1. Childhood Development
Children are wild flowers. Teachers think them weeds and root them up to civilize them (pg. 39)
This book focuses heavily on the differences Black and brown children who receive education and experience childhood based solely on their economic status. This quote emphasizes O'Gorman's ideological thinking of children as innocent vessels who are shaped by external forces. Teachers then, in the critical sense, can be negative forces on children and their development. If teachers constantly punish, dismiss, and arouse fear, anger, or passiveness within their students, they are not harnessing the potential of these children. Instead, they are creating in them pessimistic views of the world around them: teachers are children's eyes into the world unseen by them since they are always deemed not ready to experience it themselves.
I had taken T. to the country. He was four.
In the middle of the night he climbed into my bed and woke me.
Hear dem monsters. They is getting ready to cut me.
Hear dem. Dey is licking their lips.T. burrowed into me and pulled the covers over his head.
I listened. Children always hear what they say they hear and see what they say they see.
And then I knew what T. heard.Crickets. (pg. 89)
O'Gorman throughout the book focuses on the individuality of each student being highlighted. O'Gorman's goal for the storefront was to become a "place where the senses were freed from the fate of the streets", (pg. 16), which is why he made sure the children had access to things like books and instruments, as well as access to experiences like going to museums and beaches. O'Gorman states that the streets of Harlem to children are the only world that they know. The "white world, hover[s] like a lead mist over everything; creating devils and fantasies of dreadful power" (pg. 89). The restrictions of place plus the inadequacies of teachers who refuse to help broaden children's worldview create fear in the child that can be difficult, if not impossible to grow out of. By bringing T. to a new environment to experience something new, the difficulty to shed that fear lessens, especially because to T., O'Gorman was a safe enough space to run to and seek comfort from.
2. Intersectionality
Children impose discipline on themselves. All they want to know is what they can do; most of the time they are told what they cannot do. I told a psychiatrist, hired by Headstart to solve problems teachers and parents had among themselves and with the children, "the problem most of the time is the teacher's problem with the interior life of the children. They are scared of it. The teacher is the un-disciplined one - not the child. An 'un-disciplined' child is the creature of a teacher who forces children into a regimented day to save 'teacher's' nerves. It is no wonder a child rebels (pg. 64).
Age is an identity that constantly goes undiscussed. Children are innocent actors in the corrupted systems in which we, as adults, dutifully operate within. O'Gorman believes that children need to be allowed space, not restriction. Children are often seen as extensions of the 'teacher', or, more refined, any guardian. As O'Gorman says, the un-disciplined child is a creature created by the teacher's anxieties. The idea of a child existing outside of the guardian's control is always seen as a positive, yet when the negatives of discipline begin to show face, it is the child that is blamed as being "rebellious" or "misbehaved". And in some cases, if race and socioeconomic status begin to intersect with these notions, the blame can be seen as inherent and unavoidable (i.e the existence of school-to-prison pipeline, police presence on campuses, etc._
Lesson in observation. Children in Tunisia. [The children in the school] were one thing: docile and mannerly. Their docility didn't seem to interfere with the freedom and gaiety of the classroom. I admired that school though I knew that such tranquility would be denied our children as long as one had to struggle so to keep their bodies and their spirits alive (We feed our children an enormous breakfast and lunch and see to all their medical trouble. We've an eye doctor, a brain surgeon, a plastic surgeon, and an orthopedist ready to do what we need done). But I love to see our wild ones when they step aside from the eruptions in the world outside and from the eruptions within and sit still, quietly dreaming, content, smiling (pg. 66).
O'Gorman points out that a child's hierarchy of needs is directly related to how 'well' they behave or, in better terms, how relaxed they will feel in an academic space. Comparing the Harlem schools and their students to a school in Tunisia, a country in North Africa, O'Gorman finds that in America, there is a constant need for students to be taken care of. Sometimes, it can seem as it is too much, like we as a collective society are trying not to let our children ever get dirty. But in Tunisia, students were "docile and mannerly" without losing their childlike wonderment. They were still wild and silly like children universally are, but without it interrupting their studies. This is not something that is prioritized in American schools, but obviously could be through structures like what was happening at the storefront.
