Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
By Mike Rose
(The New Press, 2009)
192 pp. $19.95
In “Why I Write,” George Orwell gives four reasons why all writers (and particularly Orwell himself) write. Reason number one begins with a lovely, blunt confession: “Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood. . . . Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.”
Reasons two and three are also on target: “aesthetic enthusiasm,” or the pleasure one can find in the “firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story”; and “historical impulse,” or the hope and attempt to see things as they really are, to track down true facts and disseminate them.
Orwell’s fourth reason gets to the heart of who he was as a writer and an unparalleled moral force in the 20th century: “Political purpose—using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”
Orwell notes that he is a person for whom the first three motives could have easily outweighed the fourth:
In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. . . . Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.
I kept thinking of Orwell while reading Mike Rose’s impeccable Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us. In all of his work Mike Rose shows himself to be an elegant writer, someone who understands the rhythm of a good story; he’s also demonstrated over and over through an impressive body of work the value of tracking down the facts and sifting through the evidence. But what characterizes him as a writer (and as a teacher and a singularly engaged citizen) is the humanity apparent in every line of prose he writes. Rose describes and portrays things as they are or as he finds them—but that is never the end of the matter, for he has another eye riveted on things as they could or should be. One feels the love, but it’s neither romantic nor innocent; with Rose one gets love edged with anger, love on a mission of repair, love that is urgent to do justice.
Education: Commodity or Human Right?