I have been a New York City high school teacher for thirty-five years and had recently retired when I came accross Ms. Wexler's remarkable book:in that time I taught high school in some of the most challenged environments in the South Bronx and finished the last twenty years of my career at Stuyvesant High School.
I had a most powerful reaction when I read Ms. Wexler's book: I was reminded of why I became a teacher in the first place. Teaching can be and should be a sacred mission and that the purpose of education is constant self transformation and self examination for both teacher and student. It is understandable how this ideal can be forgotten in the day to day social and bureacratic commands coming from transitional interests. Her idea is inviolate: education is a process a generative one, that requires carefully tactile massage,(love &integrity) and to make it into a business invites risk.(grave opportunity costs). These risks are despair , lost opportunities, alienation and emotional and social displacement. All education involves heeling for children with disabilities or without. Some disabilities are obvious or fall within legal guidelines, others are not. At certain times in our lives we all need repair and the models for children with special needs is essentially the proper model for all children. That is what make this book so releveant. Individuation should be the goal as Wexler maintains. This method of self discovery cannot always be predictable or exact, much in the the way that art, literature and music are created. There are boundaries in which creativity can take place within a cohesive and exacting structure and still provided for individuality and self expression, honoring the disciplines being taught. Ms. Wexler's book stands as rebuttal to industrial model of education(specializtion of tasks, robotic movements of the assembly line class room) and the reactive sentiment of controlled outcomes that is the language of educational bureacracy in all quarters, that can result in intellectual servitude, for both students and teachers. Ms. Wexler reminds us that we do have a soul , the way Socrates taught us and that teaching can be glorious.
Gary Brandwein
