericks and questioners are being silenced before they even know the sound of their own voices.
When I saw the title of this post, but before I read your words, I thought the post would be about abortion, but "shame" is really too light a word for it.
ReplyDeleteAnd for this, too. Did Houghton still have TICA (Teaching in Inner City America) when you were in the Ed. program? Those three weeks were my first and only first-hand experience, and if my life hadn't taken a rather abrupt turn the following year, I may have followed that siren, myself. I remember leaving my classroom at the end of each day reeling from the force of all the conflicting emotions I felt. The two teachers with whom I worked responded to the insurmountable in different ways; one plugged away, doing as much as she could, when and where she could without thinking too much about the Big Picture, and the other let the students do whatever they wished for entire periods while he read magazines at his desk.
With the Holy Spirit burning in your heart, I think you'd do better than both.
By the time I went through Houghton, it was TIUA (Teaching in Urban America), but it was virtually the same program, I think. It was just a short stint in the city, but it was enough to get a taste for something miles away but worlds apart.
DeleteAt this point, my future is in such a befogged state of bewilderment that I have no idea if I'll be in the city someday. Perhaps.