About New York: Starting Anew to Liberate Young Minds

January 2, 1999

ABOUT NEW YORK

Starting Anew to Liberate Young Minds

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More 'About New York' Columns by David Gonzalez

By DAVID GONZALEZ

OUR preschoolers clung to Ned O'Gorman on Columbus Avenue near Lincoln Center, when a stranger in the crowd nudged him. "Excuse me," she said impatiently. As Mr. O'Gorman carefully shepherded the four youngsters to the other side, he looked over his shoulder at the woman.
"Relax, dear," he said. "Life goes on."
That it does. Six months ago Mr. O'Gorman was angry and depressed after he was ousted by the trustees of the Children's Storefront School, a Harlem academy he founded and had led since 1966. The trustees, intent on strengthening the curriculum and insuring a smooth transition of leadership, had grown impatient with his unkept promises to retire. Their decision plunged him into a despair he had not felt since his son, Ricardo, died a few years earlier.
"I was fired from the place I had spent almost 33 years in," he said. "I exploded in rage, but I knew that it would be ultimately absurd to continue that because it would possess you."
Instead, he took possession of a ground-floor brownstone apartment barely two blocks from the Children's Storefront on West 129th Street, and opened a preschool. The space has been transformed, with little chairs, lots of books and a half-dozen children. So, too, has Mr. O'Gorman's mood, as he enters the new year with an old idea.
"It's the happiest I've ever been in my life," he said. "When the children come here and I watch them grow, it's astonishing for me. At this point in my life, I'm beginning again this task of liberation, healing and teaching."
Those last three words pop up often in his conversation. People who hear that Mr. O'Gorman is a poet might dismiss those words as romantic notions unrelated to the mundane tasks of reading and writing. Worse, they might sound like anachronistic 1960's slogans. Yet Mr. O'Gorman still holds on to those ideas, as well as his ideals, which he says are just as valid now as they were when he started his original school, with little more than a handful of books and students at a storefront on Madison Avenue. Public schools, he said, are still failing to educate children in poor and minority neighborhoods. The gap between rich and poor, if not the distance between black and white, grows.
"People always want to see change," he said. "They say, 'Oh, Ned, you certainly see changes in Harlem over the last 32 years.' Changes in race relations? No. I see some people rising to the top pretty fast, and they would have anyway because they're bright, ambitious or ruthless. But the poor are still oppressed and shunted aside. They still get the leavings from the table."
At his new one-room school -- named the Ricardo O'Gorman Library and School, after his son -- the children receive a Montessori-style program that develops practical learning skills. It's amazing stuff, he said, that echoes the days when the method was started to teach poor children in Rome.
"They were children who had absolutely no formal structure to their lives," he said. "It was built on their own angelic spirits that had to be snatched away from the oppression of their environments."

HERE he goes again, talking about oppression. He knows that word makes Americans uncomfortable. That's why he uses it when he talks about the failings of politicians, institutions and even others in the community. "That word is not very well liked even when you talk to liberals in America," he said. "There are no oppressed people in America."
But there is no dire dogma when he sits among his students, hunched over in a tiny chair so he can look them in the eye. He is encouraging and playful, yet stern and firm when he has to be.
"Moose," he chided one boy who was playing with his food. "Stop acting like you're from Mars."
Tracie McCord, who helps him at the school, nodded in approval. "They need that discipline," she said. "That direct 'no, this is not acceptable.' When you're little, you need somebody to say no."
Just as they need somebody to say yes. A few days before the school's holiday break, Mr. O'Gorman took the students on their weekly field trip: a visit to Lincoln Center, with a break for cookies and juice at a friend's store off Columbus Avenue. The youngsters scrambled onto the wide plaza outside the Metropolitan Opera House.
"O.K., guys," Mr. O'Gorman said. "You want to run, run. Run!"
He smiled as he watched them take off.
"They're liberated children already," he said. He relaxed. Life went on.

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