The example of positive mini-societies nevertheless demonstrates that the Marxist view of cultural reproduction is not the last word on how children grow up. Though schools do reproduce oppressive relations, there are potential paths through which small trickles of something different may leak out, until a larger revolution or insurgency takes root.
The question this book explores is how to understand the actual dynamics of public schools of poverty in such a way that potent mini-societies can be created right inside them. The charter or private school is one route. But the great mass of oppressed young people are in normative public high schools. That mass possesses almost unfathomable energy. We want to develop a frame through which their energy could become foregrounded not only as unorganized resistance, but as actually constructing an insurgency.
To understand the terms and ways of thinking presented here, it is important to reflect on two particular inadequacies of the dominant ideology as it relates to education. (1) Schooling tends to treat persons as things, subjects as objects; (2) discussions of the roles of young people generally suffer from a pervasive literalism.
Treating persons as things is an ethical error analyzed over millennia in many different cultures. Capitalism or the West or Whiteness are particularly egregious violators in this mode: we have regularly bought and sold human beings and continue to monetize everything we can name. Another way to understand the ethical error of treating persons as things is to consider certain traditional forms of thinking that refuse to treat even animals, plants, mountains, or rivers as mere things. Thanking the buffalo or the bear for their meat, cherishing the returning rain or sun, are “superstitions” to “scientific” minds, but in other ways of thinking these are acts that establish our own humanity: it is an ethical requirement to be conscious and aware of our relations to the world, to be “in relation” to the world as opposed to merely using it. Though this traditional awareness may go too far for many of us brought up differently, it highlights the distinction between parts of the world toward which we hold ethical obligations and parts of the world toward which we don’t. In western terms, this distinction is between “persons” and “things.”
The factory or laboratory analogies and the everyday practice in schools of poverty encourage this ethical error. Young people are often objectified, and young people whose ancestors were slaves, legal property that a person could own, may be especially sensitive, at least emotionally, to such a category mistake. In general, however, the disregard for young people’s full personhood is taken for granted. This is explored in detail below. For now, we simply point out that in the official, normative view, young people are of doubtful personhood. Unlike adults, their will and identity are not thought to be fully autonomous. Having committed no crime, having made no positive choice to participate in any organization or institution, adolescents are compelled wholesale to attend schools and to follow school rules, or they are humiliated and punished. This is a condition generally not suffered by persons officially categorized as autonomous.
We have no consensus as a society about when a small child, maturing into an adult, attains a fully autonomous will and identity. It is clear, however, to most people today, far more than in, say, 1787, that treating Africans as things rather than as persons is an egregious trespass. The case of adolescence is less clear, but young people challenge older adults to think about the consequences of making a mistake in evaluating their autonomy. If it is an error to treat a person as a thing, then it is an error to treat someone who possesses full autonomy as if they do not. For many years women, of course, had trouble convincing men of the strength of this argument, and in much of the world still do. With regard to young people, the case is still far from obvious, especially in schools of poverty, and pushing the point is one of the aims of this book.
The second major inadequacy in most discussions of education is an unfortunate literalism. Literalism is the idea that words refer directly or transparently to things in the world, and that confusion in communication can be eliminated by simply finding the right words to represent any intended meaning.5 Language, however, is less straightforward than literal-minded people would wish. Words are full of overtones and undertones, shadings and associations, and they carry immensely complicated histories with them wherever they go. We call speakers “tone-deaf” who seem oblivious to how context might modify, limit, or expand the significations of the words they use. Consider, for example, the Columbia Law School trustee who recently asked a black applicant interviewing for admission: “If you say ‘people of color,’ what’s wrong with my saying ‘colored people’?” The literalist is baffled by the distinction, while anyone with a sense of how history intertwines with language will understand that the stylistic choice between “people of color” and “colored people” today, in 2013, communicates something about the speaker’s stance and values.
Much of the language used by schools of poverty—or by bureaucracies or researchers about schools—suffers from the stylistic defect of literalism. I argue in accordance with a long rhetorical tradition that the stylistic defect is actually an ethical defect. Tone-deafness in speech often goes hand in hand with cruelty in action. The trustee who has trouble distinguishing between “people of color” and “colored people” is likely to reinforce the institutionalized cruelties of racism.
But the argument goes far beyond the political correctness of specific terms. The rhetorical tradition we are invoking advances a strategic approach toward language as symbolic action. The bad style of school bulletins on truancy or test protocols, or the bad style of most official “standards” describing curriculum or behavior, abet and enforce reactionary attitudes toward the struggle of young people in poverty. This point is discussed explicitly in Part II on teaching Brown vs. Board in a segregated school, and is relevant throughout. Actual or pretended ignorance about how our official language clatters against reality is in itself a kind of wrong-doing and contributes to making schools of poverty unlivable for human beings.
But even more important is the converse: sophisticated and even “literary” appreciation for good style is potentially helpful in directing us toward good and humane action inside of schools, and can help us dig in and survive there. What we find as we explore this topic is that human beings are naturally graceful and sensitive to the complexity of the symbols and language they use. We find that young people are almost obsessed with stylistic nuance and shading—in language, dress, gesture, or stance. And we find that any elaborate series of stylistic choices can add up to a strategy for action, to a way of taking on the world as it presents itself to us, and possibly of transforming it.
The more literal-minded we are, the more we will despair of getting out from under the bureaucratic mass. But using and appreciating language that is multi-layered and alive can give us a different perspective. If we understand the roles of young people in schools of poverty as part of an enormously rich and heroic drama rather than simply despairing at their mistakes or at our mistakes or at the administrations’ mistakes, we will be much more hopeful. We can take a bit of the action and language and interpret it; and then we can apply or try out our interpretation on another bit and see if it helps us make sense of something that was troubling us. This sort of functional interpretation then becomes a pragmatic tool that actually helps move the action along in a desired direction. Through public speech and action attached in an aesthetically sophisticated way to radical traditions of speaking and acting, we may find ourselves “stepping into history,” making things happen.
By resolutely treating persons as persons, not as things, and by celebrating and putting to use the historical and aesthetic complexities of public speech and action, we counter the ersatz “science” of the education world. Bad “science” tries to expunge