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This is not a solely student-centered approach. This approach recognizes the intersection of student abilities and interests with the educators’, and with the resources of the community where they reside. 

Inside the school, time is also a critical issue. How will the kids' time be consumed? How much free time will they have, considering that there is a direct link between freedom and discipline? How much time will you waste if you are not given a phone, a bathroom, a laboratory, and a computer/library available at all times to every kid in the class? Resolutions to all of that is a social studies method.

Kids can understand this. They can take up a school of history as their own and struggle for its outlook in discussions and debates about how things work, which always lead to questions about what is next-and what to do. All of history is an interpretation of the past, through a standpoint in the present, that is imbedded with a call for action in the future.

With standardized curricula and tests, this fear is ratcheted up with external rewards and punishment. In Michigan, for example, the state test, the MEAP, is administered by the Treasury Department, and rewards are offered to kids who take it, financial punishment meted out to schools with low participation. The Detroit Free Press suggests that the way to prepare for the tests is to play “How to Become a Millionaire” with the kids. http://freep.com/news/education/meap20_20010120.htm

So, with the double problem,  the fear of freedom, and the kids belief that this fear is really academic rigor, there is a good deal to be undone. Much of this little book is about how to do that. However, one pattern is clearly useful: to engage a particular subject that is routinely ignored, or falsified, a subject that has some interest to the kids, and take it apart. In my experience, this can begin nearly anywhere but the ignorance that is promoted about Vietnam, (http://www.richgibson.com/HoChiMinh.htm) fascism, (http://www.richgibson.com/teachingholocaust.htm)  and methods of analysis 
(http://www.richgibson.com/scedialectical4.htm) have  proved out well. In earlier grades, trickster tales (described below) are a nice place to begin. 

Beyond subject area entry points, it is key to maintain freedom of expression in the classroom, meaning the freedom to say nearly anything that does not demonstrate contempt for the people in the room, and to say that anything without fear of retribution (grades, etc.) In the absence of this freedom, and the trust it produces, the others all fall apart. They will not tell you they are not free unless they feel free to say it. If you don’t know about it, how will you deal with it? Your task is to change people, not to let your ego become so fragile that you cannot allow the routes ino their minds be exposed.  Specifically, it is one thing to allow a theoretical discussion about racism in a classroom to progress to the point where some students are expressing clearly racist views. It is another thing to allow those racist views to be directed to people in the room, to be used to destroy their freedom. You must know who in you class hold fearful (racist) ideas, yet you must not allow those ideas to go into effect. Teaching is not for the faint-hearted.

Ho Chi Minh

Art is never separate from its social context, although some artists do seem to be able to vault forward in time, signaling what is to come, often in foreboding terms. See the passage in Bosch above.

Mrs Sutfin greeted her small mob on her first day with a sense of cheer, joy, and firmness that comes with having dealt with dozens of great child tragedies and curiosities, and challenges. She took pictures of the kids and when I came to her classroom, she had a poster of the children in several poses. The two I remember, “We can be silly!,” with the children’s faces contorted in an endless variety of parental horrors, and, “We can be serious,” with every child peering steadily into a book. 

I was visiting Mrs Sutfin that day just to say “Hi,” to a new colleague. As I walked down the hall toward her room, another teacher began to pass me by, going in the other direction, trailed by her classroom of probably 35 fourth graders, all in a neat line, each just more than an arm’s length behind the next, all with both hands clasped behind their heads. She led the line, then stepped aside as the group was about to pass me, and whispered proudly, “Takes a month to get ‘em like this!” As she turned toward me, away from the kids, one little girl, the third in the line, burst out of position and began to dance, not march, down the hall. Every other child remained in line, hands behind heads. By the time the teacher turned back to her minions, the little girl was back in line, uncaught.

Mrs Sutfin was reprimanded later in the day–for allowing her class to go to lunch without forming a good line, without being sure that the children could not touch each other. She called me and I stopped back the following day, just around lunchtime. 

Mrs Sutfin’s kids were marching, well, high-stepping, down the hall, in near-perfect line, each child with the fingers on each hand clasping one of their own ears, and pulling. Every kid had a tongue out, and every kid was in full glory of making their most ever-so-wicked face. In a day, Mrs Sutfin’s gang became a class. No one ever tried to discipline her again. They started to read. 

