Volume 10, Number 2 · February 1, 1968
The School Mess
By Florence Howe, Paul Lauter
Toward Creating a Model School System: A Study of the Washington, D.C. Public Schools
by A. Harry Passow. and Others
Teachers College, Columbia, 593 pp., $5.00
A white school administrator in the District of Columbia unwittingly provided a clue to the pathology of urban education. She was talking frankly about the 'two language' problem of a school population that is 91 percent Negro. Yes, she agreed, Negro children speak a dialect whose consistency we ought, in some measure, to respect. 'But then,' she said, warming to her subject, 'there is the problem of getting jobs. For example, take the young man who goes to the store for a job. A lady comes out of the store with a package, and he goes up to her and says, 'Lady, kin ah kerryer packsh furya?' Well, she isn't quite sure what he has said, and his tone has put her off as well, and so she says, 'No, thank you.' And the boy doesn't get the job.' The sight of black children educated to haul packages for ladies is a common and haunting one: you see them at Washington's supermarkets any day in the week. Nothing so shapes the education these children are given as the ideas people hold about the purposes of that education.
Review, 5135 words
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