6. Discussion – Modern Times
Somewhere in the 1950’s or ‘60’s, in the popular imagination, schools changed from centers of civic pride, order, socialization and achievement to locations of chaos and social problems (Leo 1997). Juvenile delinquency, sensationalized in such films as Blackboard Jungle (1955) , Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and West Side Story (1961), the racial tensions brought about by racist reactions to integration and massive White resistance, hippies and the drug culture – all played a part in delegitimatization. Each cultural conflict seemed to chip away a little more from the view that youth were malleable and that urban schools could discipline the body and the personality. Whites and the middle class fled the city for the suburbs; they deserted the North and Midwest for the West and the so-called “Sunbelt.” They built “gated communities” and as cities like Los Angeles and New York became “majority minority” cities, some white taxpayers withdrew their children from the public schools and their support for school taxes (Hayes-Bautista, Schink and Chapa 1988). Voter initiatives like the 1978 Proposition 13 in California cut deeply into funding for education (Davis 1990). City schools are now more segregated than they were in 1967.13 [11].
The word urban, that once connoted metropolitan, civilized and sophisticated came to be synonymous with chaos, poverty, danger and violence – “urban decay”, “inner city” and “urbanschools” came to be code words for ghetto (Ferrell 2001; Massey and Denton 1993). As pedagogical authority was withdrawn from schools, metal detectors, cameras, security guards, and undercover police replaced the panoptical surveillance of the teacher (Devine 1995). The last figure I will show is to me a disturbing image. The caption to Figure 10 reads: Undercover LAPD officers Dwane White (left), and Yolanda Gonzales appear at a press conference with Chief Daryl Gates, where Gates said the two were among eight undercover agents behind a narcotics operation at nine city high schools. They found 201 students dealing drugs, mostly marijuana, during the 13-week «school buy» program which ended in early April. Officers made 393 purchases, including cocaine and LSD, during the 13-week operation at Monroe, Verdugo Hills, Gardena, Canoga Park, Cleveland, Taft, San Pedro, San Fernando and Hollywood high schools.
Figure 10. Undercover officers 1986. Photographer Anne Knudsen. Figure dated: May 21, 1986. Los Angeles Public Library.
Urban schools serve “them” not “us,” they are no longer perceived as mutual institutions, of which Foucault observed:»We have here a sketch of an institution of the “mutual” type in which three procedures are integrated into a single mechanism: teaching proper, the acquisition of knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchized observation. A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency» (Foucault 1995:176).
People in the United States seemed to forget Durkheim’s Maxim that: «The fear of punishment is something altogether different from respect for authority. It has a moral character and moral value only if the penalty is regarded as just by those subjected to it, which implies that the authority which punishes is itself recognized as legitimate» (Durkheim 1961 [1925]: 154).
New eugenicists like Charles Murray (Herrnstein and Murray 1999) recycled the old arguments punctured by Richard Wright back in 1941:
In their classrooms and laboratories they attempt to harness science in defense of their attitudes and practices, and never do they so vigorously assail us as “troublemakers” as when we say that we are “this way” because we are made to live «this way». They say we speak treasonably when we declare that human life is plastic, that human nature is malleable, that men possess the dignity and meaning of the environmental and institutional forms through which they are lucky or unlucky enough to express themselves. They solemnly assert that we seek to overthrow the government by violence when we say that we live in this manner because the Black Belt which cradles our lives is created by the hands and brains of men who have decreed that we must live differently. They brand us as revolutionists when we say that we are not allowed to react to life with an honest and frontal vision. (Wright 1988 [1941]:130).
Urban schools have come to be seen as utter failures, too expensive, to dangerous, too out of control to fix. In place of edifice envy and charitable industrial schools are proposals to provide publically funded vouchers allowing parents to choose private schools. In this short essay I have given one “reading” of photographs of urban schools. As suggested in the introductory section, photographs are polysemic texts whose meanings cannot remain fixed but have many interpretations. Not only are individual photographic meanings “up for grabs” but I made specific selections from among the thousands of images of urban schools available in the archives. One could tell many other stories: of gender, of sports, of teaching techniques, of specific eras or ethnic groups, or of particular cities and school districts. Hopefully future researchers will continue to develop photographic views of urban education.
