A New Approach for Reaching Inner-City Kids

A New Approach for Reaching Inner-City Kids:

Review of Teach Me: Kids Will Learn When Oppression Is The Lesson

Teach Me! Kids Will Learn When Oppression is the Lesson
by Murray Levin (Monthly Review Press. 152 pp. $23.00)

Murray Levin was winding down a decades-long career as a professor of political science when he decided to work with an entirely different type of young person: students at the Greater Egleston Community High School in Boston's depressed Jamaica Plain district. The black and latino kids at this small venue for students who had been unsuccessful in traditional high schools could not have been more different from the privileged, well-prepared white students Levin had taught at Boston University and other colleges; they included alcoholics, drug users and dealers, and petty criminals. Most came from chaotic homes, and many were parents themselves.

<1>Teach Me! is an episodic chronicle of Mr. Levin's three years teaching a weekly elective course in which he sought to make social sciences come alive for his students by relating topics such as history and geography to their own lives. His learning curve was steep; at first impatient with the students' inattention and refusal to do any reading, Mr. Levin realized quickly that before they could learn anything, they had to be taught how to think in terms larger than the 'hood and the here-and-now.

Mr. Levin showed them that effects have causes, that societies and governments are organized systematically, that conflict and opposition are necessary to bring about change in systems and processes. He got them to place themselves in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis and figure out what motivated its primary figures. He demonstrated how people are manipulated by consumer and political advertising. The students who gave Mr. Levin half a chance became much more sophisticated thinkers, and most of them are continuing their education or employed in skilled jobs.

While Mr. Levin has devised effective strategies for engaging hard-to reach inner-city kids, the book is a bit repetitive. He presents information about the students' home problems, the smallness and ugliness of their world, their conspiracy theories about drugs and AIDS again and again. His conclusions--that instruction needs to be exciting and relevant; that social studies is best taught using primary sources and participatory activities; that high schools need to be much smaller--are valid, but not entirely new concepts.

Murray Levin first thought of writing a magazine article about this experience, and his narrative would have been somewhat more powerful had it remained at that length. The warmth of Mr. Levin's relationship doesn't always come through in his writing, but by including some of his students' testimonies in the narrative, he demonstrates his regard for them and adds compelling voices to his own experience. In the end, his successes at Egleston are worth reading by anyone who works with urban students--and they might be instructive to a parent of any hard-to-reach teenager.