"So, What's the Problem?"

Roger Shattuck’s article, “The Shame of the Schools,” in the most recent The New York Review of Books (7 April 2005), contains a great deal of truth. Shattuck’s overriding premise and complaint, that schools fail to intellectually challenge, to emotionally address, and psychologically nurture our children, has become a pedagogical cliché in the waning years of the last century and the incipient years of the present one. In fact, the struggle for the American Curriculum (a characterization of education history made by curriculum theorist, Herbert Kleibard) has been fought over these charges from the very beginning of the common school movement in the early nineteenth century. That contentious debate has swirled through the classrooms for almost two centuries, well into the twenty-first century. Given the present educational climate, there is little hope that the struggle will soon subside. But Shattuck’s recent argument addresses the very charge that I and my colleagues—professional educators, self-called reconceptualists, scholars and practioners all--have been making for several years now. “The emperor wears no clothes,” we exclaim. “The curriculum contains no substance” we complain. “The schools are not functioning,” we grieve.

Of course, Roger Shattuck’s article fails to address the incredibly complex history which has brought our educational institutions to this position, and therefore, he does the schools an egregious disservice. It would seem from Shattuck’s argument that what he refers to as the shame of the schools is, indeed, for Shattuck, equivalent to the fault of the schools, and not the result of the social and political forces that vie for power in American society, and which use the schools as the tools and scapegoats to pursue their partisan agendas. Schools, alas, have been rendered veritably powerless in American society; teachers have been deskilled and reduced to mere technicians executing the directives of others; curriculum has been reduced to a ‘need to know’ knowledge grid, and intellectual rigor has gone the way of ethics and social responsibility. Indeed, schools have been made into the whipping posts onto which are tied every failure of American society. For me, now, an educator for thirty five years, the shame of the school has become, alas, in Shattuck’s title, my social disgrace, and all of America’s economic and social failures result from my incompetences. Ah, but that plaint is motive for another essay. For now, I want to study another and somewhat related, aspect of Shattuck’s argument.

After forty years of college teaching, Shattuck retired into the meeting rooms of the local school board in Lincoln, Vermont, to take his place as an elected member of that illustrious body. There, he learned that schools boards are overwhelmed with matters of school security, contract negotiations, administrative hirings, special education mandates and budget matters. And he also discovered overcrowded, overworked classrooms, and poorly and noisily ventilated classrooms. He discovered “teachers pushing loaded carts like the homeless,” and became aware firsthand of the increasing and constant demands placed on teachers for patience, firmness, and imagination. In his article, Shattuck does not note the remarkable absence of trust placed in the teacher for developing and implementing curriculum and managing other school affairs. Ah, but that is a matter not directly related to what Shattuck means to address, and motive, I think, for another essay.

Finally, at some point in his School Board tenure, Shattuck turns his mind to issues of curriculum, and discovers that, to his horror, “my school and its district have no ascertainable curriculum and no effective curriculum document.” Curriculum guidelines, yes, but curriculum, no. Curriculum standards, yes, but curriculum content, no. Curriculum strategies, yes, but curriculum material, no. Board Member Shattuck was not pleased.

Like the good scholar he is, Shattuck used his time on the board to re-educate himself about public education, elementary and secondary. He read the literature, the journals and the histories, and discovered, as we would expect (and even as we might hope), John Dewey. I mean, Dewey was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont, and attended undergraduate work at the University of Vermont. John Dewey is one of Vermont’s (bless its heart!) favorite sons. And Shattuck discovered in John Dewey the quintessential curricular theorist. Because it is in John Dewey that Shattuck discovers the quintessential pragmatist—a man who, like Shattuck himself, went into the schools and learned his lessons about schools. Dewey, Shattuck suggests, went back into the schools in the philosopher’s own thirties and, at the University of Chicago, operated a laboratory school in which Dewey himself learned about schooling and curriculum.

Shattuck characterizes Dewey’s newly learned wisdom as having resolved the perennial dualism between a ‘child centered’ and a ‘curriculum centered’ practice. That is, for Dewey, it could not be merely content that must be the substance of curriculum. Nor could curriculum be driven wholly by the child’s own needs. Rather, this dualism, which opposed the child and the curriculum, is resolved by Dewey when he suggests that the child and the curriculum are merely “two limits which define a single process.” That is, just as two points define a single line, so, too, do the two positions of the subject-matter content and the individual child define the curriculum. For Dewey, with the guidance of the wise teacher, the child must be led along that curriculum line, reconstructing his or her experience as the educational process enables her to do. If the school theorists wondered if the curriculum problem might be solved by focusing on content or on the child, if the problem set by school personnel concerned whether an emphasis should be on the content or the child, Dewey ironically queried, “What is the problem?” And Dewey responded, not quite innocently, to his own question, “There is no problem and never has been!” Dewey acknowledged, of course, curriculum must have content, but that content must derive from the child’s own experience.

