EDUCATION
THEN
ROBERT FRANKE
Before the Reagan era, they were more willing to grapple with right and wrong. They were willing to assume the responsibilities of moral choice. I know it's been referred to as a decadent era. I found it just the opposite. There was a search. The great unrest among my students came out of a dissatisfaction with some of the presidents, with what was happening in our society, with wars. I saw it as a time of the young searching, examining alernative ways of doing things, better ways. Always questioning.
The students in my class today are very reluctant to assume responsibility for their own moral choices. If I were to tell them persuasively something patently false, they'd probably go along. It doesn't really matter to them.
In the sixties, there was beneath all the turmoil a hopefullness, a genuine hopefullness that the world would be better. That gave spirit to the time. It is false to describe the young then as lost souls.
I took a poll in my class recently: How many of you feel there will be a nuclear war? Seventy-five percent of the class raised their hands. I was appalled, thinking of their absolute hopelessness. Assuming the Vietnam War were still going on, I have a terrible hunch these students would have said there's nothing to be done about altering the government's stand. What's the point if nuclear war is inevitable? When they all saw On the Beach on TV - the world destroyed by the Bomb - I tried to make it personal. They'd have none of it.
With the abscence of hope, I find an abscence of generosity. We had a course on disease. We contrasted today with the time of the bubonic plague: how medicine developed, how attitudes changed, how supersition was challenged. Inevitably we came to a discussion of AIDS, of its devastating effects, of our fears. This prevailing attitude in class threw me for a loop: people with AIDS deserve to die. Others would say, I want nothing to do with them. There was hardly any show of compassion. They were so cold. Of course, if you're going to be blown up, you have to be dispassionate and not worry about people with disease. I don't think that was true in the sixties.
Yet when I showed them a film on AIDS and the dying, they were disturbed. Some in the class cried openly.
Robert Franke taught honors Science and Society at the University of Arkansas -- Little Rock in the 1980s.
Pictured above is the poster for "On the Beach," a 1959 film mentioned by Franke in his interview with Terkel. "On the Beach" depicts a nuclear war apoclaypse scenario. A review of the film in Variety magainze at the time stated that "The spectator is left with the sick feeling that he's had a view of Armageddon, in which all its contestants lost."
NOW
ARCHIE VEALE
I've been teaching for about almost 25 years - 21 years teaching art. Because of the places where I teach, I'm always working with what is called "at-risk" kids or kids that are in certain situatons. The need is so much the same and the circumstances so much the same until the kids aren't really that different, I'm always addressing the same sets of problems. Reflecting back on what the teacher [Robert Franke] was saying in the book, the outlook of the kids that I'm used to working with is always pretty shady. They don't really have a lot of faith in what has been but they don't necessaily have any real experience with it either. They don't know how things work, so they don't know why they don't work or they don't know how they're supposed to work. Their families are not ideal, their neighborhoods are not ideal, their infrastructure as far as access to whatever types of materials are needed is far from ideal. So they're pretty pessimistic, but the ones who are willing to sit in the classroom, the ones who are willing to accept someone as a teacher, you can reach them and they will be as hopeful as you are because you become a set of possiblities.
I always feel that kids internalize things a little bit differently. For a long time I was teaching kids that had the real expectation that they would not live to see their 21st birthday. I mean that's how they approached the day, so all their decisions about what was going to be done for that day was based on the fact that, well, tomorrow one of us may not be here, because that was a real thing. That hasn't changed because the circumstances haven't changed. But like I was saying, they're open to that not being the case if you can prove that it doesn't have to be, but that's what I think needs to be the teaching moment. I dont think they're disconnected from it, I think they're over it, like this is how it is, this is how it is.
Do you agree with what Mr. Franke says about the sense of hopelessness in the students from the eighties?
I was a highschool student in the early eighties. It's a real thing, but I don't think it's as bad as he was making it out. There's a little bit of hyperbole. There were a lot of people who just believed that things were bad because they just didn't think things could get any better. But I went to an arts school and I went to a school that had a lot of caring students and teachers so we were pretty positive that we were gonna get out and make the world better. But I think a lot of kids don't feel like they have the means to make it better, and they figured you all will ruin it before we have a chance to get our hands on its anyway.
Archie Veale is currently a drawing instructor at the Baltimore School for the Arts and MICA. The work below is a collage of his entitled "Boy".
Click below to hear a snippet of Archie's interview.