1. Get people doing good work that counts for them and the people they care about.
2. Work along with the learners, and make their work public.
3. Aim high.
4. Don’t tediously lecture or give conventional tests, but set up dialogues that link experience and theory, practice and research, understanding that learning can build on failures as well as success.
5. Build on imaginative work through storytelling.
6. Urge people to become creators of their own research, responsibly, so the become finders as well as receivers in seeing the connections, the relationships, of (for example) emotion and reason, the particular and the general, playfulness and planning, the individual and the group. 
7. Are never cruel, yet rarely praise excessively, while they offer time to complete the work through polishing, reflection, and reexamination. 
8. Link classroom practice with the world outside.
9. Create communities where peers can profit from and build on the work of peers, using grades, if at all, in ways that least interfere with the intrinsic desire to learn.
10. Never deny learners their lives, and let them go when the time has come. 

I have always found the kindness that forms the skeleton of Macrorie’s work to be valuable. I hope you will find time to review his books. 

Webbing is easy. Start with a central issue that offers interest and motivation. This can be drawn with a central circle with many spokes. Then allow students to pick related subjects which may reveal something new or interesting about the initial issue. In the Tyson fight case for example, someone might do a biography of Arthur Ashe. Someone else might do Mao, etc. Arrange for regular research reports so students can keep their eyes on the commonality of knowledge as it develops. 

Let us take the study of flags for example. In many classrooms, flags are used unquestioningly, addressed as facts, not problems; fixed objects with no contentious history, not multi-dimensional symbols that mean very different things to different people. Take the US flag. Early elementary kids chant at it, hands placed for some reason on their hearts, or, in the case of the Scouts (a problem too), in full salute. Many little kids have no idea what they are hooting, as Matt Grogan has humorously shown in his wonderful cartoon book, School is Hell. "I pled a jean-size to the flag of de Un-seated fates of Demonica..." In other classrooms (a phenomena growing thankfully more rare) kids memorize flags and stick little pipe-cleaner flag symbols into world maps.

Consider otherwise. Here is the US flag. Now, part of this class will be young black men about to be drafted to go to Vietnam in 1966. Here is what Muhammad Ali said you should do. Another part of this class will be a Vietnamese woman, in Hanoi, in the same era. Another group will be Richard Nixon, planning a comeback, and yet another can be Henry Kissinger. Will they all be seeing the same flag? Now, ask the students to look up the flag of the National Liberation Front.

The move from appearance to essence recognizes that book covers, appearances, are important, but insists that there is more inside to be seen and known.  This interplay is also rooted in the idea that you will be sufficiently open, humble,  to change you mind if your theory and practice contradict one another. 

Scott, having been assigned a history project, asked his father if the story was true. His father said he thought it was. So Scott placed a small ad in a local Navy paper, seeking to interview survivors of the Indianapolis tragedy. 

He got one response from a survivor who not only described the horror, but who told Scot that the captain of the ship had been unjustly court-martialed for the tragedy. The allegation of the court martial, the only one of its kind after the war, included testimony from the captain of the Japanese sub, who reported that the Indianapolis had not been zig-zagging. The captain was blamed for everything.

Then began Scot’s pursuit of the truth. After several months of work, Scot reached many other survivors who all told the same story. In time, Scot learned that the captain had been scape-goated by a sizeable group of admirals and commodores. They had not directed a zig-zag course and, more, they were trying to protect the fact that Allied Forces had broken the Japanese codes. In fact, moreover, the captain had been zig-zagging, but as dense darkness fell, he chose to order a straight course, suggesting to the men on watch that they return to a jagged course when it became light. Around midnight, clouds suddenly cleared and the watchmen on the submarines spotted the Indianapolis and sunk it–in twelve minutes. 

But Scot found there was a deeper story still. The Indy had been delivering parts to the atomic bomb. When the ship was sunk, perhaps in order to maintain secrecy, the naval bosses knowingly turned their backs, as if the ship did not exist, and sent no rescue. The only reason the survivors were found was by sheer chance, a passing reconnaissance plane. 900 men were alive when the ship went down. Only around 300 were picked up.

The captain, wrongly convicted, was deluged with blaming letters from survivors’ families. He committed suicide, leaving a note, “I should have gone down with the ship.”

