What Nearly Made Me Choke on My Granola While I Was Reading This Morning.

The passive, tranquil and protected lives white people lead depend on strongly armed police, well-demarcated ghettos. While children starve and others walk the city streets in fear on Monday afternoon, the privileged young people in the Free Schools of Vermont shuttle their handlooms back and forth and speak of love and "organic processes." They do "their thing." Their thing is sun and good food and fresh water and good doctors and delightful, old and battered eighteenth-century houses, and a box of baby turtles; somebody else's thing may be starvation, broken glass, unheated rooms and rats inside the bed with newborn children. The beautiful children do not wish cold rooms or broken glass, starvation, rats or fear for anybody; nor will they stake their lives, or put their bodies on the line, or interrupt one hour of the sunlit morning, or sacrifice one moment of the golden afternoon, to take a hand in altering the unjust terms of a society in which these things are possible.

[...]

Least conscionable is when the people who are laboring and living in these schools describe themselves as revolutionaries. If this is revolution, then the men who elected Richard Nixon do not have a lot to fear. They would do well in fact to subsidize these schools and to covertly channel resources to their benefactors and supporters, for they are an ideal drain on activism and the perfect way to sidetrack ethical men from dangerous behavior.
 
--Jonathan Kozol
from Free Schools

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Only two chapters in and this book is rocking my world. It was published in 1972--I feel sure Kozol would have known better than to use the proverbial but exclusionary term "men" even a couple of years later, even in the midst of such proverbial speech--but I see a very appealing present-day revolutionary potential in these ideas.

Just now there is a little voice emerging in my head, telling me, "Put 'Starting a Free School' on the ten-year plan! Scrap international travel, scrap ever making a comfortable living, scrap this bourgie bullshit about 'leisure time,' there's work to do! Call Kymber and Katie! We'll all quit our jobs and learn how to run a non-profit and everything will be amazing and we'll teach Glenwood kids, outside the system and for the righteous purpose of human-fucking-liberation, for free!" But hold on, Cooper. Not so fast.

Portrait by Robert Shetterly, www.americanswhotellthetruth.org

One of the things I love about this book so far is that it seems to employ a very elegant balance of the general and the particular to motivate and inspire, but also to instruct, in the most practical sense of the word. Most of Free Schools literally reads like an incredibly approachable instruction manual that skips over the tedious technical and legal aspects of running a nonprofit, saving those things for later discovery by the reader. Kozol occasionally wanders into helpful but essentially theoretical commentary. He makes no attempt to disguise his personal positions, and he is careful to discuss with real consideration other ways of thinking about an issue at the same time as he distances himself from them.

In the chapter titled "Power: Participation: Sanction: Legal Matters," for example, Kozol discusses the balance between radical democratic ideals and the real needs and considerations that must go into creating an effective governing body for the Free School:

Many people who go into Free Schools are so nervous about power, and so uneasy in regard to anyone who holds it, that they do not like to face the painful fact that somebody in this school, or at least some group of bodies, is going to have to make some kinds of difficult decisions. [...] The composition of the Trustee Board, and the power that it will or will not have, is therefore elemental to the entire character and oftentimes to the survival of the Free School.

He goes on to discuss the pitfalls of electing "prestigious" Trustee Boards in order to ensure popular support, as well as the problems inherent to starting out with a Board comprised of well-intentioned but weak-willed anti-authoritarian idealists who can quickly be replaced through "democracy" by power-hungry manipulators.

Clearly, these are words from the trenches. Every time I read one of his books, I get the sense of a guy who has sat down to write because he knows he is gifted with the ability and therefore the responsibility to raise awareness, capture imaginations, and change minds, but all the while, he has one eye trained on his real work, out there in real schools with real kids.

Although he has tamed his image somewhat in the past couple of decades--i.e. the appearances on national television where he firmly but politely rails against injustice--he has never really changed his mind or his message. I expect that Jonathan Kozol is one of those people who has the stamina to fight on the front lines until the very last. Furthermore, he is the kind of figure whose integrity puts to shame all of those cozy, rich University bastards like Noam Chomsky who, despite the usefulness and truth of many of their ideas, are undeniably and quite literally in the business of radical politics.

So, fuck Chomsky. I'll just keep reading my little teacher books, written by a guy who is much better at living inside his ideals.