Campbell F. Scribner's "A is for Arson"

Campbell F. Scribner is Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. He is the author of The Fight for Local Control and the coauthor of Spare the Rod.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education, and reported the following:

From page 99:

If the true goal of education is for the student to recognize herself as autonomous, to discover the meeting point between the world and the individual life, then education cannot be conceived of simply as linear growth and the mastery of skills. It requires the development of interiority, the suspension of certainty, and the possibility of negation, which Sartre (following Heidegger) associates with destruction.

Readers will learn a lot by turning to page 99 of A is for Arson! Most importantly, that while it is a work of academic history—with insights into evolving interpretations of property destruction and various attempts to control it—the book has a deeply existentialist bent. Whereas Part I examines school property damage as a form of politics and resistance (by students, parents, taxpayers, and sometimes teachers), that argument is unlikely to surprise critical readers. Page 99 comes in the introduction to Part II, when the voice and structure of the book take an unexpected and wholly original turn. Four essays blend historical and philosophical insights to explore the experience of vandalism in the past and ask whether breakage or defacement themselves had any educational value. The essays use thinkers such as Heidegger, Jaspers, Arendt, and Nietzsche to analyze doodles in nineteenth-century textbooks, initials carved into desks in the 1920s, smutty messages on bathroom walls in the 1960s, and orgies of window-breaking in the 1970s. In each case, the essays offer conjectural arguments about the development of selfhood outside of the official curriculum. Thus, A is for Arson tries to take children seriously not only as historical agents who exercise power and engage in political struggle, but as individuals coming into being through emotion and wonder.

Learn more about A Is for Arson at the Cornell University Press website and follow Scribner on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: The Fight for Local Control.

--Marshal Zeringue