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.