When my children arrive home on Halloween, (a pagan rite if I might say, which might bear some cultural study), from a night of Trick or Treating, and they gleefully unload their sweet stashes on the floor, there is in my living room mathematics, science, and history (a term Shattuck prefers to social studies). And, Dewey notes, it is my responsibility as the teacher to know this fact, though it is only candy, candy, and more candy that the children see. When my child, disregarding my wise caution, jumps into the puddle on her way to school, wetting her shoes and pants which she must all day wear damp, there is a geography lesson in her actions. But she doesn’t know it: I do! It was the teacher, the central figure in the educational experience, who must be wise enough—who must in her own education be made wise enough—to understand the disciplines, to understand how the child’s actions are always already embedded in those disciplines, and to know what must next be done, and why, and how!!

I cannot here repeat what I have elsewhere eloquently argued: that the anti-intellectual nature of schooling which I and my colleagues decry, now joined by Roger Shattuck, characterizes the educational experience, even as Hofstadter argued eloquently that anti-intellectualism characterizes American Society. Certainly, the glee with which our present President reminds us of his educational mediocrities does not bode well for improving the intellectual climate. Indeed, every time that man speaks he denies everything for which in my thirty four years in the classroom I have stood and will continue to stand.

What Shattuck argues, that curriculum must be intellectually challenging and emotionally fulfilling, and psychologically relevant, has been the ignored cry of a most wonderful community of scholars whom I am proud to call my teachers and my colleagues. I can at a moment’s notice provide an extensive bibliography to help Mr. Shattuck begin the wonderful journey to a legitimate and viable curriculum. But for his plea, at least, I and my colleagues applaud Mr. Shattuck, and invite him to share and share in, our work.

Though we heartily concur with Roger Shattuck’s complaint, we are disappointed with his solution—the adoption of what Shattuck claims is the only “curriculum that moves grade by grade . . . that uses simple lists of specific content, that does not prescribe teaching methods, that is cross-referenced, and that turns out to be informative and even a pleasure to read.” This incredible document, it turns out, is the product of Core Knowledge, and is the work of none other than scholar E.D. Hirsch, who is 1989, in The New York Review of Books, argued “that the purpose of education is the transmission of an accumulated shared body of knowledge, and the continued enlargement of that same ‘shared’ body by a method of selection to which those privileged few are privy.” I responded in some small measure to Hirsch’s NYRB piece in The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (1989, 8:3), and my criticism can be read there. This notion of core knowledge recreates the very dualism that Dewey’s work exploded more than one hundred years ago. Because the core knowledge here is merely a curriculum centered education totally unmindful of the children. In his conceptualizations, Shattuck should start not with Dewey’s rightly famous, My Pedagogic Creed which Shattuck says Dewey rose above after his work in the lab school, but with Dewey’s essay, “The Psychological Aspect of Curriculum,” (1897) in which Dewey dismissed the current dualisms which rendered education if not impossible, then certainly ineffective. There is nothing to my knowledge in Dewey which would advocate the core curriculum promulgated by Hirsch and his colleagues.

Rather, Dewey would continually argue that the content which my children address in school should be rigorous and intellectually stimulating, but must derive from their experiences!! There is nothing wrong with every student reading a different text, as long as the classroom is structured so that the voice of each student and each text is provided purpose and place. Education is not knowledge of the text, but the means by which that text informs the life of the reader of it. There is nothing wrong with every student in the class reading the same text as long as the voices of the students inheres in the chosen text, and so long as the environment is so constructed (by the wise teacher) that a complicated conversation with the text(s) at the center develops. It is from that conversation that the child’s experience may be reconstructed! This is an intellectual journey requiring an intellect which the curriculum should foster and offer.

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!

It has been two weeks since I broke my ankle. The pain has subsided a great deal; now, I would characterize the feelings as merely ‘serious discomfort,’ but I can sense a quick dissipation of the remainder of the hurting. I am not so obsessed with my pain—well, at least my physical ailment. And so I have had some time to notice some other significant changes.

As I have focused less on the pain, as it has intruded less on my consciousness, I have begun to maneuver about the world with greater facility. Suddenly, I discover myself thinking of myself as a man on crutches, rather than as a man temporarily incapacitated by them. That is, these iron supports have become integral to my thinking: I organize my movements by my facility with the crutches; they are constantly by my side. And I am not a man who runs; I am a man who walks with crutches. But I am an active man, crutches notwithstanding.

And I have begun to learn about and to understand rest. Oh, I am still active and neurotic—it is 10:00 p.m. and I know where my children are—they are yet waiting for me to help them with their homework. I have read and commented upon student papers this evening, I have practiced my reading in Megillot Ester for Purim this week; I have thought about the books I should read and the projects I should begin. I have corrected Anna Rose’s math problems and edited Emma’s paper. I have tried to stay seated. I have called my friend Mitchell and tried to schedule another taxi ride to work tomorrow in his BMW. He is refusing to return my phone messages.

