A b e c e d a r i a n

Influences, lineage, ancestry

​

Probably in my life my own greatest teacher was Myles Horton who I spent twelve years with listening to and the book [The Long Haul] took so long because we didn't want to stop seeing Myles so much. And Myles was saying, that in the 30's, he and his friends, truly believed that they were going to see revolution in the United States. And they truly believed it and were acting on that premise. This was right after the depression, the new deal and before the second world war. Remember, the war came along and solved a lot of problems that are still unsolved. That is to say put a lot of problems that are unsolved under the table. It took a lot of men out of poverty into the military ...you know....

​

I was born in 37 so in some sense I am a child of the late depression. My parents were married five years earlier during the high depression....My father was unemployed for awhile.... But anyway....I grew up in an immigrant family. So I had a lot of the sense of the urgency, the drama , the craziness....But Myles said, they really felt, that at this point that a revolution was going to take place in AAmerica...working people were going to rise, the CIO was formed, there was gonna be mass industrial unions, there was gonna be redistribution of wealth....And he said after the war without losing his stride, well, everyone lost some strides, you have to realize that you have to shift the nature of your struggle and that it's gonna take a hell of a lot longer than you can imagine to bring decency into the world on large scale. And I see the same thing for people who were born....Remember I am not a child of the sixties. That's the most important thing to understand my thinking. I'm ten years older than people who grew up in the sixties. I graduated from college in 58. Went to Bronx Science in 54. Went through the McCarthy era. I am a child of the McCarthy era. If you want my coming to age it was in a socialist and communist family. I 'm a red diaper baby: My family consisted of anarchists, socialists, communists, small businessmen and Mafioso. I am also part Italian.....

​

So I have a very different perspective on the 60's and the educational stuff in the 60's as opposed to Bill Ayers...who is wonderful, but that's when his coming of age was.....It's a matter of a certain difference..... So that when I came to struggles in the 60's...and I was in Berkeley in 1968, ran a high school in Berkeley, 1968-73......and taught in Berkeley in 68. I have been there. But I didn't come there except from a tradition of struggle.

​

My grandfather was union activist but not on the intellectual level. On the thug. He was a member of the carpenters and joiners union and basically his job in the union was when other unions went out on strikes, he beat up the scabs....When he did it for someone else's Union he got assault and battery. He just spent a lot of time in jail , that's all. We lived in the same house. He came from Russia in 1905 as a socialist, after the first revolution in Russia. My family, if there was any defining social world on my mother's side it was a bunch of Italian people, really quite wonderful and on my father's side of the family it was the workman's circle. The "ar bite aring" [?] And there's no temple. We're really very secular, but we're also very confusedly mixed cause nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody ever does. See it's taken me years to figure out all these things. If we could define it in anyway: it's resolutely working class . Unambiguously.

​

When I came to education, I also went to the New York City public schools, but I did get to go to Bronx Science and I did go to Harvard and I did get to go to Oxford so in a sense my early education was public school, my training latter on was in some of the most elitist institutions in the United States. I hated it and didn't feel at home. Still don't feel at home in these places. I feel at home on the streets. I feel at home here. I feel at home kind of wandering around; I feel at home at Haven's school [footnote] spending time with the kids....I felt at home when I was teaching in Harlem. The kids were just black... but they were just like we were. The building looked alike in fact.

​

On Becoming a Teacher

​

I didn't go into teaching because of the civil rights movement...whereas a lot of people did because of the civil rights movement. Or because of the anti-war movement. I went into teaching because I love teaching. I thought it was a great, wonderful, exciting, important thing to do and a lot of people told me I was totally nuts to become a teacher given my education. Because people who go to Harvard and people who go to those places don't become teachers. To me it was a way of coming home and staying home, and doing something decent. And using my mind as well....

In a sense, the struggles that I experienced made me appalled at the schools. I didn't really expect to experience the kind of racism I did. I was also a high school activist....I was head of the student body at Bx. Science and I was also head of the New York City Inter-Geo Council, which was all the high schools in New York. (Second in charge was this guy Bob Maynard, who became the owner of the Open Tribune, the only African American to own a major newspaper in the US..)....We ran a student strike in 1954. From '51-'54 when I was at Bronx Science we came out in support of our teachers who were thrown out because of McCarthy. We closed the school down because we refused to salute the flag when they said "one nation under god."

