Tunnel vision.

• Author: Hicks, Deborah
• Position: Book review

Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us

by Mike Rose

The New Press. 177 pages. $19.95.

On a cold February day in 2003, I was struck by a strange and unexpected set of images when I walked into the public elementary school where I was working. The school was set in a small neighborhood of about 1,000 people, many of them the descendants of poor Appalachian laborers from Kentucky and West Virginia. I was in the school in my role as a literacy specialist, and one of my efforts involved an after-school reading class for girls. As I walked into the school to set up for the afternoons teaching, I suddenly realized that all around me were images from the military. In the school cafeteria where I entered the building, lunchroom servers, who often wore hairnets for their work, had donned headscarves with army camouflage patterns. In the faculty lounge where I went to check my mailbox, teachers dressed in army fatigues passed by. Inside my mailbox, mixed in with the usual offerings of announcements and educational catalogues, was a peculiar artifact: a photocopy of an old 1940s poster of U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. "Now--All Together" read the caption. A handwritten note added further detail: All together and as a team we will raise our scores!

What could be going on here? I asked myself this question, feeling at the same time stirrings of the familiar. In public schools set in poor neighborhoods, themes are an all too familiar fact of everyday life. Kids and teachers roll from one set of inspirational messages to the next, like being in a theme park that every six months or so gets a fresh retooling of its rides, food stands, and neon signs. This time, I learned, the theme was Proficiency Boot Camp.

It was a confusing choice of metaphors because America was about to go to war. President Bush had only recently announced his intentions to invade Iraq, and military talk was rampant. In this climate, it was easy to draw dotted lines from Proficiency Boot Camp to the buildup for battle. This appeared to be the reaction of a twelve-year-old girl in my after-school reading class, Elizabeth. She would skip school, Elizabeth said, if it turned into the kind of boot camp she knew from Hollywood films and television.

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I n his eloquent new collection of essays, Why School? , Mike Rose considers the compelling question of what has happened to public education in an era that is supposed to be all about reform and equal...