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FREEDOMWAYS
FOURTH QUARTER 1968

with the communities they purport to serve. But this same kind of conflict begins to unmask the society, for it is a deeply racist, voluntary totalitarian society clearly controlled in the area of public services and public welfare by a benevolent but all knowing bureaucracy which acts as agent for an unfeeling power order. A bureaucracy which encourages talk of democracy but actually limits the people's participation by the manipulation of issues, by asserting that disagreements are wholly dependent on expert judgement, to which they alone have access, and by steadfastly maintaining their own political power and leverage within the system by avoiding structural and organizational change. The attitudes whether expressed or hidden behind the clichés of the educational bureaucracies have been captured by Jonathan Kozol who wrote in Death At An Early Age: "This less than gentle attitude seems characteristic of a less than gentle society, in which the prevailing viewpoint of those who are moderately successful is too likely to be that they have got theirs and the others can damn well wait a while before they get the same."

While the conflict exposes the agents of the ruling order for what they are, the same efforts highlight the world of those struggling against the entrenched order. In the ranks are the knowledgeable side by side with the naive, the dedicated next to the ambitious, the progressive side by side with the paranoid, the revolutionary astride the reactionary, the hard worker shoulder to shoulder with the hustler, the liberal hand in hand with the conservative. To attempt to evaluate a whole people's effort on the basis of the actions of one segment or from one of the individual value systems is to run the risk of misunderstanding the broad scope of the effort. For each of the points of view has both added elements as well as subtracted other factors from the total success. 

But whether strong or weak the efforts of the people of the 201 area have been the efforts of a community, the vanguard, the committed ones, the emerging leadership as well as the followers, to achieve a better, more just order for themselves and their children. 

the system-- its secret overlords-- and the persistent challenges

A favorite American boast is that its education system rests on a cornerstone of a free public school system. But in an increasing number of urban centers that claim is just another idle slogan. For the systems are not free from deep seated racism; and are in fact seldom "public," that is, responsive to and/or accountable to the local communities if those communities are comprised of blacks and Spanish-

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