But I don’t have to wonder when I am going to run during the day; I don’t feel tired from running miles on the roads; I do not have to arise early to get in the runs before a day of meetings begins. Hell, I don’t even have to attend the meetings if they are too far to hobble. I have the time to plan other activities, like reading and writing and editing the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, and edit student papers, and talk on the phone with friends about personal and intellectual matters, and discover that I still have time left at the end of the day to sit here and do my blog. This forced cessation of movement has been a moment of insight and renewed activity.

I am an almost normal man on crutches.

Baruch Spinoza and Hillary Clinton

Nicholas D. Kristof writes in his Times column of 16th March, that if the Democratic Party “wants to figure out how to win national elections again, it has already in its midst an unexpected guide: Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Kristof argues that Ms. Clinton seems to know how to talk to an American Public which has voted a Republican ascendancy for the past dozen years, at least. It is Hillary, Kristof avers, who seems to know how to compete in the Heartland. For starters, Kristof says, the Democrats, following the example of Ms. Clinton’s rhetoric, might learn “to speak more openly about God and prayer,” because “a Pew poll found that 60 percent of Americans pray at least once a day.” Kristof does not say for what those Americans prayed.

Secondly, Kristof says that Hillary Clinton recognizes, and gives voice to, the moral doubts surrounding issues of abortion, doubts which “acknowledge that [American] people are deeply uncomfortable with abortions, but they also don’t want women or doctors going to prison, and they don’t want teenage girls dying because of coat-hanger abortions.” Democrats, Kristof implies, deny the moral complexities of abortion for the Manichean perspectives represented by issues of pro-life vs. pro-choice. As if the Republican rhetoric gives voice to any moral doubt! Indeed, to listen to the pundits, it was the absolutism of moral values in the hearts of the red-staters that led to the Bush victory. In fact, to my mind, it was the perceived threat of moral ambiguity or difference to which the Bush campaign pandered as it crossed the Heartland. It was the black and white world of absolute right and wrong which made the Bush lies concerning Iraq acceptable, and that continue to maintain this war, especially horrible, because it is, as were so many such conflicts in the 17th century, a private monarch’s grab for land, wealth and personal retribution.

Finally, Kristof praises Clinton for her collegiality, which he defines as her willingness to wonder at a meeting if anybody wants coffee. I cannot speak much to this praise, but it seems fairly damning: don’t the men know enough to get their own coffee?

Of course, Kristof does not believe that Hillary has the slightest chance of being nominated, much less, elected President, in 2008, because “ambitious, high-achieving women are still a turnoff in many areas, particularly if they’re liberal and feminist.” But at least, argues Kristof, Clinton’s discourses could be a model for the Democrats who need very much to reconnect to the heartland of America. By Heartland, of course, Kristof refers to what has come to be known as ‘the red states.”

My lords, I beg to differ. I have been reading Steven Nadler’s biography of Baruch Spinoza (1999: Cambridge University Press). Spinoza was a philosopher excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam for heretical views; he was a philosopher vilified in his own nation-state, and often at risk, locally and internationally, for the advocacy in his religious and political writings of a radical freedom for the individual and for the nation. And Baruch Spinoza was, as well, a man who would brook no compromise in his advocacy for these radical freedoms, even when that compromise would have made his life more financially comfortable and physically safe. Living in very dangerous times, Spinoza nevertheless refused to accommodate his views to ingratiate himself to the larger public; indeed, he preferred not to do so, and remained largely isolated and marginalized, and, sigh, veritably powerless.

But this is not the powerlessness of a Democratic Party which cravenly speaks what it believes a public it only imagines to exist wants to hear; rather, Spinoza’s lack of power derives from his willingness to seek truth in a world comfortable with lies. Spinoza’s powerlessness results from the radical freedoms he offers, and the radical fears of those threatened by those freedoms. But, despite Spinoza’s failure to influence public policy to any extent, he never doubted the truth of his ideas. Baruch Spinoza remains my candidate for moral bellwether. If it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, then Spinoza is our candle in the Republican darkness. And though powerless, at present, in the public sphere, we are not without power as long as we remain true to our principles. In principled opposition, we can address the horrors of the Republican agenda without soiling ourselves, or being sent out for coffee. I offer Baruch Spinoza, in principle and philosophy, as a model for the Democrats to follow.

