'Urban' Schools and Other Euphemisms
Deborah Meier continues her conversation with Mike Klonsky today.
Dear Mike,
Americans (maybe all "high" civilizations) have a special kind of romance with rural life. They look down upon while also "admiring" what are seen as stoic, hard-working (if ignorant, even stupid) ways of life. Maybe the object of humor, but not hate.
Simple. Versus the city life—with its illicit, suspicious sophistication and its lazy, criminal poor. The latter the haven of unwanted diversity. Democratic life was imperiled, it was "argued," by city corruption. My friend, Ann Cook, once did a high school class comparing children's literature re. rural and urban life which carried this implicit message. (I must get hold of her bibliography sometime.)
So it is that our caricatures of bad education are generally urban. The 1955 film, Black Board Jungle, billed as a gritty film about inner-city students, was mostly about white, urban, working-class kids. It might make good re-viewing to see the similarities and differences between a class versus race view of public schooling's "recent" history.
Even the "urban" has switched its meaning. When the 1955 film appeared, it was a word for low-income city kids. It's now a euphemism for the "African American," "Latino" poor. The book The Power of Their Ideas starts with me asking kids what it meant to refer to as "inner city" in preparation for a visit to a largely white college. They got it when I added that Dalton (a rich white school 20 blocks further "into" the city) was not considered inner city. It was a euphemism for another euphemism—ghetto.
They got it, and it made them angry, just as they were when the Brown University campus'Urban' Schools and Other Euphemisms - Bridging Differences - Education Week: