Free Dance the Eagle to Sleep by Marge Piercy

came in. His crew were learning fast and he was pleased with them. Hewas getting a lot better results out of them than the school ever had. One of his best men was Chuck, who’d never been allowed to take anything more demanding than Life Science.
    Ginny hung around and finally out of embarrassment he put her to work with the crew. It turned out she wasn’t stupid. He could not say why he had assumed that she was. She even asked good questions. He forgot to be worried about how he should act. He treated her like the rest of the crew and that seemed to work.
    Why had he assumed that Ginny was stupid? It was Joe all over again. It was because she came from the Ditch, not from Valley Acres, because she was tracked into “general studies,” which was the dropout track. She wasn’t even good enough for “commercial” which would train her for a typing job—a job she would always think of as temporary if she spent forty years at it. No, she was down in “general,” where she would, if she was persistent enough to hang around to graduation, be able to get a job in a department store or filing or running messages.
    He kept thinking about tracking. He spent time going through records in the principal’s office. Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your social class was established for the rest of your life. Unemployment or welfare or with luck into the mills, for the guys in “general.” Typing and clerking and maybe secretaries or bookkeepers for the girls in “commercial” College and afterward semi-technical or social work or teaching for the “academics” If you weren’t in the academic track and the fast classes, nobody would try to teach you much, just keep you busy.
    Ginny’s parents spoke Polish at home. She had scored down close to the borderline of mental defective in her early intelligence tests. No one had bothered to notice that she had managed to learn English since then, and that here was an alert if bruised intelligence. Chuck made a more than adequate chemist. He would never think up an experiment, but he could follow any formula and he was accurate.
    They were broadcasting by then to other kids, trying to get them to rise and take their schools. Students who had never willingly spoken in class since the third grade made speeches and broadcast appeals. A daily newspaper was run off on the office mimeograph, and there was no shortage of articles and drawings and jokes and editorials. All of them were erupting opinions they wanted to share.
    He kept trying to decide, day to day, if Corey was bright. He was no mushhead. Yet there were holes in Corey’s mind. Corey was profoundly ignorant. In twelve years of school, he had learned nothing about biology,physics, chemistry, music, literature, art, psychology, anthropology, or sociology. His history was a series of brightly lit counter-myths, tableaux of great Indian leaders and peasant uprisings and guerrilla struggles, a Manichaean war stretching into the dim past. Corey had a sense of politics, of what made people move. He had a facility with public speaking. His record had enough nasty comments on it to keep him out of anyplace he might have wanted to go.
    Billy made his first public speech about tracking and the school records. (His own had a note from the principal saying not to pass on information about his bad temper and therapy, because Franklin High needed the admission to a good school for their records.) At the end of his speech, it was voted to burn the dossiers. He was stunned and exalted before the fire.
    It was still a school. Classes met most times of the day and night. They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use. People proposed classes they wanted to give or take. Lots came under the general heading of Who Am I, Where Do I Come From, Where Are We Going? They had learned nothing real in prefab history or civics classes. Corey and Billy between them taught a course in American History that got the kids