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I have not heard Celeste talk about the issue of color as a negative
thing about Hartford since our first tour. I think because it became
for her, on that day, her school. She can talk freely about the
skin color of different kids on the playground, something few white
people I know can do. She now addresses all around our neighborhood,
who ask her constantly in a somewhat surprised tone how she likes
Hartford. "It's the school for me!," she says emphatically.
We ask her so much that I sometimes wonder if she will learn to
assume that something must be wrong. Hopefully, she will instead
learn to assign the repeated questions to the category of ridiculous
things that adults do.
Sometimes, though, when
we walk north to play in the new and ample playgrounds of the suburban
grade school in Shorewood, I wonder if I am taking something away
from Celeste. I look at that school. The building is older, like
Hartford, but it has been rehab-ed and landscaped. Flowers and hedges
intersperse four large play areas with state-of-the-art equipment.
It's a wonderful place to spend a spring afternoon.
And I feel like I am
buffeted between two ideas of the public. On the one hand, there
is my older idea, rooted in a social vision of equality that holds
out to Celeste and Sylvie the possibility of living in a world with
lots of different people, and learning from all of them. In this
idea of the public, we are all in it together- rich people, poor
people, upper middle class; Black, white, Latino, Asian, American
Indian. Our physical plant, like the one at Hartford, is overused
and antiquated, but we clash and differ and figure it out together.
Our children are loved and protected, and they learn from one and
other, much as Celeste has learned from her friends to deal with
the noise and chaos of public school lunchtime. In this public,
our strength is diversity, and the creativity and good will that
come with it.
My other idea is, I think,
a historically newer one. It emanates from twenty-five years of
savage war against the older idea of collectivity and diversity.
During these twenty-five years, funding for public education has
been repeatedly, cruelly, cut. Many schools in the Milwaukee Public
School system do not have the arts and music curriculum that Hartford
does. Cynthia writes grants to get private funding for these.
Fleeing the battered
and besieged public, many people have invented a different idea
of the public. The most extreme example of what I would call the
sheltering public might be gated communities, which have public
spaces within them that are carefully maintained for only a select
few. Like the Shorewood school building, this public is carefully
trimmed and pruned; children are sheltered and taken care of. In
many ways, in this second idea of the public, children need to be
sheltered from the rundown diversity of the other public.
This sheltering public nurtures and protects children with small
class sizes, extra-curricular activities, pedagogies that inspire
twenty kids rather than disciplining forty of them. Who wouldn't
want their child cosseted in such an environment?
Thing is, this cozy and caring public is also remote. It can only
be called public by dint of unequal tax dollars, residential segregation,
and increasingly inequality. While the schools of Shorewood are
public schools, such plush environments are not open to everyone.
And I want both experiences
of the public for my kids -- the nurturing public and the diverse
one. Thing is, they are pretty much mutually exclusive at this point.
You live in the city, you get the rundown public schools; you move
to the suburbs and suddenly your grade school has marigolds growing
outside it. An older idea of the public might have offered small
class sizes and nurturing pedagogies to every child -- a real
No Child Left Behind policy -- but ours discriminates. And
that injustice informs every decision we make about educating our
children.
I read over this essay
and see that it is anchored by the central figures of Eric and Hartford
University School. So in trying to figure out how Celeste and other
kids like her learn about race, I have spent a lot of time talking
about a Black man who is one or two steps away from being homeless,
and an urban public school that flourishes despite being, always,
one or two steps away from the grave consequences of budget shortfalls.
These two figures signal the difficult historical moment that our
children pass through on their ways to being educated about the
world and its inequalities.
mmo
: november 2005 |
