Feelings Before Thinking in Kozol's Death at an Early Age
One dogma of the mental hygienist program of progressive educators, behind the 1954 Brown decision, asserted that the student's emotional development must be cultivated before the student's academic development. This doctrine was based on the notion that students must reach a level of "readiness" to learn before they can learn. Since segregated students were deeply damaged, according to the Supreme Court, it was by implication more important for schools to repair the segregated student's emotional state than it was to teach her the intellectual subjects.
Jonathan Kozol's criticism of the instructional program of the segregated Roxbury elementary school where he taught in 1964-1965 was based on the progressive education dogma. Repeatedly, Kozol states that the authentic subjectivity of each student was being crushed by the school, specifically, by the school's insistence on teaching the traditional subjects.
Kozol opens Death at an Early Age with a set-piece, good v. bad, description of the struggle between the damaged boy, Stephen, and his Art Teacher. The Art Teacher taught drawing by requiring the students to copy drawings by others, or by passing out mimeographed outlines for the student fill in with indicated colors. The drawings to be copied were models the teacher expected the students to learn. Stephen did not want to do this assignment. Requiring him to do it quashed his motivation and diminished his self-esteem, just as the Supreme Court said segregated education would do. Let's listen to Kozol tell this story.
"The fact that [the students] were being asked to copy something in which they could not believe because it was not of them and did not in any way correspond to their own interests did not occur to the Art Teacher, or if it did occur she did not say it....
"How did a pupil like Stephen react to a teacher of this sort? Alone almost out of the entire class, I think that he absolutely turned off his signals while she was speaking and withdrew to his own private spot. At his desk he would sit silently while the Art Teacher was talking and performing. With a pencil, frequently stubby and end-bitten, he would scribble and fiddle and cock his head and whisper to himself throughout the time that the Art Teacher was going on. At length, when the art lesson officially began, he would perhaps push aside his little drawing and try the paint and paper that he had been given, usually using the watercolors freely and the paintbrush sloppily and a little bit defiantly and he would come up with things that certainly were delightful and personal and private, and full of his own nature."(P. 3.)
It is worth pausing here to point out that copying masters is a traditional art instructional technique. It is integral to master-apprentice instruction. The apprentice learns a technique, almost always too complicated to explain clearly in words, by copying the master's active practice and trying to replicate instructor's works. In other words, the Art Teacher taught by employing a technique used for thousands of years in teaching art, calligraphy, and many complicated manual skills. The technique was the gateway to participating in an artistic tradition, that is, the basis for self-expression and originality within the tradition.
According to the dogma, imposition of discipline destroys the student (hence the title of the book, "Death" at an early age). Kozol wastes no time in getting to this point.
"If Stephen began to fiddle around during a lesson, the Art Teacher generally would not notice him at first. When she did, both he and I and the children around him would prepare for trouble. For she would go at his desk with something truly like a vengeance and would shriek at him in a way that carried terror. 'Give me that! Your paints are all muddy! You've made it a mess. Look at what he's done! He's mixed up the colors! I don't know why we waste good paper on this child!' Then: 'Garbage! Junk! He give me garbage and junk! And garbage is the one thing I will not have.' Now I thought that garbage and junk was very nearly the only real artwork in the class. I do not know very much about painting, but I know enough to know that the Art Teacher did not know much about it either and that, furthermore, she did not know or care anything at all about the way in which you can destroy a human being. Stephen, in many ways already dying, died a second and third and fourth and final death before her anger."(Pp. 3-4.)
Kozol is being melodramatic here. He is implicitly comparing the teacher's words to stabbing. She is stabbing Stephen to death, stabbing a second and third and fourth and final time until Stephen is dead.
Once the reader steps into the web of assumptions spun out by Kozol, it difficult to escape his conclusion that this Art Teacher was a monster--a murderer. But let's extricate ourselves from the web. Let's assume the students are not emotionally damaged. Let's assume the students are normally motivated. Let's assume that the school is not a psychological clinic or mental hospital. Let's assume that the purpose of the art class is to teach the students to appreciate art, to understand why great art is great, to obtain a feeling for the practice of art techniques that masters used to create great art. Let's assume that purpose of the class, even for fourth graders, is not "self-expression". Let's assume that, from the perspective of the art tradition, self-expression is no more than infantalism.
With these assumptions, the Art Teacher's reaction is cast in a different light. The teacher should not accept self-expression, which would be simply a childish, defiant refusal to do the lessons. The teacher should not receive any art production by a student as okay. The teacher should make it clear that there is a difference between disciplined technique and undisciplined self-expression.
Kozol would have none of this. The goal of education was to heal the injured subjectivity of the pupil; therefore, all the student's self-expression was desirable and legitimate. Any disapproval by the teacher, from this point of view, was insensitive to the pupil's self-esteem and illegitimate. But this view was more than Kozol's, of course; it was the law of the land. It was the view imposed on education by the Supreme Court.
[To be continued.]
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