Conclusion:
The Sensitive Teacher and The Totalitarian School
I would like to conclude my discussion of Kozol's Death At An Early Age by looking at the issue of teacher sensitivity. Kozol repeats endlessly that the teacher's most important quality for effective teaching is to be sensitive to the student's own feelings. The requirement of sensitivity follows directly from the mental hygienist approach to education. Sensitivity is mentioned in the White House Midcentury Report, which we have previously examined as the immediate social science background to the Brown v. Board decision.
In discussing the school and the emotional life of the student, the Conference Report* states unambiguously:
"For if satisfaction and increasing control are to result, integration in terms of ego strength must be always augmenting. And this entails emotional supports in relationship with others--for the child and young person, primarily with adults who may stand as counterparts for the once all-powerful and all-enveloping parents.
"Some teachers have always been able to lend some such support through their acute, sympathetic sensitivity to people and to what children, in particular, are feeling and contending with. Now they and others less sensitive are offered a clearer comprehension of what is involved, and so a more adequate conception of their own role in furthering the kind of integration of the personality required for robust living and social effectiveness."(Midcentury Report, p. 252.)
Kozol contrasts the need for sensitivity to the insistence of the insensitive teachers of the segregated school where he substitute taught that the traditional intellectual discipline was most important. These teachers expressed the importance of the discipline, in part, by maintaining an emotional distance between themselves and their pupils.
The Reading Teacher, for instance, refused to associate with her pupils out of the classroom.
"...about what she had been saying I found I was still puzzled. 'Would you have Negroes come and visit you or come and have dinner with you in the evening?'
"And to that the answer was clear and elucidating and exact: 'They could come and visit if I invited them to come but not as you could come to see me. They could not feel free to just drop in on me. I would have to draw the line at that.'"(Kozol, p. 23.)
Kozol interpreted the separation of teacher and student as maintaining a racial color line separating Black students from white teachers.(Kozol, p. 25).
The lesson about avoiding social relationships with the students came to Kozol formally as an injunction:
"To have any friendly relationship with a student outside the classroom would make teaching him impossible or, at the least, substantially more difficulty. To know him as he is and to allow him to know you in any ordinary vulnerable light is likely to affect adversely both the way in winch you think of him and the way in which he thinks of you."(Kozol, p. 114.)
Sensitivity to the student required the belief by the teacher that the teacher had much to learn from the student. The student was "worth listening to and even learning from."(Kozol, p. 157.)
Kozol was, in his self-congratulatory account, an effective teacher, because he was sensitive to the students. "The real reason that I was able to get on with those children in the state in which I found them is that I came into that room knowing myself to be absolutely on their side."(Kozol, pp. 161-162.)
Kozol's work epitomizes the most extreme development of the progressive, child-centered tradition of American pedagogy. It was also, in a sense, an official publication of the academic elite in the social sciences and education that prepared the social science statement submitted to the Supreme Court for the Brown v. Board decision. Not only was Kozol a product of Harvard, the home of many members of this elite, but portions of the book were published in the Harvard Educational Review and the Atlantic Monthly magazine before they appeared in book form. Dr. Robert Coles, an influential Harvard child psychiatrist wrote a preface for Kozol's book. Harvard educators eventually became the advisors to the busing program that courts imposed on Boston in an effort to end the city's de facto school segregation.
Let's close our analysis by asking a question. What kind of schools, as public institutions, are likely to result from the educational philosophy expressed by the Midcentury Report, the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board decision, and Kozol's journalism?
The school must be an institution that takes over the role of the family of the students, in which the teacher's influence extends outside the school and school hours, that places medical administration of the students' emotional maturation at the center of its program, and that denigrates the teaching of critical intellectual skills that would enable the students to criticize the educational and social policies that created such an institution.
That such schools should be public, state-run institutions constituted a vast expansion of the role of the state in the lives of citizens. It dramatically shifted the line between private and public, so as to diminish private lives and expand the reach of public power. The Midcentury Conference report candidly and honestly referred to the "total school program". We may cast the social science agenda somewhat differently by saying that the educational pedagogy demanded by Kozol and the elites he represented required totalitarian schools.
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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.).
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