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THE SIXTIES: THE CALM AGAINST THE STORM, OR, LEVELS OF CONCERN
Author(s) -
Greene Maxine
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
educational theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1741-5446
pISSN - 0013-2004
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00307.x
Subject(s) - scholarship , citation , sociology , media studies , library science , political science , law , computer science
Striving to avoid presentism, staving off some of my own memories, I turned to Educational Theory in the decade of the “Sixties.” Because of my associations with the unrest of that period, I looked back with considerable expectancy where educational philosophy was concerned. I was sure, somehow, that there would be responses to what seemed to be a variety of philosophical questions inherent in the Civil Rights movement, with its stress upon civil disobedience, nonviolence, and redemptive suffering. There were issues like conscientious objection to a draft occasioned by what seemed to increasing numbers to be an unjust war. It would appear, even from the present vantage point, that appeals to intuition and to the moral law (in tension with rationality and the civil law), while warranted by war or cruel circumstances existing in the South, held implications for the schools. There were the demonstrations, mostly peaceful, some of them not, and odd alliances among those Norman Mailer called “armies of the night.”1 Legislation having to do with educational equality, compensatory education, and sexual equality raised an unprecedented set of problems, some of them linguistic, some arising from generations of discrimination scarcely questioned before. I realize I was looking through lenses partly derived from recollections of participation in the 1963 March on Washington, of taking buses to peace demonstrations, of trying to convince colleagues to take positions on the war in Vietnam. And, of course, there were the three assassinations that shook our faith in political possibility. Somehow in connection with that, I recall what now seems an absurd conviction that America was really undergoing a “greening”: a relaxation of constraints; an unprecedented mutuality, even across differences; a devotion to compassion and peace. Few people worked out ways of attaining all this, with or without reliance on the schools. Images of open spaces, communal living, flowers in the muzzles of guns lulled numbers of people into (for a while) a kind of bland complacency. But then the bombings began in Cambodia and Vietnam, and optimism gave way to other modes of protest, some of it focused on the schools.