​

We all want to change the world. And we all want to change the world in ways that are very close to each other's visions of decency. ItÕs a question of what else is in you, above and beyond the desire to change the world. I didn't want to become a teacher to change the world. I wanted to use my position as a teacher as part of my life long commitment to change the world. But I was a teacher. Still am....

I teach kids. I don't teach classrooms. Classrooms are inert, dead. They don't exist. Except in the minds or in the social structures created by people. I work with kids in my study. I work with them like one of Haven's kids this morning, I worked with one of them helping shape her exposition. I teach kids how to read. You don't need a classroom to teach.

​

On Teaching in East Harlem in 1962

 

I left it in order to change it . The [system] didn't assault me, personally....the point was that my assault on IT, didn't work well enough which is why I left the system to work with the parents at IS 201. So I worked with the parents in community control..... I crossed the picket lines in struggles over community control of the schools, which was also no light thing for me given I come from a union background. [It was] very difficult. A very morally complex decision to make.

​

Pedagogy and Social Change: The tradition of activism & education

​

I think it's a tradition that has to be rediscovered and reinvented but I think the greater service is it's a tradition that needs to be documented; well & clearly, and shared with young people so they realize they don't have to reinvent the world. See...Kids don't reinvent the world. Kids don't invent the world. Radicals don't need to reinvent the struggles. They're right there in front of you. Right in front of your eyes. I didn't invent any struggle I've ever been involved in. I had to do a lot of reconstruction when I started teaching because TU, the teachers union, was red baited out of existence and I never liked John Dewey, particularly. Always identified progressive education when I was teaching with a lot of elitist private schools. So I did a lot of unnecessary exploration....What I mean by unnecessary is .... would have done something equally as creative if I had some place to take off from too. In other words, I didn't have to discover these things for myself. But I had to because the tradition was not there for me to take advantage of.... Quite frankly I might have been able to rediscover it, but a lot of people didn't, who could have done it, had they not had to rediscover it....I'd been through a different kind of educational experience, a different kind of background, a different notion of social struggle and a different notion of what elitist education is. I mean, I learned a hell of a lot in places like Harvard and Oxford, in Paris.... But if there is a continuity in the relationship between social struggle for equity and justice and pedagogy.... And people stay away from that.... I really think that a lot of academic intellectuals quite frankly who say that they are doing it don't do that either....

Organic intellectual: that's what he (Gramsci) talks about. Not a Henry Giroux type intellectual. He's not talking about Peter McClaren. He's not talking about people who sit in universities .....If you can write in that language (and it has nothing to do with the idea) with that kind of rhetoric, you're basically saying that people aint worth shit. Unless they are getting a Ph.D. with you....
 

On the Academic Establishment

​

I'm not fluent with their writing and I don't read that shit, because all I have to do is wait another year and get a summary and figure out what they've not said, yet again. It's really what they've not said again. And they criticize me for talking too much about politics and social issues. But if I did that I couldn't teach. I wouldn't teach. I mean I wouldn't be talking about the world kids live in or the world I live in ....where we are all forced to live in. And the world we can transform. So I believe in transformative education.

​

On Writing and Teaching

​

Writing is a skill. It's very difficult. It's hard work. I wouldn't wish it on anybody frankly. When I was 12 I wanted to write and teach. That's all I've ever really wanted to do: write, teach, and be in love.
 

Lineage of social change and pedagogy that has shaped your work

​

A lot of the lineage that I got, I got through family. My uncles, my grandparents, the friends of my grandparents' friends. Remember I'm a fourth or fifth generation radical. Not a first generation radical. So my kids are sixth or seventh generation radicals. It kind of comes with the milk, or chicken soup, or the pasta....It's just there.

 

People who have influenced, whose work is part of our history, you might say: certainly Gramsci, certainly Amilcar Cabral...(who I read in the sixties, terribly moving, terribly important), Fritz Fannon. For me personally, one of my great heroes has always been John Paul Sartre and I've always drawn inspiration from his incomplete projects and from all the crazy ideas that he tries and doesn't complete....From the notion of will and responsibility ...

