On Radical Education

I am a radical not because I choose to be, but because I must admit what I am. If I was a radical by choice, a free radical, I would not be radical enough to suit my nature. I am the metastasis of the progressive spirit—insistent, insatiable, irreversible. In education, it is a good thing that more satisfied minds prevail.

Nevertheless, I offer radical education. Radical education consists in taking things a step further. It begins, however, by accepting responsibility for all of the steps that lead up to that last, radical leap. Those precursor steps will always be necessary, but never sufficient to effect the changes demanded by radical education.

Three year ago, I might have allowed myself to be drawn into an argument about the historicity of progressivism and the worship of newness. But I’m not looking for something new, I am looking for something old that has been lost or taken away, something simple and local and traditional. I’m looking for schools that come from inside the community, that answer to the community, that grow from it.

The idea that schools should be as one with the communities they serve should be self-evident, but in New York it is the exception. Many of this city’s communities are occupied by a school system that functions as an external imposition. Never mind that thousands of people from within these communities also staff the schools, and that they operate as though they are both a part of and at the service of their community.

Part of the problem is that a school cannot server two masters. To be part of the public education system is to partake of the techniques and discipline of a certain kind of schooling. Those techniques were not developed a priori. Rather, they grew in response to the educational needs of a community, and that community is well served by such techniques. In other communities, however, the discipline of public education must be received like the revealed word, only with much less persuasive force. In such a case, a public school is in a difficult spot: Its mandate is to enforce techniques created for a given community upon any community.

Very quickly, however, such a school will discover that the educational techniques of one community are not enough to meet the needs of another. Worse, transplanted techniques do not fail to carry with them other trappings of culture, so that they are not only insufficient, but antagonistic, as well. Put another way, who wants the French to lecture us on how to raise our kids? Or rather, who wants France to run our schools . . . from France?

It is a radical project to make New York City Public Schools into what schools should be. In too many cases, history has ensured that there is nothing for some communities to go back to when it comes to the warm embrace of a public education. The only place to find it, then, is in the future, and it will require radical education to get there.