Who are these people to whom Nicholas Kristof argues the Democrats should be speaking following the example of Hillary Clinton? To those in the Heartland, he declares! But to whom exactly does this description apply? I do not mean to whom the label names individually, but well, to whom the appellation is addressed generically? And I want to argue here that the term Kristof uses—the Heartland—refers to those people who elected George Bush and Dick Cheney, two of the meanest persons I have come across in mainstream politics in my life time. These men argue for a crueler, more selfish America, one pointedly concerned with the continued pleasures of those who have at the expense of those who have not. This is a President who claimed during the debates that to offer health care for all equal to that which the government offers its own workers, including the President and the Congress, would be too expensive. This is a government which would abandon the one enduring social program which sustains those most in need of it. This is a government which appoints as its Representative to the United Nations one of the most vicious critics of that organization. This is a government which seems to hold that governing ought to be a relatively simple business because world situations are so absolutely transparent. This is a President who declares that “Freedom is on the March,” without having a clue as to how to articulate what that phrase might mean!! This is a President who stood up in the first debate and leaned on his podium, looked the American Public straight in the face, and whined, “This is a hard job.” IS HE KIDDING? What did he think the Presidency was about?? That statement alone should have been the end of the Bush candidacy, but the Heartland said, ‘nay.’ It is to this Heartland that Kristof argues the Democrats must speak. I say nay. It is not to them as they are that we must speak; it is to the Heartland as they must become we must address our words. I think what Democrats must do is speak honestly about the complexities of our world; I think Democrats must help Americans learn to discern truth from lies; I think Democrats must refrain from complicity in the lies of others, and make absolutely certain that clear distinctions can be drawn between the advocacies of both parties. I think the Democratic Party must finally declare its uncompromised allegiance to equal rights, to secure jobs, and to adequate incomes, pension rights and health care for all, and especially for those who can least afford it, and therefore, least afford to do without it. I think high quality education should be a priority, but it cannot be measured by generic curriculums and impersonal test scores. I think Democrats must publicly insist on high corporate values, and publicly demand severe penalties for those who betray the public trust. At this moment in America, the wages of sin are wonderfully high. These wages demand severe cutting.

In the attempt to keep things simple, stupid, the Republican monarchy avoids the complexities of life. And Kristof and Clinton notwithstanding, prayer is not the answer to the material miseries of this world. It is another obfuscation aimed to keep the red states bleeding.

It might be that Hillary Rodham Clinton has something to offer the Democratic Party; it might be that Hillary Rodham Clinton has something to offer the American Public. But it is not by adopting her language so that we sound more like them that must be our panacea; rather, I would like Ms. Hillary Clinton to learn to speak more like us.

Standing on One Foot

I broke my ankle last week. As on most Tuesday mornings, I was out running with Gary, my road companion of fifteen years, and I slipped (hmnn, no, I didn’t slip, I did something else), on the ice, upended, and came down somehow with a foot twisted horridly awry. Without thinking I twisted it back, as if I had merely to screw it back on to repair the damage. No success there. Gary ran what he claims to be a sub-four minute mile back to the car, sped back to where I was lying on the ice, packed me in the front seat, and moaning in sympathetic misery, sped us to the hospital. By the time we arrived at the emergency room, there was a swelling the size of a tennis ball on the inside ankle.

Interestingly, I did not suffer great pain: some said it was the endorphins, others said it was psychic numbing. Even when I had tried to turn my foot aright, I had felt nothing. I just lay there anguished that there would be no more running for awhile, and I could not imagine how I would psychically survive the abrupt cessation. I’ve been running for thirty years, and have never rested for more than four days in a row, never paused longer from taking my thoughts and my troubles out on the road. I now envisioned too many troubled months ahead. I decided to schedule an appointment with the therapist.

I had to have surgery on the ankle, during which they placed pins and plates and other implements of construction into the bones. Eight weeks later . . . well, I hope to back on the roads with Gary. But in the meantime, I feel like a hobbling cliché.

You see, I’ve never suffered an injury before. When I was three or four years old, I had my tonsils (and adenoids) removed, and once I included my finger when I sliced through a bagel. Six stitches for the finger and cream cheese for the bagel. I’ve had the occasional tooth extraction. Once a year I develop a cold which sends me to my bed for recovery. And last year I had a trigger finger repaired. (A trigger finger is a carpel tunnel syndrome of the finger—it causes a bent ring finger to remain bent). Other than that, I take mega-vitamins and no other medications.

Now, I can hardly move. Every event has to be carefully planned. Whereas before I was completely mobile, now I am completely immobile. I cannot get up from my chair to get an extra pencil; to find a book from the shelf; to urinate at will. I can’t carry my laptop about with me, nor plug it in to what is now an inconvenient outlet. I cannot arise from my labors easily to make another cup of coffee—not because I cannot get to the stove, (though it is certainly a chore to maneuver there), but because I cannot return to my desk using my crutches and carrying the filled cup as well. I find myself imagining such inventions as hooks onto which one could hang things like filled coffee mugs, slices of French bread, and apples, leaving hands free and permitting travel. Suddenly, the world has to be rethought and reorganized from the position of immobility. For example, right now I would love to get up and go to the bathroom, but the energy required just to arise up out this chair, move the computer off of my lap and find some temporary resting place for it, reach for my crutches, lift myself out of my chair, schlep myself to the toilet—for ease onto which I now sit—and then schlep myself back to my chair, opening assorted doors along the way, keeps me in my chair, albeit, a bit uncomfortably. Because if I wait just a few minutes, I might use the return trip from the bathroom to grab some breakfast in the kitchen through which I must pass to return to my seat. Conservation of energy.