Scot pursued his action-research over years. Eventually he was able to gain congressional hearings which exonerated the captain. Scot was made an honorary survivor. Study deep. What you do counts

Here is a good link: http://www.ussindianapolis.org/main.htm

Tracking them can be interesting. Werner Von Braun, the leader of the US space program was one of them. Long dead, his history is worth a critique. So is the history of the fascist Romanian, Valerian Trifa, deported for being a fascist, after living for years as a bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Even today, his followers are trying to wipe his slate clean. See: http://www.roea.org/9701/ho00003.html

The former head of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, was a wanted Nazi war criminal. Interpol, the international police organization, was founded by old Nazi’s. 

A young girl in Germany, in the late 1980's, decided to make her high school project a research into what her villagers had done during WW2. She believed their stories, that they had done nothing to help the Nazis, and that fascism was imposed on them from above. Her teacher urged her forward. The town's people called her, soon, "The Nasty Girl." A film was made about her travails. Now she lives in the US, driven out of her homeland. Similar work has been done in the US. For example, in Royal Oak, Michigan, a Catholic Church called the Shrine of the Little Flower, a towering edifice of the crucifixion, was built with money donated to the immensely popular, but fascist, Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin. "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" is sometimes a dangerous question.

Similar questions can apply to the US Civil Rights movement. “What did your hometown newspaper have to say about Rosa Parks the day after she sparked the bus boycott?” or the US invasion of Vietnam, “What did your paper say about bombing Hanoi, or Cambodia, or the Pentagon papers?”

Of course, one has to know who and what to look for, and to move judiciously to avoid a witch hunt, but such is history.

Sitting in groups, where all can look at all, sets up power relationships that are at odds with traditional transmission teaching methods (I know, you don't, listen to me, read the textbook, because it is on the test). A collective geography demonstrates in concrete ways that power in your room is shared, not necessarily equally, but more democratically. It allows people to use their bodies to move around, to enter areas of the room that might offer space for class plays or a map area or a quiet reading area. Rather than a factory, where workers' knowledge is always under attack, the critical classroom is set up to test ideas in theory and practice-as individuals and as a group.

This is not something you should do with children. (And, actually the Ghoul stole the bit from a 50's tv serial). But the vaudeville routine can work well in classes. There are many vaudeville pieces that can be sources of inspiration, like the Abbott and Costello bit, "Who's On First?" available in video stores everywhere.

Setting up a Ghoul-Froggie bit, say, with a politician giving a speech about family values, can be plenty of fun. Think of William Clinton giving spiritual guidance to the Surgeon General he fired. Well, of course do not think about the substance of that interchange, but the form. It's the form that's the thing. Think of Froggie tormenting, say, Dan Quayle. You get the drift, right? Who gets to be Froggie?

There is an infinite variety of trials to investigate, possibly even reenact-and plenty of film and paper archives too. You might want to look at the trial of the Wirtz, Commander of Andersonville, a southern prison camp, at the end of the Civil War. Or the Nuremberg trials which used his conviction as a basis for charging Nazi war criminals with crimes against humanity at the end of WW2. You could look at the Florida trials of the El Salvadoran Generals, charged with abetting the torture and murder of nuns in their country during a US funded anti-communist operation, in November 2000, among the first so charged under an international law. Investigate the tragic trial of Joe Hill, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, who was hanged after a trial in Utah in which the judge refused to allow him to fire his lawyer, who was pleading Joe guilty. Hill got the death sentence, but not before he wrote to a pal, "Scatter my ashes everywhere but Utah. I wouldn't want to be caught dead here." http://iww.org/.

Every trial is a big trial to those involved. Go look at the local court system in action. Be sure to see Small Claims Court, too. Or, if you get a ticket, take the kids. You could set up a system of redress for your classroom too; but beware, kids can be harsh. The abused tend to abuse.

Have kids rewrite the tales, as they have been written by shifting social relations over time.

First, tell your kids the story of Farmer Duck, that hero of all animaldom who had nothing to lose but their Lazy Old Farmer. Let the story flow, as it comes to you, from your memory of reading the book. Throw your self, your body, into it–and your voice and eyes and arms and legs. Then, have the kids discuss the story. What was this about anyway?

Now, take the book and read it to the kids, with all the expressiveness your denied stage-stardom can whomp up. Let the kids discuss this reading, noting that there are likely some differences with what you did in your storytelling. Now, show the kids the stroke of genius you prepared late last night, over that nasty cold cup of coffee: the print part of a big book (for older kids, just give them the blank pages of the big book). The print can be at the bottom of the pages of the big book, with probably 2/3 of the page blank, but lined if you can get it.

