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THE WAY IT IS: Fifteen boys describe life in their neglected urban neighborhood by John--Ed. Holland

THE WAY IT IS: Fifteen boys describe life in their neglected urban neighborhood

By

Pub Date: April 2nd, 1969
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World

What began as a school project for ghetto youngsters has been coordinated into a book by their teacher, and the product--a photographic neighborhood tour with captions--is a revealing reflection of the boys' milieu. Financed by Eastman Kodak and supervised by Columbia's Horace Mann-Lincoln Institute of School Experimentation, these boys from Williamsburg's (Brooklyn) I.S. 49 apparently enjoyed their Instamatics and snapped whatever they saw--friends cutting school, bums lying in the street, local junk piles, a three-year-old and her new dress, a burned tenement, and numerous examples of rooftop culture. Their comments, primarily content-oriented, nevertheless record the kind of offhand insights of the excerpts in Kohl's 36 Children and Stephen Joseph's recent paperback The Me Nobody Knows: Children's Voices from the Ghetto. Although kids at I.S. 49 will have a field day finding themselves, children in other ""neglected neighborhoods"" have seen it all before (and will probably chafe at the designation); and their better-heeled contemporaries may find this introduction to a different environment vivid in its depictions yet wanting because the project was concerned with ""The Way"" and not the why. But adults in and out of the school systems can learn a lot from it.