 

A.S. Makerenko....Very important piece of work called The Road to Life. Anton Makerenko. He ran what was called the Gorky colony, in Kiev I believe... from 1917 till 1935 or '36, named after Maxim Gorky, who was the patron of it. Who is still alive. It was a colony in which street waifs, the wildest of the gangsters, (some of whom were Jewish, some of them who weren't Jewish....A lot of people don't remember that the Jews were thugs and gangsters and prostitutes in Russia and in New York....) Makerenko took these kids in and created basically, what you would call a kids democracy; in which the young people became the governing body of school, living, community, agricultural commune...The most conceivably noneducatable kids ...The book The Road to Life is the whole story of the Gorky colony. I discovered it way after 36 Children. But if I had discovered it before it would have been logical to say that 36 Children was influenced by it.... It really influenced my practice. Not my writing but my practice. It's a very beautiful book. It's where work brigades began... and where the young pioneers were created. The whole pioneer movement. That's a seminal book. It's never been formally published in English....

 

In association with The Road to Life, the other books that have influenced me is the work of Fritz Redel. Probably the person who has written most thoroughly and creatively on discipline, behavior, aggression, fear among kids, that I've ever encountered. He has a book.... called The Aggressive Child, though I think it's a collection of two books which have been reprinted separately. One is called Controls from Within, and the other is Children Who Hate. He continues to be for Judy and me one of the great teachers in the world . He used to be at Wayne State. His archives are there.... He has an essay called The Making of a Delinquent which is a...classic. What the essay talks about is what it takes to make a delinquent: How much abuse, how much neglect, how much rejection, how much social, personal and other things it takes to turn someone into a delinquent. He used to run a place called Pioneer House in Detroit, working with kids themselves.

 

Then there is August Aichorn, who wrote a book called Wayward Youth, kind of a psychoanalytic approach to the education of wild adolescents....Then there is Homolane (A.S. Neil's teacher, who wrote a very important book called Children's Common Wealth. He's American and Canadian.... That's for me part of the tradition I come out of. Remember I come out of a street tradition; a tradition in which the pedagogy follows the struggle for social justice. It doesn't lead it. So that Deweyite ideas, okay sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. Phonics, whole language. They are instruments towards the liberation of people. They are not the liberation of people. Transformative classrooms, non transformative classrooms, critical analysis, rote learning, history, full frontal teaching, student seminars, exhibitions, standardized tests. We're talking Power. We're talking about something much bigger than all those little things that become divisive among those of us who really care about the kids.

​

Anything which oppresses children by the way...you eliminate. ANYTHING AND ANYONE. If you possibly can you just eliminate them. That's the Mafia in me coming out.

 

Paulo Freire: The things that I am talking about are in the 20's and 30's. But these are things that I have read when I was forming my ideas in the 60's and 70's. So other people are reading John Holt and I'm reading the people I told you. As well as Paulo...although less influenced by him. He was more of a confirmation than an influence....An encouragement. If there was one thing Paulo contributed to my work it was putting it on a larger scale of social revolution. And that I loved. That's why I loved him so much. Always did. These things were big. These weren't kids he was talking about. These were adults. He's talking about adults taking control of their lives and their world and society and that was always very helpful to me. I read Pedagogy of the Oppressed maybe 5 times. And have taught it at least three times most recently this last, page by page by page in which I ended up with all my American educators saying they can't use the book. Of course they can't use the book. He's talking about revolution. He's not talking about reforming schools. Not a damn thing in Paulo about reforming schools. He's not a reformist. Not a damn thing in his thinking that says if you change a classroom you change shit.... That is not what Pedagogy of the Oppressed says. Basically he says "change the world, take a risk, risk your life, be filled with love and understand why you are doing this very dangerous thing ....He's always been very inspirational because that's the level of Paulo's inspiration. Not pedagogical. The pedagogy there, is basically very simple... very basic. It's the social conception of education as part of an ongoing struggle that's important . That's why Cabral is so important to him, that's why Fannon is so important to him, that's why Sartre, was important to him....

 

You asked me about Dennison. George Dennison's book is absolutely beautiful. It's absolutely, as both a work of art and a piece of educational writing, it's exceptional. It's extraordinarily moving and wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful. It's not so much a model as a very important kind of....It's like a sunny day in your life, you know ? That you keep in your mind. You don't have to model anything about it but you keep it in your mind. It's very important. It's affected me only because it's beautiful; the way beauty affects you. You know you say what does a beautiful painting do to you ? Well it's the same way with that book. And George is such an incredibly good writer. Much better than me. Much more highly crafted, much more highly nuanced . He's a novelist. He's really extraordinary.

