This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: I’m not sure which is making my own skin crawl more, the unveiled racist talk of white parents afraid of what weapon-wielding and drug-transporting black kids will do to property values, or the creepy pity expressed by white parents who say they want to wrap their arms around poor black children who have to get on buses before daylight to get themselves a decent education. Ugh.
Then again, there’s this: a few words recently spoken by Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP: h
“If the districts [Normandy and Riverview Gardens] cannot find a way to properly educate their children, they might as well put a gun to their head [sic] and kill them.”
I know Mr. Pruitt knows that this is an extremely dramatic thing to say and is using hyperbole to express a sense of urgency. He is saying that this thing we call “a good education” is so vital to existence, so necessary to the future of all children, that without it, children will have no life at all and might as well be dead. Mr. Pruitt is saying that “they” – the unaccredited districts’ faculty and staff – might as well shoot children dead right here and now.
This figure of speech might remind some folks of doomed Jewish mothers feeding cyanide pills to their children before boarding trains to the death camps. Why live another few hours, the logic goes, if you’re only going to be herded into an air-tight tiled room for a “shower” and gassed? The merciful thing to do is call it quits.
Talking about taking a gun to the heads of children and shooting them dead does something else, too, though: It tacitly compares teachers, coaches and administrators to people who shoot other people in acts of violence. Either way, Mr. Pruitt is saying, either for lack of educational opportunities or on account of vengeance, you’re cutting other people off from the rest of their lives. What’s the difference?
I understand the message, and I share Mr. Pruitt’s sense of urgency. But I also insist that the analogy is not apt: The adults serving Normandy School District — teachers, administrators and building support staff collectively working alongside parents, university allies and community partners, not to mention the students themselves — will be living and breathing the transformation of this district. Mr. Pruitt’s dreadful metaphor does not serve anyone at this moment.
The school transfer statute is a consequence of racial politics, geography, economic struggle and complex histories of housing, zoning, bank lending, highway construction, and tax policy in metropolitan St. Louis. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to be meaningfully informed in these conversations — whether at the dinner table or in the fray of the public arena--to read Colin Gordon’s book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City.
For our immediate purpose, however, we need to get straight what we mean by “a good education.” Nobody in his right mind would argue that teachers get into teaching to deliver a bad education. But what do we mean by good? Is singlemindedly chasing benchmarks and standards good? Is that what children in the highest achieving public districts and most elite independent schools do? Don’t we want critical thinkers and problem-solvers who love to learn? Isn’t that what’s good? Aren’t there better ways to strive for statewide excellence than draining communities of people, power, and material resources?
A good education for the children of Normandy, Riverview Gardens, and Kansas City will require us to challenge the hopeless cycle of carrot-and-stick behaviorism and so-called reformist experimentation – in other words, a system that says “adapt to the dominant, market-modeled business of schooling or there will be blood” -- that’s been running the show for too long.
Maybe, in an effort to counter the horribly demoralizing messages out in the public on all sides, the analogy ought to be something like this: our unaccredited districts are like a person undergoing stem cell treatment. Just about every single cell the body can spare has been destroyed, diseased ones and healthy ones alike. The body’s got hardly any resources left except for brand new stem cells — harvested from bone, fat, or blood — who are game to do or be just about anything. The stem cells want in. They want to make new tissue and they want to make it now. They possess the power of self-renewal, which means they can make more of themselves in an undifferentiated state. They also have potency, which means they can evolve into a new kind of cell that can be or do something quite specific.
Those of us about to start the year in Normandy and Riverview Gardens need to be stem cells. As life-sustaining stem cells, we need to remember that getting the better of this situation will mean being ready and able to help each other, learn from each other, do what we know is right, and try our best to say and do things we might never have done or said before.
Education is not given to people, doled out like wrapped packages from the mall. Education is made new every morning, and has got to be alive to be good.
Schaenen writes and teaches in St. Louis. She will be an instructional coach in Normandy School District.