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  • Fun City:Kenneth Koch among Schoolchildren
  • Timothy Gray

In 1973 a boy from the inner city wandered into my rural community to teach me about the powers of imagination. I was only nine years old at the time. He looked to be a few years younger. He arrived alone, kicking cans in a trash-strewn lot before venturing out onto a busy street, the shadows of tall buildings hiding his movements, until at last he hit an open stretch of pavement and faced the glare of sun-bleached sidewalks. Harried passersby paid him little notice, but a voice told of his predicament. "To a child who can't read, the world is a closed book" ("Shadows"). For a long time the boy appeared to be forlorn and downcast, anonymous amidst the teeming crowds, but then he spotted a Bookmobile across the street. Curious, he decided to pop in and browse the selections, eventually choosing I am Somebody, a book whose title echoed the self-empowerment messages that Jesse Jackson and other liberal activists were disseminating to urban youth during this era. Book in hand, the boy hopped from the Bookmobile and ran down excitedly to the banks of the East River. Before he disappeared, I saw him with his new prize open upon his knees. He was smiling and mouthing its words in an open air library, his back propped up against a pier stanchion. A few feet behind him, a murky waterway rippled and glistened in the sunshine.

As it turns out, millions of Americans welcomed this child into their homes. He was the subject of a successful television advertising campaign for Reading is Fundamental (RIF), an educational outreach initiative based in Washington, D.C. Like the vacant lots and polluted waterways he encountered on his daily rambles, this boy's prospects had suffered greatly from societal ignorance and condescension, a dynamic reinforced infamously by Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he recommended a governmental policy of "benign neglect." The activists at RIF sought to redress persistent cultural imbalances by giving underprivileged city children free books ("for keeps," their commercial had promised). By so doing, they provided a boost to Great Society programs like Head Start. Since RIF first organized its program in the mid-1960s, various mainstream media [End Page 223] had become interested in exposing the harsh plight of inner-city kids. In 1965, bestselling memoirs by Claude Brown and Malcolm X detailed the environmental challenges their young protagonists had endured in New York and Boston. In ensuing years, popular songs by James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, the Spinners, and even Elvis Presley (aided by the equally unlikely Mac Davis) examined the harsh conditions that ghetto children suffered on a daily basis. Meanwhile, on television, Sesame Street, the juggernaut launched in the autumn of 1969 by Children's Television Workshop, shifted attention to the untapped intellect of urban preschoolers.1 Three decades before "No Child Left Behind" became a disingenuous catchphrase, children who resided in decaying cities were challenged by an intrepid corps of progressive educators to pursue their individual interests and talents. Although I myself was quite young, one piece of geographical irony hit me rather powerfully. When they were encouraged to express themselves, I noticed, city kids found in their rough and gritty environment a pastoral peacefulness missing from my rustic perch in upstate New York. At the very least, they displayed a greater genius for creating beauty playfully, spontaneously, colorfully, pragmatically.

I realize that to write glowingly about the artistic aptitude of children from underprivileged backgrounds is to risk an exploitative variety of sentimental discourse. Phillip Lopate, a key player in the progressive arts programs making inroads in New York City schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was among the first intellectuals on the scene to indict the self-serving motives of liberal educators. Writing in 1979, Lopate sharply criticized elite society's appetite for school reform, lamenting the onset of "ghetto sensationalism" and the bad faith of grandstanding teachers ("Issues of Language" 113). Although he himself had published a popular reminiscence of his teaching stint in New York City's public schools (Being with Children), Lopate came to distrust stories that "corresponded to a...

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