​

Paul Goodman is someone who I have been coming to terms with for about 20 years. I like his work. I read it in bits and pieces. I think, and this has a lot to do with the whole question of what is the role of central control versus the role of independent community based things.... and what do you do with the devastated community when there are no resources to build the kinds of things Goodman says you can build. What do you do with demoralization and cultural struggles? So that there is so much missing from what he talks about, that a lot of my first takes on him were to reject a lot of the positive things that are there. The notions of building and healing; the notion of communitas....are very very beautiful. And I think I am taking them more seriously now than I ever have. In fact, I have all of his books because over the years I collected them all. Read them. Rejected most of it. Then kind of come back to it. He won't leave me alone. You know what I mean. So I'm not sure I know what I think about Paul Goodman except that I know that he's on the table now. He's not on the shelf. He's really on the table which is really interesting for me....

​

John Holt....John doesn't believe in teaching so he and I don't get along too well. I believe in teaching. I really do.

The goal of teaching isn't yourself. It's the kids. The goal of being with kids and the goal of making social change isn't you. It isn't because you're upset. It's because they [the kids] live terrible lives. And there's no reason that they should. So it's not a matter of self reference. Change is not a question of self reference. Change has to do with someone else. It doesn't have to do with you. That's the difference between some of the people who came up during the 60's or who came from upper middle class and were involved with change and other people who do what they have to do.

 

My grandfather wasn't doing what he had to do for himself. He had a hernia and he was crazy. He'd been beaten up more times than he did it. He wasn't doing it so his ego could be involved, or he could assuage his guilt, to make himself feel better at night. He did it because he had to do it. Because it was everybody. His grandchildren, [his lonsmen], his friends and all...and we don't believe in that.

 

In fact I think the whole construction of psychology in a bourgeois society is to make people believe that that kind of disinterested action doesn't happen. That it can't be. That there always has to some kind of base motive underlying every decent motive. Or there has to be some kind of ego involvement....People who are involved with social change struggle with their ego and that's why many drop out. But that's not why you're there. You ain't there for yourself. You're not teaching kids to read so you can learn how to read. You're not teaching them to read so that you can go home and tell somebody " see I taught these kids to read." You're teaching them to read so that they can read. [So ]that they can go out and do something with it maybe....You're also teaching them to think. Then you get the other consequences, if you're doing that then you gotta say that you are teaching them some very revolutionary stuff like: "I can live a wonderful life but something is preventing me from living a wonderful life and it's not me. It's not my mom, my dad. It's not my lack of a mom or lack of a dad. It's not my poverty. It's the people who are causing this shit. " At this point I would say: give them everything. Why not ? Right now I think: give everybody everything.

 

Lilian Weber: Lilian was very effective. Lilian's work in the open corridor schools and her teacher education work was superb. You have people, who I respect, who swear by her. Her concrete, specific everyday work and the work of the Workshop Center which has been very, very good.

 

The other people who influenced my thinking and who I think other educators should read is Jules Henry and Edgar Freidenberg. Their work has been very important to me. Jules Henry in particular. His essay "On Sham and Vulnerability", and his book on "Stupidity and Education," his essays on stupidity as learned behavior, how schools teach people to be stupid. Jules Henry is very important and with Freidenberg, particularly an essay he wrote called "Ceremonies of Humiliation in High School" and of course Coming of Age in America which was his major work.

 

And Vygotsky....I am very anti-Piagetan and have taught Vygotsky and have gotten most of my students, whenever I can, to read Vygotsky.
 

Audience

​

A lot of people have been very jealous of me in the academic world, in the education world. Primarily because I've never been in the academic world....Never spent more than a semester at a time at a University. I haven't done it for 10 years now. In my 35 years or so of teaching, university teaching would represent maybe a year and a half. Maybe 2 years. I never wrote a book for an education publisher. My books are all in the trade, quite deliberately. They are written for people. They're not written for educators. They're written for educators if they want to read them, fine. But they're written for people. Like 36 Children is written for the parents of the kids and anyone else who cares about kids....Reading: How To says there are no reading problems: there are only problem schools and problem teachers. And it also says: that anyone who can read this book can teach kids to read as well as any professional. So I'm not too well liked in the Academy. But I still believe those things....

