Eighty-eight-year-old Pete Seeger has written a new song about his old idol:
Decades after drifting away from the Communist Party, the 88-year-old banjo-picker has written a song about the Soviet leader that’s as scathing as any tune in the folk legend’s long career.
“I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams of so many in every land,” Seeger wrote in “The Big Joe Blues.”
Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and apologized years ago for not recognizing that Josef Stalin was a “very cruel misleader.” But he told The Associated Press on Friday that the song he finally finished this year is a first for him, despite three visits to the Soviet Union beginning in the ’60s.
About time.
Jonathan Kozol has a new book, Letters to a Young Teacher, which gets a strange writeup in the Washington Post today:
Kozol may be a white Harvard grad who is now past 70, but he takes pains to let readers know that he is still down with the people. For one thing, he has many personal friends in the hood. Also, he believes teachers should not be “servants of the global corporations or drill sergeants for the state.” Naturally, he opposes school vouchers, along with charter schools and, of course, No Child Left Behind. What is Kozol for? Above all else, unleashing children’s natural creativity and playfulness. He also wants inner-city teachers to become activists, bearing witness to social injustice without worrying overmuch about, say, teaching grammar.
In other words, don’t worry so much about getting your kids the education that might enable them to go anywhere in the world and do anything for a living as long as they’re having fun, protected from social injustice. Did I read that correctly?
The author of the review seems to have gotten out of the book what I would have expected:
Kozol is surely right to declare on the very first page that teaching is — perhaps he should have said can be– “a beautiful profession.” But his bumper-sticker rant of a book (”childhood does not exist to serve the national economy,” he fumes) combines kids-say-the-darnedest-things sentimentality with so many rabid and ad hominem attacks on his ideological foes that it quickly becomes tiresome. Kozol seems really to believe that efforts to ensure that students can read and do math, using uniform standards, measured by tests that can be compared from classroom to classroom and school to school, are evidence of corporate repression. Sure, those efforts aren’t always well conceived or thoughtfully implemented. But, at least in principle, couldn’t the ability to be academically self-sufficient instead be viewed as a path to personal liberation?
