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  Going to the moon didn't really matter, it turned out. I say that from the vantage point of my six decades living on Planet Earth but also because of something I saw not so long ago. It was at Booker T. Washington High School where I watched an official astronaut, a handsome, well-built black man in his prime, dressed in a silver space suit, with an air of authentic command, try to get the attention of an auditorium full of Harlem teenagers. It was the Board of Education's perfect template for dramatic success, a distinguished black man leading ignorant black kids to wisdom. He came with every tricky device and visual aid NASA could muster, yet the young audience ignored him completely. At several places in his presentation he couldn't continue for the noise. I heard some teachers say, "What do you expect from ghetto kids?" but I don't think that explained his failure at all. The kids instinctively perceived this astronaut had less control over his rocket vehicle than a bus driver has over his bus. I think they had also wordlessly deduced that any experiments he performed were someone else's idea. NASA. The Space Agency's hype was lost on them. This man, for all his excellence, was only some other man's agent. The kids sensed that his talk, too, had been written by someone else, that he was part of what the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called the "non-thought" of received ideas. It was irrelevant whether this astronaut understood the significance of his experiments or not. He was only an agent, not a principal - in the same way many school teachers are only agents retailing someone else's orders. This astronaut wasn't walking his own talk but someone else's. A machine can do that. It seems likely that my Harlem kids considered going to the moon a dumb game; obviously I didn't verify their feelings scientifically but I knew a lot of them didn't have fathers or much dignity in their lives, and about half had never eaten off a tablecloth. What was going to the moon supposed to mean to them? If you asked me that question I couldn't answer it with any confidence, and I had a father once upon a time... and a tablecloth, too. If the truth were told, in my thirty years teaching in New York City, sometimes teaching prosperous white kids instead of Harlem kids, sometimes a mixed bag of middle class kids, I never heard a single student white or black speak spontaneously of the U.S. space program, or show the slightest interest in it even though the publicists of empty space filled our newspapers for a long time. After 12,000 hours of compulsory training at the hands of nearly one hundred government certified men and women, many high school graduates have no skills to trade for an income or even any skills with which to talk to each other. They can't change a flat, read a book, repair a faucet, calculate a batting average, install a light, follow directions for the use of a word processor, build a wall, make change reliably, be alone with themselves or keep their marriages together. The situation is considerably worse than journalists have discerned. I know, because I lived in it for 30 years as a teacher. |
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