kind of panic rush toward the British Infant Schools, because here's a chance to administer freedom and save that marvelous edifice of careers, that Number One spot in the GNP. And it will work, it will improve matters. But only for a few years. And it won't work at all in the Junior Highs. The free schools, in the meantime, don't work either. They're impoverished, unsanctioned, and are staffed, very often, by people with powerful but inappropriate motivation. Nor do they work for teen-agers, nor will they ever. But eventually they will work, will be sanctioned and financed, and will be (forever, I think) exactly correct for the very young.

In short, the people in free schools have jobs, poorly paid ones, but jobs. They are socially useful, self-justifying jobs. Which means they are at work, good work, unalienated work. And that's about it. Some think that their jobs are missions, and some that their missions are the actual image of a better world. But the truth is they are jobs. And fortunately the whole power of example lies in this one little fact, for the bourgoisie yearns in its guts for precisely this, meaningful work, real work. Even the hope of overcoming the jobbishness of jobs — salaries and the crazy notion of hours — lies less in the correctness of the ideas than in the realness of the work.

3

I see the error in my second letter. What I meant to be doing — and what my second letter did not do, probably because of impatience and snottiness and also my affection for a lot of hardworking people — was urging the movement to take itself seriously as an already established physical presence in our country, and *be* more physical, less messianic and rhetorical, less burdened by grossly exaggerated sense of task. I've known a lot of young "revolutionaries", and have seen how euphoric and apparently spirited they are while they're spouting their dogma and slogans, and I've seen them collapse *instantly* into apathy and despair when their slogans (hopes) and euphoria are damaged or taken from them. So what to do? The euphoria is unreliable, an illusion; the despair is crushing. In psychotherapy the problem is handled carefully: you *don't* destroy the illusion *unless* you offer help, sustaining personal help. The error in my letter was that I wasn't offering help — and therefore shouldn't have said (so patronizingly) "you *calm* down." Personally, I think the people in the movement *can* (have the capacity to) calm down, discover a bigger and homelier world. But how can one say this at a distance? It can *only* be said face-to-face (withholding it where it's individually not true).

The fact is, I find *all* of this talk (including mine) distasteful. It's too abstract, too generalized. (Kozol's isn't — he's talking about his students and the situation in Boston).

— George Dennison

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