Brown eyes and blue eyes
It is amazing to me what a careless reader I am sometimes. I glance and think I have read.
A commenter the other day was saying what the poem was by Langston Hughes that Jonathan Kozel got fired over, and I took umbrage to the poem, not to the poem itself but to the poem as a selection for children. Of course, I would never ever have fired Jonathan Kozel.
And then to my dismay, I learn that Jonathan Kozel didn’t see the point of memorizing poetry! It just goes to show that no one is perfect straight across the board. If there is one thing I would espouse in education today, it would be memorizing poetry worth memorizing. Then the children have the essence of the poem in their cells forever.
But what I was going to write about was what Jonathan Kozel said about how many male black children drop out of major city schools — to the tune of 50%.
Why would anyone want to stay in a school that does not serve them? Why would anyone want to stay anywhere where they are not being valued? Being in school may have been humiliating for them from the first day. School is not always the best place to be in. I would say that sometimes it can be the worst imaginable place to be.
I remember a study done where a class was divided according to eye color. Blue eyes were in, and brown eyes were out. Blue eyes were valued, and brown eyed-children were not. What happened to these innocent children was deplorable. Even the nicest children became condemning.
And then the roles were reversed. You wanted to be brown-eyed, and blue eyes were frowned on. And now the brown-eyed were favored. They were honored. And they did very well (except for their superior attitude.) It was a travesty what happened to the children in that study. It was so bad that the study had to be stopped.
One of the points of this study was to show how powerful were preconceived ideas, the children’s and the teacher’s.
I wonder what would happen if teachers expected the black boys in kindergarten to be the brightest most creative fast-learners of all. I know what I think would happen.
Jonathan Kozel has reverence for compulsory education. He honors a country that desires to have education for all. And I love that too.
At the same time, I think that if children were not made to go to school, children would have a better feeling about going to school. Attitudes would change. It seems to me somehow that in public education, the cart is put before the horse.
It’s not so easy to value something that is forced on you.
In line with this, there seems to be a rampant sense of schools owing children an education and the children being some kind of receivers of education.
When I taught school, I am proud of myself that I told the children not to wait for anyone to give them an education. Not the schools, not any teacher. Education was something they had to get for themselves. No one was going to give it to them.
Tomorrow I will tell you about the moving sale my daughter and I had today. And then there’s something else I still want to say about schools.
Godwriting is a blog by Gloria Wendroff and is about Gloria's daily life as the Godwriter of the Heavenletters project that is having a profound effect on the lives of people around the world.
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