Ask the kids if they would like to make their own book, and illustrate it. The print part is already done, but there is a lot of work still to be done. There are illustrations for example, and choosing which way things will point, who will be represented, and how? If you can, get several groups of kids to work on different pages of the book. This will require that they at some point gather as a planning group and prepare the entire thing.

This will take some time, and struggle, but it makes a great video tape if you can detach enough time to do that as well. 

Aristotle, who believe that elites alone deserved the benefits of democracy, still  addressed tyranny as a person,"responsible to no-one and who governs all alike with a view to his own advantage and not of his subjects, and therefore against their will. No free man can endure such a government." (From the Politics.) Aristotle’s early complaint, and its contradictions, still linger. 

The critique of tyranny begins, at the same time, in two places: criticism of religious tyranny (absolute rule often girded by violence-- frequently a velvet glove over an iron fist) and criticism of the denial of property rights. In revolutionary US society, the critique of property was aimed at the monarchy–but spilled over into complaints about human rights as well, like the right to not be kidnaped and forced into the monarch’s navy. 

On the one hand, people have consistently asked of their world, “Isn’t there more than this?” and responded to themselves that whatever more there might be must be in another world. Then an apostolic few offered to interpret just how to get to that other world, for a fee, and set up nearly impassible (often expensive) hurdles to make it. Along came critics, like Hegel, who analyzed in depth the alienation of people from nirvana, the ways people are set apart from not only the ways to understand and struggle toward god, but from god him/herself. Hegel looked very carefully at the processes that history demonstrated, in his view, that moved people closer and closet to god, stripping the power of the priests. He was examining, not only the reality of God, for him, but the ways history moves systematically to bring people closer to God.

On the other hand, people have also objected, in revolutionary ways, to the material oppression that rises from inequality, rooted in unjust property “rights,” (usually more precisely inheritance rights.) Marx was a scholar of religion who applied the religious critique of alienated being to the material world. He was able, then, to take Hegel’s analytical scheme called dialectics (the study of change) and apply it to the material world. This did more than turn Hegel upside down, it really was more like turning a balloon inside out. For Marx, then, was able to ask, “Why are we separated, alienated, estranged, from the central activity of our lives:work? Why do people have less and less control over the processes of our labor, nearly no control over the products we make, and the more we do this, the more we enrich the few people who profit from this great scam.” In brief, Marx was yelling, “Fraud!” at both the Pope and the Rockefellers. Bertell Ollman has a nice short explanation of this: http://www.richgibson.com/whatismarxism.html

The dual approaches to criticizing tyranny influenced the great American revolutionaries, from Thomas Paine to Tom Jefferson, and all in between. It was Jefferson, remember, who was calling for the Tree of Liberty to be regularly cultivated with the blood of tyrants. To make the revolution, it was vital to motivate masses of peasant farmers with rhetoric about equality and democracy, much of it heartfelt, even if it came from slave-owners. (When one considers property rights a key component of equality, one can rather easily believe that slaves, who are property, should have no democratic rights).  However, when voting rights or democracy (not the same thing) have confronted property rights in the US, democracy usually lost. That is the reason for bi-cameral legislatures, the electoral college, and elaborate voter registration procedures. The history of the Voting Rights Act (http://www.aclu.org/issues/racial/racevote.html) is a history of this struggle. It is a telling fact that democratic rights do not exist, for the most part, at work.

An interplay of property rights and democracy is illustrated by Henry David Thoreau’s comment, “Political democracy is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but it surely cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from the political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economic and moral tyrant.” 

Now, how can all of this apply to a student in a US school in the new 21st century? Rather than take this up as a distant historical memory that applies to no one but people with flintlocks, perhaps we can address the problem as a problem. and to bring all of the illuminating parts of the social studies (history, geography, economics, political science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.) to bear on it, each offering an new insight. For example, to see that there are answers in history that deal with real questions in school today, examine the relationship of the King to the Colonist and the Principal and the Student Government. (For a fine history of the property/democracy struggle in the US, see Staughton Lynd’s Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, and Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution.) 