And whereas I was once completely independent, now I am completely dependent. Oh, I do not mean to exaggerate, nor even romanticize—I remember, that I yet control all of my bodily functions and I maintain all of my F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S, and I still hobble about on crutches. But I cannot, as the cliché goes, eat and chew gum at the same time. I can move on crutches into the next room, but I cannot also carry my book along with me. I can still enjoy a dish of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone, but not while I am walking down the street.

So many unassuming acts now have assumption. And so, for the first time in my entire life, I am forced to rest wholly and completely. I cannot run, and I cannot walk. I cannot drive, and I cannot swim. I cannot cook, and I cannot clean. I am consigned to my chair and to my books. I must be immobile. Oddly enough, there is privileged sense of freedom in that restriction.

Not Much There

In the 28 February, 2005 issue of The New Republic, Martin Peretz’s column , “Not Much Left,” with not a little schadenfreude (a word he flippantly uses when referring to what he defines as the liberal’s cynical delight at our present and continuing troubles in Iraq!), declares the demise of the liberal mind and the emptiness of its principles. He says: “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying.” With not a little glee, Peretz recounts the Western end of liberal thought. Then, having declared the veritable death of American liberalism, Peretz proceeds to reveal the failure of Western European liberalism to confront the reality of the contemporary world. He describes the failed path of Western social liberalism to construct out of its beliefs a perfect socially (not socialist!) democratic Europe, and then condemns Europe’s leftist elites who wrongly “lulled the electorates into a false feeling of security” that the new Muslim immigrants would have no social impact except to enhance the work force, do the work that “low European birth rates were leaving undone,” and protect the privilege of the elite. Peretz continues his eulogy for liberal thought by describing the bankruptcy of even the morally self-satisfied Scandinavian and Low Countries, [where] “the assuring left–wing bromides are no longer believed.”

Continuing with his screed but aiming his poisoned arrows onto these hallowed shores, Peretz charges that the liberal left in the United States has refused to acknowledge that its platforms do not recognize “that the very nature of the country has changed since the great New Deal reckoning.” As if the acknowledgement of such national changes would reveal the bankruptcy of the basic principles of liberalism rather than the need for their renewal. As if a declared triumph of capitalism would obviate the ethical charge to care for the widow and the orphan and the needy in our midst. As if we were no longer obliged to care for the stranger, for we were, ourselves, strangers in Egypt. But for Peretz, the liberal left’s agenda must be reformed and re-framed to account for what can only be acknowledged as the final, well-deserved victory of capitalism. This re-visioning, Peretz declares, must be now undertaken by the liberals because, Peretz declares, the right wing, conservative agenda, will leave “too many victims left on the side of the road.” I am not at all confident that Peretz meant the pun so pointedly evident in that sentence.

Acknowledging the rapacious criminality of capitalist greed, Peretz asserts that if liberals can manage to achieve at least something—anything! (even in their moribundity—of which more, later), they ought to address themselves to the corruptness of those heinous few on Wall Street, and to those complicitous (and criminal!) accounting firms whose purpose was to contain what is, for Peretz, apparently only natural greed. But even this caution is qualified by Peretz when he acknowledges that “greed plays a role, even a creative role, in economic progress.” What Peretz seems to be calling for here is the presence of bridled, as opposed to unbridled greed; it is only the latter which liberalism might, in its small way, condemn.

Peretz decries what he claims as the regularly offered, oversimplified and vacuous liberal litany: “We [the liberal left] want to spend more, they [the conservative right] less.” Peretz claims that this mantra prevents the liberal left from recognizing that there are a vast majority of people in this country who are “voluntarily obliged to each other across classes and races, professions and ethnicities, [and] tend to trust each other, like a patient his doctor and a student her teacher.” Peretz’s faith in the kindness of strangers is puzzling: I do not know what world he inhabits, but the results of this past election, oh hell, the past fifty years, do not suggest a kinder, gentler nation of altruistic citizens. I do not discover on the front pages of the newspapers a surplus of concern for the Other. And as for the trust between the doctor and her patient, there are just too many people without regular doctors to assume that trusting bonds exist for anything but the privileged few, many of whom, I suspect, are not liberals but rather, sit on the cushioned right side of the aisle right next to their physicians. As for the trust between teacher and student: having myself spend the past thirty-three years in the classroom as a teacher, I know that even in the better classrooms there exists intrinsically a distrust between teacher and student—after all, in our classrooms all of the power resides in the former in the form of grades and number assessments. No Child Left Behind only increases this power.

Peretz accuses the Left of social ignorance and a failure to recognize that “African Americans and Caribbean Americans have made tremendous strides in their education, in social mobility, in employment, in housing, and in politics as images and realities in the media.” It makes me wonder in what dream world I have lived and am now presently living. And Peretz decries that the liberal left uses its energies to support tricksters, like Al Sharpton, as genuine leaders and party statesmen.

