ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS: Children in the Years of Hope
By Jonathan Kozol
Crown, 388 pages, $25
American education is once more in urgent need of a conscience, and Jonathan Kozol has again taken up the challenge. In “Ordinary Resurrections,” Kozol returns to the South Bronx and to the themes that have animated his work for more than 30 years: the death of hope at an early age for too many American youngsters, the cramped choices and strangled life chances for the children of the poor, the “savage inequalities” embodied in social and political decisions allowing the best schools in the world to stand side-by-side with some of the worst. Kozol writes to open our eyes to these injustices, to stir us from apathy, to encourage our own political responses perhaps. But mostly Jonathan Kozol writes with a passion to save our souls, and perhaps even our lives.
We all know by now that the state of childhood is not a uniformly happy place, and many of us know the parameters by heart: 22 percent of American children awake every day in poverty, and black children are three times more likely than white children to be poor; children are the poorest Americans by far, and 11 million of them have no health insurance. Kozol adds the grim particulars from the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, racially isolated and achingly poor, where 75 percent of the residents are unemployed, large numbers of area men are imprisoned upstate, and an epidemic of asthma as well as pediatric and maternal AIDS ravages the people. On and on, the hard facts stand in damning contrast to America’s vaunted child-centeredness.
“We love our children,” observed the legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn in a piece for the Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1967. “We are famous for loving our children, and many foreigners believe we love them unwisely and too well.” Gellhorn details our conspicuous tirelessness as we plan and work and dream for our children, “determined to give them the best of life.” And, she wonders, perhaps it is just that tireless determination, that focused effort on behalf of our children that constricts our capacity to imagine the lives “of children 10,000 miles away, or to understand that (other) people, who do not look or live like us, love their children just as deeply, but with anguish now and heartbreak and fear.”
She is writing, of course, about the children of Vietnam at the time of the American war, but her words resonate as contemporary and pressing. We love our children famously. But our celebrated love of children can slip rather easily into a narrow narcissism, and turn, then, into something like indifference. What of other people’s children? What of children far away or across the tracks? What of the children, for example, of Mott Haven?
Kozol’s anger emerges from a particularly hopeful place here, an intimate encounter with the daily lives of a few young children and the adults who teach and care for them. His focus is grounded in the specific and the concrete: Elio’s easy kindness and his reflections on love and loss, Lucia and Stephanie’s beguiling conversations about the heart of God, Ariel’s straightforward compassion, Isaiah’s playfulness. Again and again Kozol invites us into the inventive and magical thinking of children, their ordinary wisdom and their dazzling complexity.
Childhood, Kozol reminds us, is a time of invention and discovery and surprise, but mostly, childhood is a time of hope. It is a time for the adults in children’s lives to dream extravagantly for them, a time for all of us to decide whether our hopes for the future include an investment in the young, and our hopes for the young include a robust invitation into the world. All children ought to be supported as they occupy that space of hope, Kozol argues, they ought to be allowed to delight in simply being alive as they go forward and stretch themselves into life buoyed by a sense of being unconditionally welcomed. In our rapidly moving world where doors open automatically before us and moving stairways sweep us from floor to floor, where information floods into our homes and offices at warp speed, Kozol reminds us that the growth of a child is slow, and that those of us who work with children must become “specialists in opening small packages,” practitioners of the “discipline of hope.”
Because we live divided and highly specialized lives in segregated or shattered communities, few of us who can afford a $25 book like this one have any sustained or intimate knowledge of the lives of America’s poor: We don’t typically visit socially or develop deep friendships across class lines, and so our easy beliefs and our received attitudes are shrouded in myth, informed mainly by our prejudices, shaped by an official language both distancing and obscure. “Ordinary Resurrections” invites us to take a closer look. In Elio’s living room playing space traveler, I begin to wonder why we study poverty and never wealth. Is the problem the poor, after all, or the rich? This book encourages that kind of subversive thinking, for although it is not Kozol’s most political book, politics are near the surface and inescapable.
The steady retreat from support for education in America is accompanied by a discourse unimaginable a generation ago: Schools, like any other market, must become profit-driven; if no one wants a kid, he’s expendable. Kozol holds up a different standard: Every child is a multidimensional human being, a person with a heart, a mind and a soul, with hopes, dreams, aspirations and capacities that must be embraced if productive growth and learning is to take hold. This is the intellectual and ethical heart of our work with children, a standard to rally around and extend. This is another of Kozol’s ordinary resurrections.
Kozol’s critics and detractors will undoubtedly raise the familiar chorus: Kozol is an unreconstructed liberal, an anachronism, a romantic sap. The cynics will say his outrage is entirely quaint. What about the bottom line? What about the market? He is, it’s true, easy to dismiss; his passion seems to be visiting from another planet. He simply refuses to wise up, to get in tune with the times, to become indifferent to human misery. And so he is as shocked as an innocent when he encounters unearned suffering or undeserved pain, and he sees these as pernicious challenges to the democratic project in America.
He asks us to open our eyes to a world in desperate need of repair, and he startles us into new awarenesses, challenging us to overcome our mutual indifference, to rise up and act on what the known demands.
