I’m piggybacking on the Mondays with Mike post about civics this week with an essay written by Mel Washburn. Mel is a writer in one of the memoir-writing classes I lead for The Village Chicago, and the essay he came up with for the prompt, “A Song from Your Teenage Years That Sticks With You” talks about music and protest movements 50 years ago.

by Mel Washburn

When I became a teenager in December 1957, I was already weary of the music made for teenagers by singers like Pat Boone, Debby Reynolds and Elvis Presley. Rock and Roll, which had seemed so fresh a few years before, was drowning in sticky-sweet syrup.

The March on Washington, 1965.

I was attracted to a new kind of music, sung by “Peter Paul and Mary” or Pete Seeger or Harry Belafonte. Acoustic music. Truthful music. So-called folk music.

In 1960, Joan Baez released her first album of old English and Scottish ballads. To me and my friends, her music seemed beautiful, almost holy.

In 1962, Bob Dylan released his first album. Soon he was creating sardonic and satirical music that reflected the way my friends and I felt about our times and our society.

In 1964 – my last year as a teenager – Dylan released an album that was the Handel’s Messiah of youth protest: The Times They Are A-Changin’. My favorite song on that album was “When the Ship Comes In,” which describes metaphorically the morning when we, the young, vanquish forever the forces of repression and reaction.

On April 17, 1965 (four months after my 20th birthday) I was standing on the National Mall near the Washington Monument with 20,000 people. Most of us were under the age of 30, and we were there to demand an end to the War in Vietnam. The sky was blue. The day was warm. The crowd was peaceful. We heard speeches from student leaders who had organized the gathering and from Senator Ernest Gruening, who was one of only two senators who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that had started the war. Then Joan Baez stepped to the microphone.

I was standing with two old friends, Norman Vance and Rick Clinebell, and a group of high school girls from Manhattan. We were all thrilled to be there and were doubly thrilled when Ms. Baez began singing our anthem: “When the Ship Comes In.” We listened in rapture as she reached the last stanzas:

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.

Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharaoh’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.

How could it not happen? We were young, we were numerous, we were the future. Eventually the evil, the hateful people would be drowned in the tide of our indignation.

In that moment, I believed it. The girls from Manhattan believed it. The kids who had come to Washington from a hundred different high schools and colleges believed it. We could all see clearly what was wrong with our society and our government.

What we didn’t see was that most people in America liked things just the way they were.

A couple updates on last week’s post:

First, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate students (members of the Graduate Employees Organization) stayed on strike long enough to end up getting what looks to be a fair deal for themselves. Hats off to them and their supporters, which included their undergraduate students and their counterparts up here at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Last week’s post also referenced those Parkland, Florida kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School. They’re punching way beyond their age in pressuring lawmakers to do something about access to guns. Here’s just one impressive example:

Parkland high schoolers like Delaney Tarr, the speaker in the video, have been so polished that people have suggested that they are “crisis actors” hired by political operatives.

But this article at The Washington Monthly suggests another factor: Why are Parkland Students So Articulate? Because They Were Taught Civics in Middle School.

For those of us of a certain age, taking civics class was a staple of public education. Somehow, civics classes and requirements faded over the years. I don’t know if it was the product of the countless flavor-of-the-day education movements, or that the idea was that civics would be blended into other classes.

Whatever, tests have proven that people’s basic civic knowledge has waned, and in Florida, about a decade ago, a couple of legislators from both sides of the aisle took note. From the article:

The roots of this effort go back to 2007, when former Senator Bob Graham (D) and former Congressman Lou Frey (R) realized that adults in the state of Florida scored at or near the bottom of surveys that measure civic health and engagement. The two joined forces and formed the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship to get civics education legislation passed. After a few failed attempts, in 2010 the Florida legislature finally approved, and then-Governor Charlie Christ signed, the Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Education Act, named for the former Supreme Court justice who has had made civic learning and engagement her post-SCOTUS life’s work.

The law became practice starting in 2011. By all accounts, it resembles what I remember from civics:

It mandates a civics course in 7th grade and the incorporation of civic education content into the K-12 reading language arts curriculum. Second, while most states require that students be tested only in reading and math, the O’Connor Act mandates a comprehensive civics test at the end of 7th grade. That sends a message to teachers, administrators, and parents that civics is a core subject that needs to be taken seriously.