I think Martin Peretz is wrong about so many things here. Indeed, I suspect that there are volumes which Peretz might study to begin to understand his lack of political and ethical insight. Political scientists like Andrew Hacker, of Queens College in New York, or educational researchers like Richard Rothstein (whose essay in a recent New York Review of Books offers arguments which expose Peretz’s specious claims) are more knowledgeable voices than my own, and should be read thoroughly. There are myriad others who will not take the time to respond to Peretz’s blindnesses. They have little time for such useless endeavor. But I want here to briefly address one matter very close to my soul. Addressing the failure of liberalism to mount a viable, intellectually compelling argument advancing its agenda, Peretz asserts that it is not the case that no liberal argument against the conservative regime exists, but that that argument issues from “a university personage asserting a small didactic point.” That is, the argument addresses form and not content. Operationally, its impact is negligible. Peretz continues: "that university personage employs a vast and intricate academic apparatus, which academic apparatus is actually the point of the university personage’s efforts." The work we do, say, in schools of education at the University level is esoteric and effete at best, and self-serving at worst. Peretz asks, “Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There’s no one really.” HA!

Martin Peretz obviously does not read very widely in matters of education. In fact, in the world of liberal/radical left academia, there exists a richness of language and critique which drives stakes into the very blackness of the heart of the conservative-right Bush agenda. There are educational workers whose writings and active classroom work offer powerful critiques of the right wing programs, and which construct viable alternatives to the current (absurd and cruel) conservative ideology which passes itself off as educational policy. Peretz defends himself, saying, “This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning. The conservatives have their ideas, and many of them are good, such as charter schools and even vouchers. But give me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can’t” (italics added, with extreme prejudice).

The blatant display of Peretz’s ignorance appalls the intellect in me. At the minimum, Peretz dismisses the entire corpus of John Dewey. And Dewey is the tip of the huge iceberg which is progressive education. Worse, Peretz dismisses the incredible volume of work which has engaged curriculum scholars for the past forty years, names too many to mention, reputations too valued to have to defend to the ignorances of Martin Peretz. As for the value of the charter schools, Mr. Peretz might study the recent reports on charter schools suggesting grave doubts and concerns regarding their efficacy. Perhaps Mr. Peretz can sign on to the EDDRA list serve (eddra@yahoogroups.com) for a steady critique of charter schools and the No Child Left Behind Act. Let him read the voluminous research of Gerald Bracey and David Berliner advocating for our public school systems. I have myself lectured recently at the Curriculum Studies Project at the Louisiana State University against the No Child Left Behind Law, and of the liberal structural change which we might institute to change the culture of schools.

Let me suggest something for Martin Peretz to read and to do: Of course, I would recommend two of my books, Talmud, Curriculum and the Practical: Joseph Schwab and the Rabbis (2004, Peter Lang) and ‘I’m Only Bleeding’: Education as the Practice of Social Violence Against Children (1997, Peter Lang). Let Mr. Peretz study William F. Pinar’s recent text, What is Curriculum Theory? (2003, Lawrence Erlbaum). Or if Mr. Peretz is more basically minded, he might study Back to the Basics of Teaching and Learning: Thinking the World Together, by David Jardine, Patricia Clifford, and Sharon Friesen. From these texts, perhaps, Mr. Peretz might derive an adequate bibliography with which to pursue knowledge he offers too much evidence of lacking. It would seem to me that Martin Peretz took Joseph Schwab at his word when Schwab wrote in 1969 that the curriculum field was moribund. But Schwab, at least, meant to structurally change the beliefs and practices then strangling education, but which have reappeared with a virulence in today’s conservative right-wing world that is unthinkingly accepted by Martin Peretz. I would suggest that Mr. Peretz might do well to examine The Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/jaaacs/) and discover the incredibly exciting work addressing the current state of education in the United States and across the world.

Martin Peretz’s article in The New Republic has at its core a meanness and an blindness that means no one good. I am very sad to have read it, and sadder that it was written.

"What Are You Doing Now?"

What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

Thus did Henry David Thoreau begin his journal, on the 22 October 1837, when he was still a young man of twenty years. Thoreau died on 6 May, 1862, and his journal had grown significantly. His journal was his constant society and his solitude, his constant companion and his loneliness.

“What are you doing now?” I ask? “Do you keep a blog?” So I make my first entry today, not as a young man of twenty-two, but as an older man nearing the end of a sixth decade. My beard grays, but I have yet a few things to say and learn.