We can use the tools of psychology to answer the question: “Why is it that so many people do not notice injustice, and are willing to promote it?” (Consider working class Nazis). Economics, the study of the creation and ownership of value (a key struggle of democracy, humanness and property), can assist in discovering not only where value comes from, but also why it is that so few possess so much of it. Political science can address the problem: “Why have government? Where does it come from? Is the government neutral, or a weapon of those who hold power/property?”
    

Here are some starter questions that few teachers are willing to ask in serious ways.

• What is it to be free?
• Are we free? Are we free at work, at school, at play? If we are not free: What would we need to know, and how would we need to know it, in order to be free?
• Are there people among us who appear to be much more free than others? If so, what is it that makes them different? What do they have in common, worldwide?
• Who is less free? What elements do they have in common?
• Is freedom achieved through isolation, or friendly connections with other people?
• If we are not free, in part because we are isolated from each other, often in ways that we do not see (the normalcy of segregated schooling), then what might we do to be more free?

These questions rise from the Critique of Tyranny. This critique has been applied to every society, ever since the first food surpluses made inequality possible, and it became possible to make an argument that separation from others might be a good thing--in contrast to early societies where those who behaved the most collectively survived longest and best. The critique was the interrogation of domination that, in ideas, forged the US revolution. It is absent from most social studies textbooks.

The Critique of Tyranny leads to a question that can be asked of any society, to judge it: How does this society treat the majority of its citizens, invariably the workers, or slaves, i.e., the common citizens, over time? This reasonable question sweeps aside the notion that poisons conservative forms of postmodernism, which insist that there really is no rational way to judge any society, that one society or social movement or idea might be as good as the next, that all is mere viewpoint and, at the end of the day, maybe Mussolini was not such a bad guy after all.

Are teachers willing to ask these questions to students in their classrooms, not of abstract distant societies, but of their condition inside school? My experience is that most teachers are not willing to seriously pose the issue, in fear of lack of control.

Psychiatrist Robert Kaye says students in the world's classrooms are not free, using a metaphor that suggests that compulsory attendance laws make them "incarcerated." This would be a good place to start. Are we here because we want to be here?

Indeed, many teachers will insist that they live in a free society. But they will also agree that they cannot probe the question of freedom in school, or really speak their minds. The Bill of Rights, for example, stops at the door of most work places.

Here are some questions that students can work out themselves to, perhaps, better understand the foundation of most societies throughout history: The Master-Slave Metaphor.

• What does the Master want?
• What does the Slave want?
• What must the Master do?
• What must the Slaves do?
• How do Masters Rule?
• How do Slaves resist?
• What does the Master want the Slaves to know?
• What does the Slaves want the Master to know?
• What does the master want the slaves to believe?
• What does the slave want the master to believe?
• Is truth the same for the Master as it is for the Slaves?
• Who has the greater interest in the more profound truths?
• What mediates the relationship of the Master and the Slaves-both in theory and practice?
• What elements within this relationship, as it exists, provide clues to how the relationship might be changed?
• How will the slaves get from what is, to what they think ought to be, without relying on magic?
• What will the Masters do in response to the struggles of the slaves?
• Is it possible to end the relationship of Masters and Slaves, or are people trapped within this forever?
• If people are not trapped in the Master-Slave relationship permanently, and if they should actually overcome it, what will preserve their common freedom?

References:

On Tyranny, by Leo Strauss (the classic in the field)

History and Science for Boys and Girls, by William Montgomery Brown (early success of friendly connections, written in 1931)

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond

Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx (and all of the rest of Marx's work)

Alienation by Bertell Ollman (why we are estranged from one another and how we might reason our way out).

The Politics of Obedience, the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Etienne De La Boetie

On Mussolini as a Kinder, Gentler, Fascist, see the New York Times, 9/28/02 A17

Steve Biko, the South African activist who was murdered by the apartheid regime while he was in custody, said that. The next paragraph is from David Barsamian, a historian. 

He’s quite accurate. Most oppression succeeds because its legitimacy is internalized. That’s true of the most extreme cases. Take, say, slavery. It wasn’t easy to revolt if you were a slave, by any means. But if you look over the history of slavery, it was in some sense just recognized as just
the way things are. Well do the best we can under this regime. Another example, also contemporary (its estimated that there are some 26 million slaves in the world), is women’s rights. There the oppression is extensively internalized and accepted as legitimate and proper. Its still true today, but its been true throughout history. That’s true in case after case. Take working people. At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred a fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery. That was not an unusual position. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which Northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. Were against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Mass., a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people's heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now thats unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks its legitimate to be a  wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, lets say, a hundred and fifty years ago. So that’s again internalizing oppression, and its an achievement.

