Important things couldn't be discussed at school. Important things aren't
taught at school. It would be more of an education to walk through east
Palo Alto, if you are a middle-class white kid, because you would see life in
America - which has nothing to do with what is in the history books.
(Evergreen, June, 1971 p. 23)

This Statement (assuming it refers to school textbooks) echoes what we have
heard before about school hindering the discussion of important topics. The
aspect of economic inequality is added, and the alternative is not simply discus-
sion but seeing the living conditions of the poor, up close.

Although Baez was active with Caezar Chavez and the Farmworkers Union
when they fought for better pay and working conditions, Baez' focus has never
been mainly on changing economic conditions in america alone:

I feel distant from the cause of any particular minority group in the sense
that when I throw myself into 'the cause' for me it is that of mankind. . .
whenever you talk about a deprived group like the brown or the blacks, it is
assumed that they should have what everybody eise has. But in this society, if
all browns and blacks had what the whites had we would be in a more hide-
ous Situation than we are in now. If they get into the stream of what is now
America, then they too would be exploiting others, say in Latin America,
Vietnam, Africa. . . In the search for equality our vision must go further than
just wanting what other people have had and what we have been deprived
of. (Evergreen, June 1971 pp. 21-22)

Although this quote rests on a very unsure base, namely the assumption that

workers, so long as they do not increase their Standard of living, are non par-

ticipants in exploitation, it does show why Baez' critique of schooling has rela-

tively little to say on the subject of selection and the inequalities that that

selection may perpetuate or produce.

D. Lethal Legitimation

The school System and formal education as a whole, according to Baez, are
not simply in need of reform so that they can actually produce what they
promise (e.g. equality of opportunity). She sees those Systems functioning all
too well in stablizing the Status quo, in providing people trained in passively
accepting the nation-state. As an "anarchist pacifist" (a description she has used
to define her position on several occasions, e.g. in EBQ, The Bridge or the Gap),
Baez sees the existence of the nation-state as equivalent to the preparation for
and the continuation of warfare. It is also the nation-state which demands sub-
serviance and a limiting of the active problem-solving potential of its members:

184