Sick of Love

The new Victoria’s Secret catalog arrived today. I’m not at all clear who sold our name to them, though in this world and in this age it might have been my runner’s catalog which also displays undergarments and bras—though ostensibly from a different perspective and for different reasons. Nonetheless, we’ve been placed on the Victoria’s Secret list, and we periodically receive their catalog. And has been my practice over the past several years–years in which the Victoria’s Secret catalog was delivered to our home–I recycle it immediately. That is, I deposit it into our recycling bins after I have walked very sl-o-w-ly up the l-o-n-g driveway ogling the fancy bras and panties that are so revealingly and seductively displayed, and panted over the bodies which lay just underneath the lingerie. (I wonder why men’s undergarments are not called lingerie? Am I not getting Victor’s Secret?). I pant heavily, I protest, because the driveway is an uphill climb and the bodies displayed are half my age. But that is another story.

I have two young daughters and a wife who . . . well, she’ll have to answer for her decisions and desires herself. But our daughters are fifteen and ten, and I just don’t know that there is anything I want them ogling at in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I don’t want them identifying these bodies with ideal female beauty; I don’t want them wishing for a body other their own; I don’t want them desiring to dress themselves at this moment of their lives for sexuality or sexual activity; or be identifying their gender with these seductions. I’m not sure I can seriously distinguish between Playboy and Victoria’s Secret, and I don’t subscribe to the former. The latter arrives willy-nilly.

And now I have learned that Bob Dylan had offered his image and his composition, “Love Sick” to an advertisement for Victoria’s Secret, renowned purveyor of ladies undergarments. Some, even many, see Dylan’s act as a betrayal, a pandering to the capitalist mentality to sell what is sellable for the highest price, a prostitution of a virtue forty years of creation and performance have developed. I wondered myself at Dylan’s decision. Since 1962, Bob Dylan has been central to my consciousness; not a day has gone by that I have not listened to Dylan either on vinyl or on compact disc, or in my mind. I have daily quoted Dylan in my intellectual and pedagogical meanderings; I have measured my life not in coffee spoons but in Dylan albums. He voiced my rage, articulated my confusions, spoke my hungers, defined my spiritual quests, expressed my bitternesses, cried my despairs, and prayed my hopes. Through my years, I have experienced epiphany at many a Bob Dylan concert. When I turned fifty I celebrated at a show at the Midway in St. Paul, Minnesota. The evening ended on the prayer, “Forever Young.” And now, I discover Dylan playing the soundtrack to my lusts, and again he has led me to thought.

Because somehow, I do not feel betrayed. No, I am not one who accepts whatever Dylan does without doubt, nor excuse what I consider lapses in his artistic creation, or blindly follow his directions. I mean, early on he warned, “don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters,” and I have heeded his cautions, though sometimes I have paid heavily for neglecting the latter. I lost interest in Dylan’s work during his Christian phase during the 1980s–from what I had heard from him I was not certain that I was much interested to learn what Dylan wanted to teach. And for a long time I’ve believed that a song from early in Dylan’s work defined his stance in the cultural landscapes:

You say you’re looking for someone never weak but always strong
To protect you and defend you whether you or right or wrong
Someone to open each and every door
But it ain’t me, Babe
No, no, no it ain’t me babe
It ain’t me you’re looking for, Babe.

I took him at his word, and he let me discover myself for myself. Not long after appeared “Like a Rolling Stone, “and it confirmed my quest: “When you got nothing you got nothing to lose. How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, Like a Rolling Stone?” By refusing my dependency, Dylan taught me independence.

And I learned from Dylan about the struggle. He engaged me politically, though he eschewed the role of leader. He wrote, in 1963 “Trail of troubles. Roads of battles/Paths of Victory/We shall walk.” Then, though he admitted the struggle would be arduous and seemingly hopeless and futile, he promised final victory, even redemption. The world was corrupt, we were corrupt, but when the ship came in, the promise would be fulfilled. I think I was defined by that promise–I listened for the sound of the tambourine. Ah, but times changed; there were so many deaths and so many defeats. Many gave up the struggle; many turned against it. But not Bob Dylan: he remained true to his commitments to the struggle. In the last album (Love and Theft), he declared, “The only thing, that I did wrong/Was to stay in Mississippi a day too long.” Later, in the same album, in “Honest with Me,” Dylan sings defiantly, “I’m not sorry for nothing I’ve done/I’m glad I fought, I only wish we’d won.” Despite his critics’ accusatory cries (reaching back at least to Newport, 1965) that he’d abandoned the struggle, here Dylan confirms his continuous engagement for freedom and social justice, and the pronominal movement from the singular to the plural acknowledges the community in and for which he fought. And I think that Dylan’s participation with Victoria’s Secret now remains part of that battle.

I have heard the story that early in his career Dylan was asked what product he would ever consider letting his songs advertise, to which he responded ‘ladies intimate apparel,’ or something like that phrasing. Perhaps negotiating with Victoria’s Secret, Dylan was fulfilling an early fantasy. (“I spoke like a child,” he states in “Love Sick.”) All the better that in the fulfillment no one need be hurt, though, perhaps, one would argue, there is a violence in the sexual display of women in the sometimes lubricious images. But, I consider, Victoria’s Secret represents my desire, sometimes gives it tangible form; I do not think it creates desire. Maybe the images in Victoria’s Secret direct desire, and in this manner perpetuate oppression and abuse. Perhaps, I am disturbed to have had my desire discovered so easily, but I am intrigued by, no, I am attracted to the images. It is, I explain, a secret pleasure in which I indulge when I look at the catalog; I know where I am. As a teacher, I would offer such reflective moments rather than censor the environment. I am a teacher: it is my life that works to mitigate the sources and effects of oppression and abuse.

