[RSCT] McNamara's legacy, war, and test scores

[BBPDX at aol.com]

Dear Rethinking Schools friends,

When we think about the importance of the critical teaching work that we're 
attempting, it may be worth considering Howard Zinn's comments today about 
the character of Kennedy and Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara 
-- key shaper of U.S. war strategy in Vietnam -- who just died. Here is 
what Zinn had to say on Tuesday's "Democracy Now," when Amy Goodman asked Zinn 
about McNamara's legacy:

<<It seems to me one thing which we should be thinking about, is that 
McNamara represented all of those superficial qualities of brightness and 
intelligence and education that are so revered in our culture. This whole idea that 
you judge young kids today on the basis of what their test scores are, how 
smart they are, how much information they can digest, how much they can give 
back to you and remember. That’s what McNamara was good at. He was bright 
and he was smart, but he had no moral intelligence. What strikes me as one of 
the many things we can learn from this McNamara experience is that we’ve 
got to stop revering these superficial qualities of brightness and smartness, 
and bring up a generation which thinks in moral terms, which has moral 
intelligence, and which asks questions not, “Do we win or do we lose?” Asks 
questions, " Is this right? Is it wrong?" And McNamara never asked that 
question.>>

Jonathan Schell was also interviewed by Goodman. Schell pointed out that as 
overdue and as pathetic as it was, McNamara waged a bit of public struggle 
with his conscience about his role in Vietnam, and even World War II. Zinn 
agrees but uses this to make another key point about young people:

<<I think it tells us that once you enter the machinery of government, once 
you enter the House of Empire, you are lost. You are going to be silenced. 
You may feel anguish and you may be torn and you may weep and so on, but you 
are not going to speak out. What lesson I think that is for us, for young 
people who may be thinking, as many young people do: “You know, I think I’ll 
enter the government and I’ll get in there and I’ll make a difference.” 
No. The people who made a difference are not the people inside the Pentagon. 
The people who made the difference are the people outside the Pentagon, the 
people who demonstrated against the Pentagon, the people in the streets, the 
movement. If people are going to devote their energy to making this a better 
world, they better not think of getting into that machine that destroyed 
people like McNamara and that silence them.>>

McNamara was a war criminal. Let's "honor his legacy" by continuing the 
crucial work of figuring out better ways to get our students to ask fundamental 
questions about our society and about war -- to ask, as Zinn says: "Is this 
right? Is this wrong?"

For the full discussion: 
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/7/vietnam_war_architect_robert_mcnamara_dies

Best, 

Bill Bigelow
Rethinking Schools
www.rethinkingschools.org


**************
Summer concert season is here! Find 
your favorite artists on tour at TourTracker.com. 
(http://www.tourtracker.com/?ncid=emlcntusmusi00000006)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.criticalteach.org/pipermail/rs_criticalteach.org/attachments/20090707/3c371b6a/attachment.html>