What might that have to do with teaching, the struggle over what people know and how they come to know it? 

As I write here in San Diego, California is in the midst of a series of power blackouts that have stretched across the state for two weeks. Predictions are that the outages will continue for a year–in the richest state of the richest country in the history of the world. Mainstream press reports limit the exploration of this crisis. On the one hand, they fail to investigate where it is energy-power  comes from (the combination of all the inter-related process of the natural world; water power for example) and on the other hand, they ignore the interconnection of natural forces  with labor and technology (the Hoover damn and publicly funded research) going back hundreds of years.  Normalcy, then, eliminates the idea that electricity is the product of natural forces that it makes no more sense to privately own than air, and eliminates the history of labor and struggle that rationally cannot be possessed by a few. It is “normal” that electricity should be owned. Normalcy forgets. A teacher’s task is to assist others in remembering, and to create the wonder that goes along with knowing that somebody wants things forgotten–or gains from forgetting. There are plenty of history texts that explain the background of the crisis, beginning with Carey McWilliam’s classics. They don’t turn up in the San Diego Times Union. 

Consider the grocery store in an urban area. How come it looks like that–a huge parking lot with a building set far back from the street and sidewalks–hundreds of square yards of space that could be profitable simply lost to auto storage? The answer is in history, a history I thank my friend Paul for helping me to re-see.

Grocery stores are, like all businesses, there to make a profit. The struggle over their profits has been intense. Consumers want lower costs and sometimes shop competitively. Suppliers want their piece. The work-force in a grocery store has some advantages in controlling their work place: the employer cannot completely leave, go to the third world, although the employer can go to the suburbs. The routes into and out of the grocery store can be somewhat controlled by workers if, for example, unity can be built between the Teamsters who deliver goods, and the Food Workers who work in the store. This explains why, in California and Michigan for example, grocery workers remain unionized in an era of union collapse, and why, where the unions have resisted, they are fairly well-paid.

But why the geography of the modern grocery store with that huge parking lot? Well, of course there is our society’s reification of the automobile, which became the normal mode of transportation in only the last fifty years. But there is a deeper reason. The parking lot does not have to be where it is. It could be behind the store, with the storefront on the street. But it could not be there if the employer wanted to be sure to be able to control entrances and egresses, on the chance of employee picketing, informational or otherwise. The reason for the geography of the grocery store is an intersecting history of the struggle of workers, bosses, and modern transportation, a history that needs to be noticed, and remembered.

Now, why does your school look like that? 

"I ain't the worlds best writer nor the worlds best speller,

But when I believe in something I'm the loudest yeller."

                                                  --Woody Guthrie (1950)

Consider the politics of, "This Land is Your Land, this Land is My Land," by Woodie Guthrie and ask if that is better than the current national anthem (there was a congressional debate about it). Songs have always been concerned with history and society, and reflected/recreated what they portray. Take for example the song, "Bread and Roses,"  http://www.breadandroses.com/real.audio.1.html. This brilliant, moving, powerful song came out of the strike of women textile workers in Lawrence Mass, the first major strike in US history that was won. An investigation of the Bread and Roses strike, which leads to song writing, play writing, little newspapers, etc., could be a momentous class event. Here is a song:

When the Union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, 
There can be no power greater any-where beneath the sun; 
But what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? 
But the Union makes us strong! 

Sol-i-dar-i-ty for-e-ver, 
Sol-i-dar-i-ty for-e-ver 
For the Union makes us strong. 

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite, 
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might? 
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight? 
For the Union makes us strong. (CHORUS)

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade; 
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid; 
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made; 
But the Union makes us strong. (CHORUS) 

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone. 
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone. 
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own. 
While the Union makes us strong. (CHORUS) 

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, 
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. 
We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn 
That the Union makes us strong. (CHORUS) 

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold; 
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. 
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old 
For the Union makes us strong. (CHORUS)

Here is the Little Red Songbook: http://www.bloomington.in.us/~mitch/iww/lrs.html

Here is a song from eighty years later by Rage Against the Machine: 

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