Nor could Dylan’s greed answer to the question ‘why?’ I don’t know much about Dylan’s finances, indeed, I don’t know much about finances at all, but I cannot believe that Dylan is desperate for cash. Nor, as I have said, am I a purchaser of the products of the Victoria’s Secret catalog which might excuse their use of Dylan for their marketing strategy; I don’t wear their clothes, nor does anyone I know or think I know. Sigh! And, as I have said, I don’t want my children looking into the catalog, though I look myself pruriently within. No, I do not feel perfidy at Dylan’s move; indeed, I almost think that I understand. There is something in this relationships that I might discuss with my daughters.

In “Love Sick,” Dylan sings of a crushing weariness provoked not only (indeed, if at all!) by a rejection by his lover, but by the self-doubts and insecurities which love inherently provokes. Whether actually betrayed or anticipating the inevitability of a betrayal, Dylan speaks in both accusation and reflection. “Could you ever be true?/I think of you and I wonder.” Yet, as miserable as he is, as tormented as he remains at his condition, he is anguished by his desire for her. “Just don’t know what to do/I’d give anything just to be with you.” This sentiment reminds me of the closing couplet of Michael Drayton's (1563-1631) sonnet, “Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part," in which the poet’s aggressive acceptance of the relationship’s end is vitiated by his suggestion that at a word of reconciliation from his lover, the poet would instantly resume the affair. Indeed, though there is suggestion of separation in “Love Sick”–“I’m trying to forget you”— there is also a hint of a tortured continuance, “I’m walking,/Through streets that are dead. Walking, with you in my head.” This is a love so all-consuming, so overwhelming, so tormenting, that it tortures: “This kind of love, I’m sick of it.” As has been pointed out, ‘sick of love’ here could easily refer to ‘sick with love’ as well as sick of being in love, or sick of the state of love itself. In each case, love is a pernicious malady from which the suffering is profound. Indeed, so consumed is Dylan by his love that everything about him becomes measured by the unrequitable longing for the loved one. The world itself loses substance:

I see, I see lovers in the meadow
I see, I see silhouettes in the window
I watch them ‘til they’re gone
And they leave me
hangin’ on to a shadow

There is no energy and no hope.

Indeed, I think “Love Sick” is a fitting and ironic comment to the Victoria’s Secret catalog. That catalog depicts images to be desired, but which are forever beyond our reach. Indeed, that perfect beauty probably doesn’t exist at all—it is all illusion and ephemera. Fantasy! In the catalog, imperfections have all been disappeared, airbrushed away, and unblemished images of beauty are all that remain. ‘I’d give anything to be with you . . . Could you ever be true? I think of you and wonder.” I scream, “I, too, desire all the beautiful things so beautifully and seductively displayed. I want!” The catalog promises fulfillment , but contains only image. It makes you sick; it feeds your illness.

This condition oppresses and frustrates Dylan, but at whom can he direct his rage? Certainly not the loved one with whom he would forever be. How much more suffering can he inflict on himself? And there is little hint—I cannot think of one instance in all of Dylan, that suicide is ever an answer to anything. (“I see that silver linin’/That was hangin’ I the sky,” he sings in ‘Paths of Victory”). Ah, but the world outside, beyond the catalog, outside of that catalog, even all of the real bodies which live out here, now there might be an outlet for his bitterness. And so the advertisement itself becomes the statement of Dylan’s revenge. “Sometimes, the silence can be like thunder/Sometimes I want to take to the road of plunder.” Here there is a violence, but Dylan’s plundered road is one of performance and not pilfery. It is where we pay to hear him play. It is where he enacts his desire. And I have been at those shows and been relieved.

In Dylan’s Victoria’s Secret advertisement, I hear a weltschmerz ( a concept I would have my children know), and I hear a strength (also, a concept which I would have my children know). There is in the Victoria’s Secret advertisement this experience of conflicted emotions: the promise of fantasy and the anger at illusion, the innocence of desire and the sickness of lust, the hope of love and the reality of its end, the prospect of happiness and the weariness of loss. What is expressed in Dylan’s expression is the conflict at the core of desire which I think I want our daughters and sons to understand. I think of another Dylan song, "Silvio," and the lines,

I can tell you fancy,I can tell you plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don't complain

That too, I think, could be the soundtrack of the recent Dylan Victoria’s Secret catalog. I know what lies behind those images, and I am angry at them and at myself. I’m sick of love. I am wearied. I want to take to the road and plunder. I’d give anything just to be with you.