Making Freedom Trivial

Eight months into a public school-teaching career in Boston, Jonathan Kozol was fired in 1965 for reading an angry poem by Black Poet Langston Hughes to his class in the Roxbury ghetto. He detailed his frustrating experiences in Death at an Early Age, and set out to reform U.S. education by helping to found "free" schools: small private schools where parents are "free" to decide what their children should be taught. He concentrated first on Roxbury and later on such cities as New York, Chicago and St. Louis. His target was the ghetto, but the idea caught on with middle-class liberals. Within a few years the country had more than 800 such "alternative" schools.

Now 36, Kozol has spent much of the last two years visiting free schools across the country and evaluating what was partly his own handiwork. In general, he reports in the current Harvard Educational Review, he was pleased by what he found in ghetto storefront schools, where the chief problem was constant staff turnover. All too often, Kozol writes, the teachers are young whites who spend a year in "the race and conscience bag," then discover new slogans and bywords and leave for "a new dedication." Nevertheless, the ghetto schools' education programs, by virtue of their locations, have inherently "a strong ingredient of direct, unfalsified political consciousness," which Kozol considers at the heart of any serious free school.

Not so the free schools for middle-class white children, which Kozol found usually operated by "liberal and genteel men and women" who strive to keep their schools nonpolitical. Despite their diverse resources, Kozol says that many of them offer children only "unimportant options," such as a choice between working with "bright and whimsical gadgets" like a packaged science game, or doing "their own thing" at the weaver's loom and potter's kiln. To Kozol, these choices are not really free, at least not in any way that genuinely matters. Instead of confronting their students with moral dilemmas and social problems, these schools offer only "the pretense of free choice within a carefully constructed framework of contrived and managed possibilities." Moreover, the schools' "ideological antisepsis" guarantees that no child "will ever choose spontaneously to learn of things which lie outside the province of privilege, the kingdom of trivia, or the boundaries of self-gratification."

As a corrective measure, Kozol urges that these schools be reoriented around questions of "what young people will believe, or not believe, about the way they live, about the way their nation lives, and about the way in which it serves or does not serve the cause of justice." Otherwise, a child might be better off in an old-fashioned public high school. "At least he would not be deceived into believing that his choices were his own," declares Kozol, "and consequently would be able to react with secret rage and silent skepticism to the undisguised mendacity around him."

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