Schools and Cleaning Fluid

Here are a couple of thoughts I had a few weeks back-still relevant-that I haven't posted till now:

I was riding my bike down St. Claude into the French Quarter. Maybe I was going downtown but what I saw that broke my heart was blocks away from the French Quarter before St. Claude becomes North Rampart. I saw a sign on an abandoned school saying “School Starts Aug. 28, 2005.” Of course school never started then for Louisiana students. Some had left, some without any options had to stay and some were probably housed in the Superdome for days after the flood. The sign hadn’t been changed since then, and doubtless the building hadn’t been occupied for schooling since the spring of 2005. In the Lower Ninth Ward, school is something noticeably absent for the exiled community. Homes of course are still non-existent, but schools seem to be the lynchpin of the community, along with the churches. Youth are also precariously absent from the Lower Ninth, and hence the future is nowhere in sight here.

As a former teacher, and as a critic of education and schooling in general, I remain a skeptic of ideas that school will elevate a populace, or will have any advantages for a people displaced and scattered. After all, doesn’t school just teach the poor how to live with being poor, the worker how to take orders, the middle class how to be obedient for certain rewards? Though I was told once that school in the South, in particular the Black South, had a different character than that which grew out of the Northeast tradition. There education was thought of as a means of liberation, whereby the oppressed could learn and thereby transcend the position they were born into. As long as it was controlled by the liberated still reaching for freedom themselves, and taught by the liberated I believe it could have been a sight of progress. As bell hooks wrote about her experience in a black school, thought and subversion were apart of what she loved about school. Still I believe the system has gotten very good at absorbing and transforming that which is Other, or revolutionary, or unique, into something which is upholding of the status quo-that which is part of the system. So with school, that which was meant to elevate those who were slaves or those who were lower class became a tool to indoctrinate the populace into preparing them for the roles they were meant to play.

What can I say about schools in New Orleans then? There is little reason for a family to return if their children can’t be educated. It is sad to see the schools so empty, even if I have attached the notion of children with schools. Children are the future, they are the hope. They are a reason to come home, and their absence here, though not total-decideds the future of this town.