Society + Culture,

Must Howard Zinn Know?
by Richard Oxman

“When Marx mentioned schools, he merely said that ‘government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.’ The pristine school!” — Jan D. Matthews
It’s getting musty around here.

“As students go hazily from class to class, box to box, schooling as a technique of social control perpetuates itself. And as leftists drone on about better education for the people, for the masses of people, they are unaware of what an important role they play in reproducing existent social and economic formations.”

So says Jan D. Matthews in TOWARD THE DESTRUCTION OF SCHOOLING, a definitive take on why we can’t work for “improvement” with our traditional institutions…like schools.
The improvements that leftists cite are pathetic.

“It’s true that any talk of hope is dismissed as naïve, but that’s because we tend to look at the surface of things at any given time. And the surface almost always looks grim. The charge of naïvete also comes from a loss of historical perspective. History shows that what is considered naaive in one decade becomes reality in another.

How much hope was there for black people in the South in the fifties? At the start of the Vietnam War, anyone who thought the monster war machine could be stopped seemed naive. When I was in South Africa in 1982, and apartheid was fully entrenched, it seemed naive to think that it would be dissolved and even more naive to think that Mandela would become president. But in all those cases, anyone looking under the surface would have seen currents of potential change bubbling and growing.”

The above is (vintage) Howard Zinn, responding to a routine question in a recent Tikkun interview.

I have a few questions of my own. One, how much hope is there for black people in the South and elsewhere in the U.S. today? I guess if you’re describing Barack Obama as “cautious,” and cheering for Marian Wright Edelman (as a sufficient next step) –as HZZZ does– you think…differently than I do. Two, what exactly are the positive seeds that were planted vis-à-vis Vietnam era protest/success if the end result is Iraq (Plus) On Stage and Iran (And So On) In The Wings today? Three, does anyone know what happened when Mandela assumed The Mantle, the state of The Union there today?

What exactly was “bubbling and growing“ then? Today?

I want to hug Howard, and give him a deep kiss on the lips for sooooooooo much. But I can’t do that –commit such foreplay– in this article.

There’s a lot I can’t do. In part, ‘cause the few readers who might come across my words have spent too much time in school…learning all too well why Civil Rights advances, Vietnam era accomplishments, and the end of Apartheid represent IMPROVEMENT.

For some reason, Howard seems to think that we can work with the subservient souls who run and inhabit our schools: asexual administrators, scholars, “useful citizens,” et. al.

Produce more Barbara Ehrenreichs and Michael Moores from the Halls of Academia as per Shelly R. Fredman’s interview . Is that really something to look forward to, to invest hope in? Such stink.

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