STUDYING INNER-CITY SOCIAL DISLOCATIONS: THE CHALLENGE OF PUBLIC AGENDA RESEARCH - William Julius Wilson (1991)
This framework connects the structural and cultural aspects of poverty (intersection) instead of looking at the issue of poverty as an either/or issue. Here, Wilson determines that "not only has the number of ghetto poor increased, but the severity of economic deprivation among the ghetto poor has risen as well" (pg. 3). Wilson further talks about the external factors that impact these communities, like "geographic, industrial, and other shifts in the economy on poor urban black" (pg. 8).
This framework connects to the notion that O'Gorman mentions at the beginning of his book, where he compares his childhood to that of the Black children he met through this construction of the storefront classroom space. He claims that his own upbringing, filled with adventure and other experiences that O'Gorman deems happy, was "all a matter of choice" (pg. 3). And, because of that, demonizing children or expecting them to grow outside of their surroundings without any other resources provided than the limited resources that are already there, does nothing. O'Gorman states beautifully, "If a man or a society taints a child's childhood, brutalizes it, strikes it down, and corrupts it with fear and bad dreams, then he remains that child forever, and the judgment on that man and that society will be terrible and eternal" (pg. 4) to further denounce the notion that a child is responsible for their upbringing when in reality, their upbringing is fully dependent on their surroundings.
OF OUR SPIRITUAL STRIVINGS - W.E.B DuBois
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
This poem by DuBois reminds me of one of the children O'Gorman engaged with named Dundy. This little Black boy would recite original poetry to O'Gorman, who would write it down word for word, "in all its wild, black grammar. Everything askew" (pg. 28).
Dundy's Poem reads:
I saw a woods,
a lake a deer and a buffalo.
I look the deer in the eyes and then said good-bye.There's a tree
A special kind of tree.It reminds me of my father.
Now my drea is almost over.
Good-bye dream.
Both poems play on pastoral imagery and include the idea of rest, sleep, and dreaming as desirable achievements. DuBois craves rest, craves a kind of relaxation of the body and/or soul, but knows that it will never come. Dundy then, is the inverse of this, and perhaps it is because he is a child that his innocence, though it is challenged through his own traumatic experiences that he is aware of (i.e a man being murdered in front of his home and Dundy making a comment on it seemingly out of the blue through a fantastically-motivated conversation about his father). Dundy's dream, full of trees, wild animals, and other nature themes, is about to be over. He is leaving that sleep and possibly very well be leaving his innocent state as well. There is a huge possibility that Dundy's "wakening" could be similar to that of DuBois - chasing that or a fraction of that sleep, as in rest, knowing that it will never come again.
When teaching, one has to take into account the internal and external factors that make their students different from one another, and, even if there are students who appear similar, find the differences within them to teach them effectively. Race is a large external factor that is impacted by many internal and external factors. The idea of white teachers going into majority-urban populations and teaching black and brown students has been challenged over the years as a type of white-savior complex; an idea that benefits the teacher through making them feel important while not necessarily benefiting the students. But, books like the one by O'Gorman introduce a kind of middle ground where white educators using their monetary or social influence can bring underprivileged students (regardless of race but also understanding how race and socioeconomic class intersect) educational resources and experiences that other educators may not have the pull to inherit and achieve.
The people "own" the cities of the dispossessed. Each square foot of land and space is the property of the people who live there. The landlords, the city, and the multitudes of organizations, for all their good intentions, by their arrogance and their cold hearts, have given up any claim to control the lives of the eople in the cities of the dispossessed. The people are the "landlords" and owe nothing to those who exploit them.
[...]
Anyone who comes to work in the cities of the dispossessed must be a revolutionary; that is, they must believe in the people, in their right to life andto all that life means: food, education, happiness, freedom, peace...Any school, church, political party in the cities of the dispossessed has one task: to let the revolution grow, to allow men their freedom and to save the lives of children. (pg. 85)
These quotes bring forth just how revolutionary working with children is. Children are a protected class that requires just that. Often, children get overlooked, especially children in "dispossessed" areas like Harlem where this research takes place. Through reading this book, I was nervous of what a man like O'Gorman would say about children in Harlem circa 1970. But, as the book continues, the reader sees just how dedicated he is to the betterment of these students who simply lack resources. O'Gorman is more than willing and able to provide those resources, hence the development of his book and eventual school in New York.