A Last Dying Chord? Toward Cultural and Educational Renewal in the South

Abstract

ions are embodied in her Kentucky characters as they live out This content downloaded from 157.55.39.123 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 05:28:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 424 JOE KINCHELOE, WILLIAM F. PINAR, AND PATRICK SLATTERY historical, economic, and cultural shifts. It is in the lived reality of southerners that educational reform must originate, not in any effort to copy school curricula in New York or California. The complicated process of intellectual development will not occur apart from cultural development, and the repressions, denials, ambivalences, and multitemporal realities that characterize contemporary southern culture must be grasped analytically and lived through existentially in order for genuine movement to occur. The task requires more than increasing individual state funding for education to a national average or southern mean. It requires more than introducing teacher evaluations and accountability programs. It will certainly not be achieved by imitating the tendency of northern states to require graduation exams for high school students (see Slattery 1993). It is an ironic tragedy that southern governors in the 1980s and early 1990s all along the political spectrum, including Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Buddy Roemer of Louisiana, and Richard Riley of South Carolina, have been at the forefront of promoting these educational reforms. Like some southern educators, these governors have ignored autobiographical, phenomenological, racial, political, and gender discourses that address the concern for literacy and social competence in the South from a postmodern perspective. The task is ultimately a social psychoanalytic project of self-understanding, self-transformation, and cultural renewal. The tools for such work are present; what is required is a curriculum of southern studies that not only makes these tools available but also assists in the excavation. In our curriculum of southern studies, educators will need to envision themselves simultaneously as paleontologists, archaeologists, and architects of a new New South rather than evaluators, assessors, and statisticians of the status quo. The latter, like the scalawags of Reconstruction days, thwart the emergence of cultural transformation and development in the South today.