Running head: MYTH, IDENTITY AND REVOLUTION
Myth, Identity and Revolution
Vance Holmes
Metropolitan State University
Urban Teacher Program
EDU 630
Paul Spies, Ph. D.
April 20, 2011
Contact: Vance Holmes, 1500 LaSalle Avenue #320 Minneapolis, MN 55403
Email: vance@vanceholmes.com
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MYTH, IDENTITY AND REVOLUTION
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Myth, Identity and Revolution
James Baldwin’s essay on education, A Talk to Teachers, is a devastatingly concise call
for schools to revolutionize and serve as engines of self-realization, social justice and resistance.
Although published 50 years ago, Baldwin’s piece could be an article written for today’s New
York Times op-ed page. On his way to defining the purpose of education – and defending the
call for revolution -- Baldwin focuses on three crisis points: social mythology, cultural identity
and personal responsibility. The scope and conclusions of Baldwin’s education assessment are
consistent with many other writers on the topic of the purpose of schools, but through his
isolation of the key paradoxes at play, Baldwin is able to navigate the wide-ranging foundational
issues of urban education in about 20 paragraphs. The essay is so condensed, each sentence
within each paragraph reads like a stand-alone quotation, including Baldwin’s very first line:
“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time” (Baldwin, 1963).
Baldwin bypasses any talk of multicultural curricula or culturally responsive classroom
management and starts with the silent threat presented by the basic contradictions in American
society. While we claim to value schooling, education serves the purpose of creating individuals
who think for themselves, and as Baldwin points out, “no society is really anxious to have that
kind of person around.” Schooling is thought to be of such importance that every child is
compelled to attend, yet as Baldwin states: "Any Negro who is born in this country and
undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic.” On the
one hand, the Black student goes to school and pledges allegiance to the flag. On the other hand,
the Black child is made to believe that he or she has never contributed anything worthwhile to
society – that the child’s past “is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured.”
Confronted with this paralyzing paradox, and facing the fact that there is little to be done about
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it, Black children often fall silent as a coping strategy. They “more or less accept it with an
absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside” Baldwin says, “all the more dangerous
because it is never expressed.” Baldwin warns that this means “there are in this country
tremendous reservoirs of bitterness” which have never had an outlet.
Throughout his essay, Baldwin explores the personal psychological damage produced by
our cultural contradictions. He asserts that Black children come to realize the value they have as
men and women of color "is proven by one thing only – their devotion to white people." Along
with creating citizens who harbor a silent rage, our social schizophrenia creates criminals –
people who, finding themselves in a society with standards which are not honored, choose to live
outside the law. In detailing America’s identity crisis, Baldwin also touches on the psychological
damage done to Whites. “If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the
schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this
culture” he writes, “you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people
who know nothing about their own history.” Baldwin charges that what passes for identity in
White America is “a series of myths” about heroic founding fathers. He says “we have a whole
race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select
political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper.”
Perhaps the most important theme running through A Talk to Teachers is the paradox of
response and responsibility. Having cited the social and personal danger in clinging to myth,
Baldwin asserts that the nation is “desperately menaced” -- not by outside forces "but from
within." He advises responsible citizens within the education system that they must be prepared
to fight tirelessly against that system. “You must understand that in the attempt to correct so
many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in
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society,” he writes, “you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined
resistance.” Baldwin speaks of the principle irony of education, saying that “precisely at the
point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society.”
The responsibility of every educated citizen, Baldwin asserts, is revolution. The only rational
response to a society built on duplicity and sustained by contradictory fictions is to fight for truth
to prevail. Instead of withdrawing into a paralyzing silence, or joining the criminal conspiracy,
we can choose to be responsible for and responsive to our society by working to change it – “at
no matter what risk.”
James Baldwin is decidedly unambiguous in answering the question – “What is the
purpose of schools?” His viewpoint is identified in the three significant elements of his essay:
mythology, identity and responsibility. Sounding like an urban education essay written last week,
Baldwin forcefully declared a half century ago that schooling should have nothing to do with
instructing individuals. He clarified that the purpose of education is to construct individuals – to
create in each student the ability to look at the world for him or herself. “To ask questions of the
universe” Baldwin explained, “and then learn to live with those questions.”
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References
Baldwin, J. (1963). A Talk to Teachers. The Saturday Review, 21, pp. 42-44.