​

A lot of academic based progressives have been angry at me because I have an audience. And they don't. Their audience is themselves. And I keep on saying to people like that "Write something popular! Think about your audience. I write for my Aunt Addie who lives up in CO-Op city....I literally keep my Aunt Addie in mind. I write for her. She reads my books, she lives in CO Op city, she dropped out of Julia Richmond in order to go to work.... So if she can read the book, I'm happy. I don't give a shit whether they read it. Cause they're not gonna change the schools, if they were, they'd be doin it already. They wouldn't be 20 years at a University doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

​

Community Control/Unions

​

Remember also, in terms of New York, I crossed the picket line and stayed with the community during the community control of school struggles. So my friends have tended to be people of color who were from community based organizations, who were involved in community struggle. And I became the enemy of the teachers. Consciously. Willingly. And I'd do it again . I 'd do it tomorrow. I mean racism is more important than union loyalty. And I'm from a union family.....And so to this very day there exists in New York city schools a deep divide between teachers that crossed the picket line and teachers who didn't. Between people who went with the community, and people who went in against them, who picketed, who went with the union as opposed to the community.

​

Al Shanker : a racist bastard. pure and simple....totally betraying the kids the parents and defending the teachers whatever they do.

​

Teaching is not like being a carpenter. You have a different kind of material. If you fudge a little bit, as a carpenter, it's okay. On the other hand...if he couldn't put in a two by four at a right angle, he'd be fired. Union or not. The union wouldn't even protect him. With teachers, you can look at the kids and they're all twisted at every which angle except the right ones, the appropriate ones, and the teachers still go on. That doesn't mean that teachers shouldn't be unionized. I think they should but the unions have to be the equivalent of social justice unions. The have to have some deep responsibility and should be able to deal with incompetence. If they can't do their job, they should quit. If I ask you to build a sky scraper and you don't know how to make the fuckin' building stand up you're going to kill a lot of people. You just can't come to me and tell me I know how to erect steel if you don't know how to weld. I'm sorry. That's what we got in the schools. People who can't do the work protecting their jobs. We have an organization that's become the enemy of the people....very often. Not always but very often. It's the enemy of itself eventually. That's what's happening. That's what the voucher movements is all about, that's what the charter school movement is all about, that's what all of the movements that are making lateral shifts within public education: School choice within the public schools, the hiring and alternative routes to teacher credentialing....See I think that teachers should have unionized jobs with good salaries and fine benefits if they do their jobs. And if you don't do your job than you find another job. That's good practical sense. But we're not in a good practical world. We don't live in a good practical world. We live here.

​

Teachers as life long learners, as critical practitioners

​

"We must become students again and learn to teach in new ways and new perspectives that we thought we knew. As hard as it is to relearn what we thought we knew there is no other responsible choice". 36 Children (1967)

​

For example, I really had to in Berkeley learn about and understand the deep sexism within the curriculum and within my own teaching from women while I was teaching there. All it meant was not for me to resist it but for me to say what am I doing that doesn't make sense ? That, in effect contradicts my inner values ? And contradicts what I am doing. I learned a great deal in... my struggle to understand what afrocentric curriculum meant . What it means to have a diverse curriculum. I mean 36 Children is a eurocentric book. It's all about Greek mythology and shit.... I've had to reconsider a lot of those things. So what it means, in effect, keeping the central vision that all children are wonderful and anyone can learn, that you may be going about it the wrong way. And therefore you have to constantly reexamine how you act. And you have to listen to people who may be criticizing something that is very dear and precious to you. Something you love. Something you thought was right. Something that even on the surface may seem to have been working. In order to understand that you were doing damage you didn't know you were doing, or you may not have been doing adequate benefit to the kids. For example, the year after I was teaching, after I wrote 36 Children,... two African American guys there, said basically: "Yea but you're damaging the kids because you're taking them away from their identity." I said "it's world wide and universal." They said "you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. " See I don't run away from those things. And we argued and argued and argued until I realized they were right and I was wrong. I didn't just automatically say it. I had to come to the conviction that it was right. And I had to test it with the kids and see and found that the kids themselves spontaneously were saying "OH Yea, this is US here! It's better to see us than to always see you. "
 

Can you teach that disposition that is mindful, passionate and open to self examination? What role does teacher education play in promoting that kind of world view ?