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Eric Margolis, Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Arizona State University. E-mail: margolis[@]asu.edu.
Received: April 3th, 2006; Approved: July 16th, 2007. URL: [http://www.bifurcaciones.cl/007/Margolis_EN.htm].
[1] A detailed analysis of representations of race, social class, gender and ability visible in photographs of schools in virtual archives can be found in (Margolis, 1999). Some of the material in this article appeared in Margolis and Fram (2007) Margolis (2005) and Margolis and Rowe (2002).
[2] Data based on personal communication with Michelle Rago, Public Affairs Office at theLibrary of Congress, 01/19/2007.
[3] This has always been the case because the photographer makes choices about equipment, framing, depth of field, shutter speed. Moreover photographic images are produced in the darkroom where a variety of manipulations are possible. In the digital world of today software like Photoshop facilitates even more the separation of the image from the object.
[4] I have written in much more detail about some of these issues: examining race, social class, gender and ability in “Class Pictures” (Margolis, 1999); conducting Foucaldian examinations of surveillance and discipline in «Looking at Discipline, Looking at Labor: Photographic Representations of Indian Boarding Schools» (Margolis 2004) and “Caught Napping” (Margolis and Fram, 2007); and analyzing images of schooling in the 1930’s and early 1940’s in «Liberal Documentary Goes to School: Farm Security Administration photographs of students, teachers and schools.»
[5] While drawing and etchings are not photographs, they are subject to many of the same issues of interpretation. Most importantly they have the same polysemic quality that makes them mean different things to different viewers.
[6] The historian David Tyack (1974:50) using conventional written texts provided additional data for reading the Harper’s image. He quoted a Scots reporter who, in the late 1860s, visited a similar assembly of five or six hundred pupils in a New York City School and observed “They were neatly (many of them beautifully) dressed, and all scrupulously clean – a point to which great attention is paid in American schools. Any scholar coming with untidy clothes, or with unwashed face and hands, or unbrushed hair, would be sent home at once.”
[7] Riis noted that “According to its location, the school is distinctively Italian, Bohemian, Hebrew or mixed.” At the Mott Street school in the photo, he observed that Italians were fast crowding out “the Irish element” (Riis, 1915 [1892]:192).
[8] Johnston’s work is unique and no comparable attempt to photograph educational processes has been undertaken to this very day.
[9] “The collection encompasses the approximately 77,000 images made by photographers working in Roy Stryker’s unit as it existed in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (RA, 1935-1937), the Farm Security Administration (FSA, 1937-1942), and the Office of War Information (OWI, 1942-1944). In addition, the collection includes photographs produced by other government agencies (e.g., the Office of Emergency Management) and collected from various non-government sources. In total, the collection consists of approximately 164,000 black-and-white film negatives, 107,000 black-and-white photographic prints, and 1,610 color transparencies. … The core of the FSA-OWI Collection consists of approximately 164,000 black-and-white negatives, encompassing both negatives that were printed for FSA-OWI use and those that were not printed at the time («killed» negatives)” (Library of Congress, 2002. «Special Collections in the Library of Congress Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection.». I examined the collection in detail in «Liberal Documentary Goes to School: Farm Security Administration photographs of students, teachers and schools» (Margolis 2005).
[10] I would suggest two reasons for the lack. First well-to-do people have the ability and power to restrict access to the private spaces in which they live and educate their children. Second is the well known “shooting down” effect of documentary photographers being fascinated with the under classes. This can be seen in choice of topics from Jacob Riis in the 19 Century th to Sebastião Salgado in the twenty-first. While no doubt the impulse to photograph children, poor people, and deviants stems from an impulse toward social justice, it leaves the rich and powerful outside the frame.
[11] “Racial composition in the largest countywide metropolitan districts has become decidedly less white since 1967. Every major countywide district saw more than 10% decline in white percentage from 1967 to 2000-01, with some districts experiencing substantial loss of white students (e.g., Orange County)…. During this same period, black enrollment has grown in every district” (Frankenberg, 2003:60).