One thing that sounds better about the modern day civics class—it’s less lecture, more discussion of issues in context, and more participation in school governance. On that note, please do read the Washington Monthly piece—it includes a nifty online civics quiz (I dare you to take it) and some nifty little online exercises.

Efforts to bring back or augment civics programs have been implemented or are being considered in other states, including here in Illinois.

It’s not a quaint idea—it’s a pretty big deal. The founders of the United States envisioned a vast public education system with, in large part, the mission of equipping citizens to participate in our democracy. And it can only make discourse more constructive and civil.

So, I’ll say something I never thought I’d say: Here’s to Florida.

That’s the title of the talk I’ll be giving for the Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar this Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 12:30 p.m. at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The event is free, and the public is invited. Come on over! I’ll give more details below, but first, some background about the woman the seminar is named for.

Thanks to Vivette Rifkin and other readers, students with visual impairments got their textbooks in audio on a timely basis.

Vivette R. Rifkin (1911 – 2007) founded Educational Tape Recording for the Blind in the 1960s to help her daughter Jill and countless other people with visual impairments succeed at school. Jill was born prematurely and was left with badly impaired vision. In her younger years Jill attended a special school for children who had disabilities, and when she expressed a desire to attend her neighborhood high school and go on to college, her mother helped by recording textbooks for her. When her daughter started at University of Missouri, Mrs. Rifkin and her team started recording textbooks for students all over the country. From the Chicago Tribune:

What made Mrs. Rifkin’s firm especially valuable was its quick turn-around on book orders. Employing a team of volunteers, and recording for five hours a day herself, Mrs. Rifkin would get students and others the books they needed, even lengthy tomes on science and other subjects, in a matter of days.

Vivette Rifkin herself never had the chance to go to college, but in 1999 the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) awarded her an honorary doctorate of humane letters. After Mrs. Rifkin’s death in 2007, her family established the Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Late last year I was contacted by Keenan Cutsforth, Assistant Dean for Advancement at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences, to invite me to meet with him and Dovie Horvitz, another of Vivette Rifkin’s daughters, to talk about the 2018 Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar. Over lunch, Dovie told us that her mother had been recording textbooks well into her 90s. “The University of Illinois was right to give her that degree,” Dovie said with a shrug and a smile. “After reading thousands and thousands of college textbooks, she could have been hired to teach classes there!”

Dovie and I really hit it off over lunch that day — how could you not love a woman named Dovie? After lunch she accompanied me to an elementary school in Deerfield to hear me talk with the kids there, and now I’m looking forward to being with her again at the seminar this Thursday. Here are the details :

The 2018 Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar presented by Beth Finke

Blind in the City: Not as Dark as it Sounds

In her presentation, Beth will outline her decision to move from a small community to a large city after losing her sight at age 26. Through her talk, Finke will examine cultural attitudes about disability, reasonable accommodation issues, and the role disability arts and culture movements play in urban life.

Thursday, March 15
12:30 – 1:45 p.m.

UIC Lecture Center Building F, F006
807 S. Morgan St.

It is an honor to be asked to give a talk for the 2018 Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar. I hope I do it justice. For more information about this event, directions or other inquiries, contact Keenan Cutsforth, Assistant Dean for Advancement at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences, at keenanc@uic.edu or 312-966-1339.

Beth, Justin, and Bob at the studio. (Photo by Peter Zimmerman, producer.)

…don’t despair! our interview with Justin Kaufmann on The Download is already available online. Just link here to the WGN Radio site and hit the button marked “play.”

I’m about to do that myself right now to see how we sound — the interview went by so quickly it’s all a blur! I’ll say goodbye here and leave you with the description from that WGN Radio site. Happy listening!

Award-winning author, teacher, journalist and NPR commentator Beth Finke joins Justin to discuss her work teaching people how to write their memoir. Beth talks about why she decided to teach a memoir writing class, how her students have to read their words and how that is different from just writing them, the challenge of drawing out the stories from her students and her upcoming event at UIC. Beth is joined by one of her students Bob Eisenberg who tells us about why he chose to take Beth’s class, the challenge of writing his story and his life growing up on Maxwell Street.

The Download with Justin Kaufmann airs Monday through Friday from 7 pm. to 11 pm on WGNRadio.

PS: Towards the end of the interview, Bob tells listeners about his own web site, blissbob.com, where you can see his artwork. He’ll soon be publishing his essays from class on that site, too. Check it out.