​

I think good leadership can do that. Another words, probably a lot of people who don't want to change it's because of inner disposition, but as many, it's because they are afraid of the sanctions against changing; of what will happen to them on the part of people who judge them, supervise them, who control their lives, who manufacture their text books...who do all those things, will do to them. And so, what the balance is and how far you can push it, I don't know. But I've seen really good principals .....

​

Teacher training is really a lot harder. You really can't do much in teacher training in the sense that these people don't have their own classes. For me a teacher education program should have six months of teacher training, six months of teaching , with teacher training , and then six months of follow up. In other words, that the real year, after 6 months at a teacher education institution, the next year they should be fully employed as beginning teachers with full support. That's when they can ask the right questions. Cause they have questions to ask. They don't have those questions before. I would say that redesigned that way, the answer is yes. You can teach that disposition. Redesigned that way, here these people are coming with real dilemmas that represent larger issues. So those dilemmas are there . They're the same ones that you would teach. But if you teach them 6 months before they get the classroom, or they're already in the classroom and it's too busy-- they got the schools coming down on their heads, they got their supervisors and they're ashamed of the fact that they aren't succeeding the first year because of how difficult it is. They don't want everybody to know that they've got problems and now all of a sudden they're supposed to be a professional but they're really not....I've been saying this for a number of years now...if the program extends, nobody has taken me up on it. They say it's too complicated. Seems to me necessary. It seems to me that if you're going to do a real teacher education program there are certain things you don't do and certain things, you do. One you don't do is you never place a student with a teacher you think is bad practice. At the cost of reducing the number of students you educate if you like, or at the cost of creating your own school... you just don't. (I ran a teacher education program that was enormously successful in Berkeley in the seventies. We credentialed 15 people a year for 3 years. We only placed people with what we considered to be master teachers.....I was teaching kindergarten-first grade full time as well as being one of the master teachers myself. That gave me a certain kind of credibility in the program. But it was great fun. At night I would teach literacy... and Freire....)

​

The second is, that ideally, you insist that your program continues into the first year of employment. Because that's when it really, really makes sense. And then you mix first year teachers with your incoming students. Because also what you're building then is a place, as your students become employed for other students who you're training to do their student teaching...so that you're building a community...you are building a community of educators . You're building a pedagogical community and you're identifying what you consider to be good practice.

​

The Dissolution of Community/Urban Removal/The Lives of Children

​

If you go up to that school, [where Thirty-Six Children was set] what you see are burned out buildings and empty lots.... I went to visit Pam's mother (a student from 36 Children) the other day and she was the last one who was living there. Her building isn't there anymore. Urban removal: the community has been removed. Every single building that all my kids lived in has either been boarded up, burned out, or removed. So in terms of that community, it's been destroyed, totally, unambiguously and forever....The school is still there, sitting in lot and Cooper Junior High School across the street is now a church or something.....So when you ask me about change I think it's worse for the kids. If anything, the kids had better lives then. More hope then. That's why it's more important for us to project more hope and struggle harder because we are at a time where the cynicism is much greater and the consciousness, the awareness of other people's pain in so overt and so clear and the tolerance for it is so current....almost mocking. No. Things have not improved at all.

 

Like I said there are many more things in the schools, many more people in community based organizations and other places making struggle, which itself is wonderful. But there's no national sentiment to do it. There's no national movement to fundamentally eliminate the indecency that comes from the top: from the President, the congress, the corporations, it comes from everywhere. It's vulgar. And evil. Other people can deal with the vulgarity I want to deal with the evil nature of it. It's really truly evil. I never would have believed in evil as much as I do now...These are people of real bad intent who do not care about whether other people live or die.....We're in a very paradoxical situation. The paradox being many many people engaged in lots of local struggles in a much more isolated context than before. So that yes, more wonderful things are happening now than I have ever seen but with less organization and with less overall sense of the society moving with the momentum of all this decent work....So it's a real paradox....

