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FREEDOMWAYS    FOURTH QUARTER 1968

which Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish social economist, summarized in An American Dilemma.  The "new" literature, in ignoring this vast scientific literature about the black people, has no roots, and indeed, sets out to be "new" by deliberately operating as if it is a new field.

When the "new" literature is read, then one who is already sophisticated in the problems and proposed solutions for the black people concludes that the "new" literature is for uninitiated whites who must be convinced that it is now necessary to do something about the poor quality of education for black children.  One feels somewhat like Kenneth B. Clark whose perceptive comment before the National Advisory Commission on  Civil Disorders (The Kerner Report) state"

"...in candor...a kind of Alice in Wonderland-with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction."

On the other hand there are some serious studies and reports which seek to deal directly with the past literature and the present situation.  The work of Kvaraceus Dynamics of Delinquency, of Frost and Hawkes The Disadvantaged Child, of Bereiter and Englemann Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool, of Reissman The Culturally Deprived Child, and even the Kozol documentary Death at an Early Age of "the destruction of the hearts and minds of Negro children in the Boston Public Schools" are clearly and forcefully written, and one reads these with a sense of ease and familiarity, and of identification with the material.  It is almost as if one already knows or has experienced this and the book merely synthesizes or sharply specifies-or as if one has read this somewhere sometime before.  Only a very, very few of the white writers of the "new" literature have the insight, capacity, or creativity to write in this way.  To repeat, the "new" literature is new only for the uninitiated, the newcomer, the still uncertain white.

More basic and more useful are the works of Arthur Pearl and Frank Riessman New Careers for the Poor, based primarily on the study and research at the Howard University Institute for Youth Studies, of Edmund W. Gordon and Doxey A. Wilkerson at Yeshiva University Compensatory Education for the Disadvantaged, and of harry L. Miller Education for the Disadvantaged. New Careers is potentially one of the most provocative, sophisticated, and significant books to emerge from the plethora of the "new" literature in its specification and demonstration of what can be done, efficiently and quickly.  The Gordon-Wilderson book is the most comprehensive

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