A few years ago, an architect acquaintance and I were talking about the younger people in our lives. She described some interns she’d employed, their advanced knowledge of technological stuff she and I no longer cared about, and their youthful eccentricities. She wasn’t angry or put out, really, it was a pretty clinical description. And she ended with this simple phrase: “It’s their world now.”

I’ll always remember that. Neither she nor I have one foot in the grave. But we are, as a golfer would say, on the back nine. It’s not all bad being there. I don’t have the visceral desire to keep up with everything technological like I used to, and that’s fine. I’m not as twitchy. I do, however, still try to live up to my responsibility as a citizen—to stay informed, vote (and act if I can figure out a way to do so)—in the interest of what I judge to be in the interest of the nation.

That’s a Russian samovar, which is an ornate tea urn.

I think often about my father and his three brothers, who all served during WWII. They were not in unison in their political beliefs, but I’m afraid they are all rolling in their graves at what’s going on now. I think about my mother, a public school teacher who taught me about what “public” means. It means acknowledging common interests and doing something about it. And her father, a Pennsylvania coal miner who did his part to unionize. It was risky, but if he and others hadn’t, I might not be here right now. He ended up with black lung disease, but likely would have fared even worse without protections negotiated by his union and accompanying safety regulation.

And so, in what I consider to be a dark hour in our country’s history, those kids in Florida and across the country who have more sense than their elders are floating my boat.

So are some young’uns right here in Illinois. When I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), tuition was around $400 a semester. You could reasonably expect all expenses, including a triple dorm room and bad food, to cost you just over $10,000 a year.

Today, you can reasonably argue that UIUC (and many other state schools) are only nominally public institutions. State support has dwindled to less than 20 percent of expenses. Higher Ed inflation over the years is rivaled only by health care costs. There are a lot of reasons, but having been in and around a university for years, I agree with the premise of this Washington Monthly article titled “Administrators Ate My Tuition.”

That aside, my $400 a semester back in the late 1970s bought me a great education and a great time. It introduced me to lifelong friends from around Illinois and around the country. In my basic reporting class, I met this girl, Beth, who always looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. It introduced me to big ideas. I had some great tenured professors. But I also had graduate student teaching assistants who made an enormous impact.

One of those graduate students was my Russian teacher, Phil Cooper, who had been to the Soviet Union on multiple occasions—that was really exotic back then. He had stories—of trading Levis jeans for priceless samovars (I didn’t know what a samovar was until he showed it to me), of rural people who refused to have their photos taken because it would steal their souls, of being shadowed by security. It made the U.S.S.R real flesh and blood. And a woman named Carolyn Marvin who taught the ambitiously titled “History of Communications.” The course was a marvel, starting with cave paintings and tracing not just communications but also the intertwined business history. (Western Union didn’t believe the telephone would amount to much. Oops.) At the time, she alerted us that we were at the precipice of a great revolution, moving from an analog to digital world. This was 1978. I was still using a typewriter.

When Beth and I lived in Urbana as townies, not students, we befriended lots of folks who had come from New York, Virginia, California, Europe, South America, Asia—all over the world—to get their graduate degrees. They came because of the combination of academic quality and a good deal—their education was essentially free and they made a pittance if they agreed to teach all of the snot-nosed undergraduates.

It’s really easy to piss on educators, but I was raised by a public school teacher, so don’t do it around me. Teachers at all levels work hard. And they put up with and have to manage the full gamut of bad human behavior. Those teaching assistants have teenagers on one end, and grizzled university administrators on the other.

So, I’m proud of and fully support the graduate students at my alma mater who are on strike right now. They’re in their second week, and they show no signs of backing down. There are the usual number-based beefs—percentage increases, etc. But the crux is what has, in my mind, been the backbone of a vital system: that free ride in exchange for teaching. The University wants to have discretion about whether these grad students get that waiver.

I love Champaign-Urbana. I love the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with all its warts. To a great extent, the place and the institution made me me. But I can tell you, it wouldn’t be the rich, quirky place I grew to love without drawing fresh, ambitious minds from around the country and the world. And, sorry, but the Urbana Sweet Corn Festival isn’t enough to bring folks to the cornfields the way tuition waivers have.

So, you go all you high schoolers and University of Illinois Graduate Employees’ Union members.

It’s your world now, and from what I can tell, the world’s in good hands.