 

And I'm not the only one who says this. Anyone involved in doing caring work and is involved in social change and social transformation, whatever you want to call it, feels the same way. People in housing, people in health, people in the prisons, people who work with community based economic development....feel the same thing. But there are clearly many many people doing things. But it's struggling against a lack of momentum on a larger scale that would give us the resources to make a fundamental difference. I don't know what it will be like in ten years. I'm curious. I hope to stick around for another 20 or 30, I think.....

 

There are a lot of struggles ahead. The key thing is to keep these struggles going on a local basis, nurture; connect them. And somehow (and I honestly can't tell you how to do it) take over enough of the media so that we have a voice. That's why I continue to write. That's why it's so important for my books to be in the trade as opposed to the education world. So that there is a voice that is coming out, reaching people as if to say "No it doesn't have to be the way it is. It's not all the bell curve. And it's not all the end of racism. And it's not all what comes out of the far right. Or this subsidized fascism.....It's not all this basically anti democratic sentiment wrapped up as democracy. I just really wish, that a lot of people in education would 'talk to people.'

​

You know when Paulo died, there was no obituary or anything like that......Nobody else was doing anything. They were arranging academic celebrations and papers.... These people don't reach out beyond the world they live in. And I think the most important thing we can do now, is to speak plain talk. And reach the ordinary people. Not put anybody down. Just imagine me giving my Aunt Addie a copy of Henry Giroux or Antonio Darda or any of these people. Where as my Aunt Addie is a ward organizer in CO-Op City. And her mother was one of Peter Mark Antonio's ward bosses.

​

People who know how to mobilize people, they know how to talk to people. Dave Spencer--he knows how to talk to people. He can't read that shit. I can't read it either. One of the most important things right now for people who are doing things in education can do, is to focus on becoming part of the popular conversation even if it's a minority part. So that the conversation changes.... That is to say, people have a voice. Ordinary people who care about their own ordinary lives. You see radicalism is ordinary, if you're hungry, or if your kid's getting a bad education. It should be the things you ordinarily would want. ItÕs not a radical thing. It's a sensible thing. " I just want my kid to be okay." And so when you ask me about all of those education things... that's why Dennison's book is so lovely, that's why "How to Survive in Your Native Land" is so beautiful....Yea, he and I almost ran a school together.

​

Camus

​

I ended up just like at IS 201, I ended up so repelled by Camus' position on Algeria, that I couldn't deal with him anymore. I ended up rereading his work and found such deep racism... it just didn't seem appropriate.

​

Gramsci

​

Now I'm writing a big thing on Gramsci now. It's either going to be a play or something to do with The Prison Notebooks. You know about his letters. They're wonderful. I read the letters from page one to page a thousand. I read every single letter....Now there is a new edition of his Notebooks. I'm on page 300. I am reading The Prison Notebooks from page one all the way through. I think [the work] it's going to be about the prisons we live in. See maybe it might be dedicated to Gramsci and you may never hear Gramsci's name in it at all....

​

The Organic Intellectual

​

Shall I say what I believe an organic intellectual is : Gramsci used the term organic intellectual very consciously to oppose it very consciously to intellectuals who use their minds in the service of the system. He meant in particular to Mussolini .... who was his jailer, literally, personally his personal jailer. I came across the quote: "We have to keep this mind out of commission for at least 20 years," wrote Mussolini about Gramsci. What he was talking about were a lot of bourgeoisie intellectuals... Everyone who is an intellectual on one level has gone to college and become part bourgeois, but either is or doesn't have working class origins or....You know we have class origins and there is fluidity....

​

The question is : for--- with-- and --how -- you use your mind as work. An intellectual is a mind worker. So the question is, if you are an intellectual in the traditional sense, and that means academically, you use your mind at the university.... If you are from the working class, get your degree, and then on some level come back to work in a working class context with your mind, you are organically tied to the class from which you came and to which you have family loyalties and blood loyalties. So an organic intellectual is someone who is organically involved in the struggles.....Because they are not the other people's struggle. They're their struggles too. So that for example when I'm doing a lot of my work it's not that it's just me struggling for someone else. This is where I come from, where I never left. Though I left. I left to become an intellectual but I went home. And that's what he means by organic.

​

It's very different from theorizing someone else's life. What that also means though, and which is why I've never written a theoretical book on education deliberately, is that you are always in dialogue with those people who you serve and who you work with. You're not theorizing for anybody.