Words&Dirt

“For those with a delicate sense of smell, a world sumptuously orchestrated was being resolved into nothingness; but right there the mystery began, because at the same time one was presented with the total nihilism of the work, a more careful intuition might suspect that this was not Morelli’s intent, that the virtual self-destruction found in every fragment of his work was a kind of search for the noble metal among the slag.  One had to pause here, for fear of mixing up the doors and going out on a limb.  The fiercest arguments between Oliveira and Étienne would occur at this level of their hopes, because they feared they were making mistakes, that they were a pair of perfect cretins insisting on the belief that the Tower of Babel could not be built if in the end it was meaningless.  Occidental morality at this point seemed like a pimp to them, as one by one it insinuated all the illusions of thirty centuries that had been inevitably inherited, assimilated, and digested.  It was hard to deny belief in the fact that a flower could be beautiful to no end; it was bitter to accept the fact that one could dance in darkness.  Morelli’s allusions to an inversion of signs, to a world seen with other and from other dimensions, as an inevitable preparation for purer vision (and all of this a resplendently written passage, and at the same time suspicious of the farce, of icy irony before the mirror) exasperated them as it offered them the roost of an almost hope, of a justification, but at the same time denied them total security, keeping them in an unbearable ambiguity.  If there was any consolation left it was the thought that Morelli too moved about in that same ambiguity, orchestrating a work whose legitimate first hearing could well have been the most absolute of silences.  That’s how they went along through the pages, cursing and fascinated, and La Maga would always end up curling herself up like a cat in an easy chair, tired of uncertainties, looking at how dawn was breaking over the slate roofs, through all the smoke that fills in among a pair of eyes and a closed window and an ardently useless night.”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 535

“Tenure is by far the most controversial aspect of contemporary teacher unionism, but in the period before World War I, there was relative consensus among union leaders, school reformers, and intellectuals in favor of tenure.  It had long been a feature of the celebrated Prussian education system, which had helped convince Harvard president Charles William Eliot and New York City’s reformist superintendent William Maxwell to support stronger job security protections for teachers.  In New York, the new three-year probationary period followed by tenure was seen as a clean government reform after decades of politically influenced teacher appointments, in which schools were part of the patronage machine.  Tenure was also popular among leaders of the National Education Association, although the NEA was hostile to classroom teachers affiliating with blue-collar organized labor.

Fed up with Chicago politics, Ella Flagg Young made plans to retire and move to California.  When she stepped down from the Chicago superintendency on January 1, 1916, she released a statement to the press that could still define progressive pedagogy today, with its view of the teacher as a creative and independent intellectual guide for children:

I believe that every child should be happy in school.  So we have tried to substitute recreation for drill….We have tried to recognize types of minds as a mother does among her own children.  We were losing the majority of children at fifth grade.  By letting them do things with their hands we have saved many of them.  In order that teachers may delight in awakening the spirits of children, they must themselves be awake.  We have tried to free the teachers.  Some day the system will be such that the child and teacher will go to school with ecstatic joy.  At home in the evening, the child will talk about the things done during the day and will talk with pride.  I want to make schools the great instrument of democracy.”

 ––The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, by Dana Goldstein, pg. 85