Reflection on Howard Zinn

It seems a bit ironic that we should lose J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn in such close order. It's hard to say we will miss the one, who has really been absent for more than forty years--leaving himself to be represented primarily by his great work, The Catcher in the Rye. The voice of Howard Zinn, however, will be sorely missed. The documentary film based on Zinn's autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, traces his life from the poverty of a cold water flat in Brooklyn, to a bombardier in Europe during WWII, to a life of activism in the Civil Rights movement and most importantly in opposition to war--from Vietnam up to and including the war in Iraq.

A couple of things struck me...

    First, Zinn emphasizes that he "grew up with not a single book in the house." He found his first book, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, lying in a street, with its first few pages torn out. I know we talk today about whether books will survive against digital media, but Zinn's experience makes me wonder whether today, amidst the flood of information on the Internet, we recognize how truly precious information is?
    Second, Zinn clearly expresses how important he considers the activist role of the teacher.

To be neutral is to be a collaborator with whatever is going on, and I as a teacher do not want to be a collaborator. I want myself as a teacher and you as students to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.

The documentary is full of examples in which Zinn interceded along with students in the social and political world of his time, at times putting his own career at risk. Teachers today may be concerned about the world their students are entering and about preparing those students to be contributing citizens. However, teachers are also pressed from many sides and justifiably concerned about keeping their heads down. In addition, teachers are understandably concerned about not exerting their power in imposing views on students. Indeed, then, should we intercede in the world, should we encourage our students to do so, and if so, how?

In Literature as Exploration (1995), Louise Rosenblatt maintains that teachers should not be dogmatic in imposing beliefs or values on students, but that they do have a role to play in helping to prepare students for active citizenship. Her primary concern is with helping students to build their personal reservoir of knowledge and experience as well as the mental habits necessary to work out their own values, make their own decisions, and solve their own problems. However, Rosenblatt also emphasizes that there are domains--e.g., psychological, gender, socio-economic--in which every society has established cultural patterns. These old ways of doing things are tenacious--they have a way of hanging on. Of course, these patterns help us to function on a daily basis, however they are also a source of power to those who understand them. Zinn, for example, would certainly say that those in power can wield these patterns to take their society into war unless the members of that society are sufficiently conscious of the driving pattern to resist it. In other words, one element of responsible citizenship is to recognize that cultural patterns do exist, and to understand that these patterns and the forces they represent should not go unexamined.

Rosenblatt makes the case that our schools are an essential force (or locus) for examining and shaping cultural patterns. First, teachers need to demonstrate awareness of their own attitudes and assumptions, and they need to model tolerance for other points of view. This creates what Rosenblatt calls a "setting for spontaneity" in which students are comfortable risking honest response to literature and other events. In addition, Rosenblatt recognizes that in today's world, technological change along with changing political, economic, and social circumstances confront today’s adolescents with an unprecedented “multiplicity of alternative choices” (p. 162). These choices are also becoming available at increasingly earlier ages which further complexifies their development. These trends make it ever more important, but also more possible to examine and understand cultural patterns--our own and those of others.

Self-consciousness about our cultural pattern means that we no longer need accept it as unthinkingly as the air we breathe. Probably more than any other cultural group before, we have the knowledge to consciously influence the future development of our customs and institutions (Rosenblatt, 1995, pp. 151-152).

Rosenblatt recommends one step in particular which can help students along the developmental route to active, responsible citizenship, and it's a step I believe Howard Zinn would also approve. We--teachers and schools--can show our students that we respect them and value them. This will give them a sense of security in their childhood on which they will be able to draw as adults "to meet constructively much of the external insecurity and struggle of later life” (p. 164).