Browse Topics
Oppression
Confederacy Of Dunces
The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling
The new dumbness — the non-thought of received ideas — is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it’s really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a “cleansing” so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult.
December 1992Sunbeams
July 1991It is not your obligation to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit.
A Few Lessons They Won’t Forget
The Disgrace Of Modern Schooling
While teaching means different things in different places, seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. I intend no irony here. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach.
May 1991The Marvelous Adventure Of Cabeza De Vaca
In the days that followed, in my first desolate confrontation with slaughter, I saw a far-off light, heard a far-off strain of music. Such words serve as well as any: for what words can describe a happening in the shadows of the soul?
March 1991Change
Her speech softened and slowed. She learned to say “ain’t,” to let a handshake trail off. She learned to ask about family before business, to work up to her questions, not throw them in a body’s face.
March 1990Class Struggles In Sweet Cider
This is the part where Karen Wheeler jumped in and turned the world around, whether because Karen Wheeler is one fine bowler herself and enjoys as much as anybody kicking the butts of the folks over in Greensboro, or whether, as I’ve said, her heart has spots soft for Gus, I don’t know.
September 1989Sunbeams
May 1989Just because the spiritual master lets you call him by his first name doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.
On The Virtues Of Distrust
An Interview With Andrei Codrescu
I wouldn’t call it [my world view] cynical, I would go beyond that. I would call it a total distrust of all the cherished notions we have of progress and history — and that’s a Balkan characteristic. We can’t believe that things are going to get better, because we know from our history that they never do.
October 1987
