For most of my student and professional life I considered myself a young turk–someone who thought of himself as trying to improve and modernize the structure and function of the university. As an undergraduate I had been a member of SDS, although at Washington and Lee University our politics more nearly resembled the left wing of the Young Democrats than those of Tom Hayden. As a young faculty member I was a member of the New University Conference, a group dubbed the SDS’s faculty auxiliary. It was the 60’s and the issues were civil rights and the Vietnam war. The 70’s added gender politics to the list.
As I reached middle age and tenure, I found myself both part of the establishment and a critic of it. Many in my generation of academics found themselves in this predicament. There were several standard responses. One was to pretend one was still young and cultivate a following of politically active students. The conservatism of the 80″s and 90’s made this difficult, but not impossible. A second option was increased careerism–publish and ignore. The third, which is the one I followed, was to involve oneself in university governance and work to make changes from the inside. This choice makes enemies in each of the other two camps.
During this time I was comfortable calling myself a radical, which I defined as one who went to the root of the issue. During my youth, I was proud of the title “radical;” more recently I have been aware of the irony inherent in such a title. However, one consistency I see in my life is a desire to actively influence both individuals and the larger social structure. That desire is one of the reasons I left the university for my current position at the Family Foundation School.
Those readers who have followed the school blogs know that we are in struggle with a group called The Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY). I described the group as radical or rather that their agenda represented “a radical take on children’s rights.” Many of my colleagues both co-workers and others in the wider profession have objected to the characterization as radical as being too insulting.
I suppose I should acknowledge that I live in an age where radical gets most often paired with jihadist and not be surprised at this reaction. But I see CAFETY’s agenda striking at the root of the relationship of the family to the state and in that sense it is radical. The irony has not escaped me. I am now the target of the kind of group I would have considered joining when I was twenty-five. My twenty-five year old self would say, “well, you are old and have an ecnomic stake in the outcome. Just what did you expect?” In my next post I will discuss their agenda and my response directly. I wrote this post first so my readers can see where I am coming from and how personally I take these issues.
Tagged as:
CAFETY,
Education,
Family Foundation School,
Politics
As I began discussion with our teachers about how we would present the up- coming inauguration here at the Family Foundation School, I was forced to reflect on my life on the white side of America’s racial divide. I was in fourth or fifth grade when Brown v. Board of Education was decided and I still have trace memories of the event. One is of standing on the playground with my friends talking about having “them” in our school. My friends may have used the “N” word; my mother had schooled me to carefully say, in Malcolm X’s wonderful spelling, “knee-grow.”
I also remember that my grandfather came to visit shortly after this decision and though I can recall nothing of what he said. My sense was that he was angry because he was afraid. They were emotions I had not seen in him before. I lost my political innocence that year. I knew no African Americans lived in near me, but I had no idea the law would have kept them out of my school if they had. In some innate ten year old way this seemed “unfair.” At a base emotional level I have never lost that sense.
During the next four or five years I, like most young Southerners, learned the racial markers—which water fountains to use, where to sit on the bus, what parts of town to avoid. More out of early teen rebellion than developed politics, I violated these norms whenever I thought I could get away with it. I also became a newspaper reader and a TV news watcher. Harry Byrd’s “Massive Resistance” unfolded and failed before me. Years later I would infuriate my father and grandfather by arguing that white southern politicians created the civil rights movement by passively resisting the Supreme Court on what they perceived as moral grounds.
“All deliberate speed” meant that eight years after Brown v. Board, I graduated high school without ever having a black student in my school. How do I explain my youth to my students the oldest of whom are born in 1991? The 50’s and 60’s are history to them and if they cannot see the short time between Obama and Brown v Board of Education, how can they really understand the significance of this inauguration?
I’ll do two or three more posts on this topic. I’d be interested to hear ideas for helping students understand this moment in their history.
Tagged as:
civil rights,
Family Foundation School,
inaugaration,
obama
Arguably our greatest plays are tragedies—Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire. Yet, we Americans don’t seem to have a tragic vision. Sophocles’ injunction to call no man happy until you know his end does not strike a chord with us. We do not believe that “The oldest hath borne most: we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” We see no purpose in thinking that way. Ten minutes on Twitter will convince you American Optimism is alive and well. If we had a tragic vision, maybe we wouldn’t wander into so many wars we can’t sustain. We might think, “how could this end badly?’
Here at the Family Foundation School, I’ve been teaching a course in Greek Mythology which has included many Greek tragedies. My students have been fascinated by the loves of Zeus, the Greeks’ ideas on homosexuality, the body, and death. But tragic vision they don’t get. Oh, they know about sudden death. They may have friends who overdosed or died in car accidents. As a student said to me today, “I can see that Oedipus got screwed over,” but tragedy as an over-arching vision, as a notion of how the world works eludes them.
Perhaps I’m asking too much of eighteen year olds, but everyone in Iraq would get the Trojan Women, children in Darfur could fully understand Orestes stabbing his mother, Oedipus might make sense to the Tutsi’s or the Hutu’s. Old men in Afghanistan would understand King Lear. We Americans live collectively too safe a life and we are confident that we will prevail.
Tragedies appear in cultures that are in the midst of struggles. Athens before and at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, London as Elizabeth begins an empire on a very shaky polity, a France that Louis XIV is just welding together, a United States winning the World War and setting out on its hegemonic path. My knowledge of Asian Drama isn’t detailed enough to continue this comparison. At these times of growth and hopes, the nation’s poets reminded us, “It could all go wrong!”
As these societies matured and then withered, their poets could not sustain this vision. Everyone seemed too comfortable. Drama went to melodrama where the clearly good overcame the clearly evil. Look at American popular entertainment. Euripides might have enjoyed Die Hard with a Vengeance. But if he were the writer, Bruce Willis would need to be a more reflective character.
Don’t get me wrong. I like our safe life, but I fear that we may be asleep when we go over the precipice and never realize that “we are like Ixion bound to a wheel. (Euripides). “
Tagged as:
Family Foundation School,
Greeks,
Myth
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=bd050479-6db4-4d22-9cf4-e9a54d128c38)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=71d65c57-cc74-4fa8-83fc-023dcf1e74b9)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a50a2a7e-2a2b-4cb2-abf3-d68408ab0d9c)
