“When I became a teacher,” Zinn explains in You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, “I could not possibly keep out of the classroom my own experiences”: So on the day of Zinn’s birth, it continues to be important not only to read and listen to Zinn, but also to act on Zinn, for it is action, after all, that Zinn lived and called for. In that context, K-12 education and university education suffer the same ultimate failure found in journalism, a flawed pursuit of objectivity, the faux-neutral pose of representing both sides. University professors-such as Zinn-also face disciplinary and public expectations of objectivity, dispassion-their work as public intellectuals either shunned or unrecognized. Historically and currently, teacher remain under the demand that their teaching-and even their lives-remain neutral, not political. It is his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, for me, that speaks to the enduring power of Zinn’s metaphor, particularly for teachers. His life and career spanned the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty-first.
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