Ghettoizing Pedagogies

When I first read through Jonathan Kozol’s piece, some of it immediately resonated with my personal sentimentalities, while other parts struck me as “extreme” or even “offensive”—the potential for which Kozol himself acknowledges in his “To the Reader” preface.

He asserts: “An isolated upper-class Free School for the children of the white and rich within a land like the United States and in a time of torment such as 1972 is a great deal too much like a sandbox for the children of the S.S. guards at Auschwitz” (11). Was I, as someone who daydreamed about moving to the country and forcing my kids to engage in an alternative educational community, akin to a Nazi guard? This connection irritated me—my grandparents are holocaust survivors after all—and I questioned to what extent I could lend Kozol full credibility. I felt he was relying on the appeal of emotional extremes to make a point that did not warrant such polarizing totalities.

And then. I read the piece on the Sudbury Schools. And became enraged. Kozol’s warnings find a direct hit in nearly every comment from a student, every framing the school establishes for those comments as support for the success of the school, for their structuring of happiness.

I believe Kozol offers a example of how to practice deconstructing social norms, in order to reconfiguring them and recognize them as ways of justifying systems of power (which are inherently oppressive or violent). He argues that the behavior, or romantic logic behind the white flight to the countryside and to its “Free Schools,” is the consequence of “falsified euphoria” (9). Those who are under the illusive sense of their retreat back to natural values with their embracement of the simple life, justify their flight as choosing to remove themselves from being an enabler of the “North American system as a whole, and especially from its agencies of devastation, power, and oppression” (10), of actively refusing the position of oppressor. Kozol argues that whether the members of the wealthy, white class within American society acknowledge it or not, “the beautiful children of the rich and powerful…are going to be condemned to wield that power also” (10). Capitalism colonizes the imagination of the capitalist. The children will continue to profit from the consequences of the system whether they recognize it or not.

The consequences of a Free School, populated by wealthy white members of society (those in positions of power), isolating itself in the mountains or meadows, is not a successful dislocation from, or blow to, the structure which enables and protects their position of power. Instead, what Kozol implies will result, is that the lives of others, the reality that “smoke [is rising] over Dachau” (12), will become shielded by the pine trees. Our tendency to ignore the distal, and concern ourselves with the proximal, is exacerbated by the isolated Free Schools, rending its students as oblivious to the privileges of the rich (the presence of structures of power), and therefore as incapable of recognizing those privileges (which exist whether they acknowledge them or not) as their obligation to work for and with others.

What is it that the children, and families of children, will learn when they are learning within these isolated Free Schools ? As the evidence from the account of the Sudbury school, what we are producing is, as Kozol names it, “some very fine and terrifying breed of alienated human beings.” By containing the future leaders of tomorrow outside the realities of the inner city, the Free School fails to prepare them, (or breeds them for another, insidious cause) to combat those oppressive realities. Instead, they become implicit and integral to the perpetuation of a violent structure.

The Sudbury Valley school claims that the uniqueness and special value of their students is the result of a specific educational pedagogy which obligates student to “internalize the fact that they are truly free,” and permits them to “endeavor to function at their highest levels” (5). They account for the success of their method with “evidence” pointing to the fact that their students are more capable of deciding for themselves what they want their lives to look like, more inclined to break from traditional norms, and feel empowered in their ability to actualize their creative, independent life goals—“…this issue of empowerment is so central to people’s sense that they can move their lives in a meaningful direction, and hence lead fulfilled lives.”

The evidence of this sense of empowerment which is both indicative of, and the driving force behind, their happiness, lies not only in the personal affirmations in the alumni accounts, but also in what types of careers they pursue. As one student affirms: “When I look around, people who went to Sudbury Valley are doing much more of a variety of things than people with more traditional backgrounds. They are not just in college, or something like that. A lot of them are teaching dancing, or they’re photographers, or they’re living out in the wilderness—they’re pursuing all different kinds of interests, begin very individual” (21). Ignoring for an instant the condescending attitude towards those non-individuals “just in college, or something like that,” what can we see from this statement? The charts that follow, show that the Alumni, in comparison with the national population, gravitate towards careers in management, the arts, education, entertainment, and media. The national population has a higher percentage of employment in healthcare, protective services, food preparation, construction, and transportation. The school suggests that this is proof of the school’s success in liberating the minds of its students, paving the way for them to pursue creative, fulfilling careers. One student was so liberated as to take on the occupation of a being a “self styled peasant.”

The school presents these statistics, exclaiming, “The figures show that the group of alumni interviewed in this study represent a broad range of ages, life experience, and exposure to the Sudbury Valley environment.” What life experiences can be extracted from statistics concerning one’s age, and one’s period of time within the school, to account for this difference in occupation proclivities? The Sudbury Valley school has a response to this as well: “We would not expect the national breakdown to correlate with that for Sudbury Valley alumni, because there are some demographic differences: our former students are somewhat skewed towards being more middle-class, more suburban, more New England, and more educated than the population at large.” They leave it at that, and say no more—the mentioning of this fact, holds no weight on their prior claims.

Somewhat. This is a preposterous understatement. The school’s implication that the consistent behavior and mentality of their alumni, dominated by their sense of empowerment and creative intellectual pursuit, is the result of their schooling, totally ignores the social constructs that make this experience common to many within the “somewhat more middle-class, more suburban, more New England, and more educated” wealthy white population of the United States.

This very sense of empowerment which validates the “pure” and “moral” intellectual pursuit, ignores the social construction which protects, enables, and encourages this type of life, this position of privilege. The students are oblivious, because they are both removed from, and not taught to see, the forces that condition their lives—“the well-demarcated ghettos” as Kozol calls it, which lend them the protection and space to indulge their whims without the burden of social responsibility. This is reflected in the accounts from the students themselves:

“Sometimes I feel guilty, because I am so blessed when there are others who are miserable and sick and dying and stuff like that. Sometimes I have to stop and get over the fear that I don’t deserve this and that it’s just going to slip away.”

“I’ve had opportunities to do work solely because of intellectual curiosity—only to satisfy my own curiosity, whether or not other people read my papers…Even if the only people I’m sharing it with are the people I love, those are the most important people to share anything with.”

And:

“In my opinion, there are no coincidences, there are no lucky breaks. You make opportunities for yourself. To me, anything is possible. The only limitation is me.”

The first two quotes reflect an insular, self serving view of the world. The misery of others becomes “stuff like that,” “something to get over.” Valuable work is that which satisfies an intellectual curiosity, not intended to extend beyond the realm of those one loves (their family, immediate community).

The third quote elucidates a theme recurrent in many modern political debates, one of which concerns the justification for programs that provide social services to low-income communities. The wealthy have no advantage over the poor because everyone makes their own fortunes. As such, the poor are lazy, and welfare becomes a lucky break serving only to further inculcating that laziness.

The danger of a school for the privileged few isolating itself in the mountains, away from the ghettos, away from narratives other than what manifests within their isolated world, is that we teach ignorance, we construct an insidious oppressive power within those who will one day inherit that power. We construct a pedagogy of the oppressed, ghettoizing the capitalist as well as those who cannot retreat to the mountains.