Kozol, Straw Spaceships and Romanticism

Note: from now on, when a post is about an article my class is reading I'll try to start the post with the citation of the article. To save mental energy I'm going to copy and paste directly from the syllabus instead of re-locating the article, so I do apologize if the citation isn't perfect.

Kozol, J. (2005). Confections of Apartheid: A Stick and Carrot Pedagogy for the Children of Our Inner City Poor. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(4).

I didn't really like this article. Rephrase: I really didn't like this article. Sure, the schools in question were mechanistic and seemed very devoid of soul. I thought during his descriptions of the efficiency/authoritarianism measures taking place in many urban schools that I now know what it might be like to go to school in the Death Star. Clearly not desirable.

Still, I think that Kozol is comparing those schools to a very unclear, very idealized vision of suburban school that feels almost mushy in its romanticism. For example, one of the pullquotes in the article rhetorically asks "How much injury to state-determined 'purpose' would it do to let a group of children have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it's something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools across most of America?" Go ahead, sympathetically shake your head at the absurdity of disallowing pumpkin parties, you know you want to. I felt tempted, but seriously. This one quote is so rich with troubles I honestly wonder why it made pullquote status. Let's enumerate:

1. Straw person fallacy: actually, the teacher in question had a party, she just had to try to justify its educational value. Me, I probably would have tried to use the pumpkin to talk about the historical origins of Halloween and the agricultural significance of foods like pumpkins, maybe the differences between Halloween in cities vs. towns. What Kozol doesn't say is that the kids in this class didn't enjoy the "multimodal pumpkin unit" the teacher thought up for them; if I had to guess, it was still fun. I would have been more sympathetic if he'd actually tried to justify the argument that fun for its own sake promotes good education somehow. Instead we get to tsk, tsk at an imaginary possibility: what if (gasp) the pumpkin party had never happened at all?
   


2. Bandwagon fallacy: this one's really easy. Yessir, everyone sure does have pumpkin parties in America. Why, just last week I listened to the national radio address condemning all Americans who didn't dance around gourds as unpatriotic. Plus, TE 250 anyone? How is pumpkin worship culturally relevant to these kids, or even "urban?" Maybe that quality of non-germaneness is what makes it educational, but if that's true what's this fuss about fun for fun's sake?
   


3. Sweeping generalization fallacy: to get at this I do need to quote a related phrase. "In some districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of elementary schools have been overtaken..." I would be curious to see the research (or theory, if we are to disdain the "determined emphasis upon empirical precision") that suggests just how pleasant and especially old-fashioned the pumpkin party is.
   

Here's another example that demonstrates the kind of empty contrast I'm having problems with. Kozol describes at length how in mechanized urban schools the bulletin boards are rigidly controlled and only describe perfect work, unlike "the lovingly assembled postings of the work of children that most grownups who attended school in decades past are likely to recall." Well I'm glad that in the good ole' days bulletin boards were assembled with love; did that make them good for kids?

Look, I don't disagree that if urban schools operate the way Kozol describes them that they have lots of problems. Kids regularly and uncritically referring to each other as "Level Fours" is horrifying evidence of depersonalization. Circular-logic methodology appears to be woven into the program such that the system becomes its own undefeatable champion. But indulge me if you will when I suggest the big-picture fallacy Kozol has up his sleeve, that if urban schools are bad then everything that suburban schools do that urban schools don't do must be good.