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Teddy Auberle
Dominic Nanni
ENG 3020 Writing & Community
Grace Lee Boggs Book Review
08 March 2018

Grace Lee Boggs and the Modern Revolution

In Grace Lee Boggs’ The Next American Revolution, Boggs recounts the history of revolution in

the United States from her perspective as an Asian woman living through every major event from the

inception of the 20th century until the election of the first black president. The ideas for a modern

revolution that she proposes have been built from those experiences of working in the major revolutionary

and activist movements for most of recent history. While most of the ideas that Boggs proposes for the

modern revolution seem ideal, a number of them can be unrealistic and in some cases naïve.

One of the passages in her book mentions a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that implies

that the younger generation is at war with their elders, and in many ways, I would say that holds true

today(95). Some of the ideas that Boggs has, specifically on materialism and education, are largely

out of touch with the modern reality. On materialism, for example, Boggs says that we would all be

better off if we were to get rid of such things as credit cards all together(106). While that spirit may

have been reasonable and even popular in the activist communities Boggs grew up in, that notion is

simply not possible now. The United States was in a much more fluid economic time when she was

forming her politics. She graduated college before the invention of the early credit cards, and even

then, she wouldn’t have been able to have one independent of her husband until she was almost 60

years old(McLaughlin). Given the fact that she wasn’t inducted to the modern cashless culture until

much later than most people who were alive when she wrote this book, her notion that credit is

unnecessary is perfectly reasonable. Nowadays, however, almost all monetary exchange happens

online. Most people are paid directly to their credit account and there’s more websites that encourage

online banking than there were banks when Boggs was growing up. The notion that all of that could
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be done away with at this stage is nigh on impossible, and to suggest otherwise betrays an antiquated

way of thinking.

That was just one example of the difference that the age gap between Boggs and the majority

of society can make. The huge shift to digitization that has occurred almost completely in the last

twenty years or so has created an insurmountable rift between the older generations and the younger

ones. Whereas computers were reserved only for the intellectual elite just forty years ago, today

every child older than 10 has a device more advanced than the first moon landing equipment shoved

in their pocket. Children and young adults growing up now know no world before the information

age, and often have trouble identifying even mainstream equipment that was used just a few years

ago, such as floppy disks.

This gap not only points to larger differences in ideals and politics in the world today, but

also the idea that Boggs spends most of the book focusing on, that of community. Community in her

day meant a group of people in an area that knew each other and supported each other. To today’s

generation, community means anyone who has something in common with you, wherever they are in

the world. With the globalization of citizens now, there is no limits on the people that you can

interact with and learn from, and Boggs’ proposals ignore those possibilities. One example of this is

with education. Boggs insists that the best way to learn is to help create things and learn from the

elders in your community. With the ease with which we can access information in the modern day,

however, the idea that the elders in your immediate area can teach you more than you can learn in a

classroom or even just searching the internet is quite frankly absurd. If I want to learn about sea

turtles, for example, it would be easier and more accurate to go to the global online community for

answers than it would be to ask an elder in my community, seeing as no one in my community has

any reason to have an intimate knowledge of that topic. Or, more locally, say I was looking for

information on new housing projects in Detroit. People in my community might not have accurate or
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updated information, and I couldn’t just go to a library to look it up either. It is, however, posted in

multiple places online for me to see. The ease of productivity that the information age allows makes

it naïve to think that there is any other way that could mirror the usefulness of instant access to

information. Teachers are included in this as well, since most curriculums and teaching plans aren’t

created in a vacuum, but with a combination of ideas and knowledge from teachers everywhere. One

community elder working alone cannot supplant the wealth of information possessed by a multitude

of teachers working together.

Speaking of education, Boggs does plenty to disregard the current education system, but

offers few solutions. She does propose the community gardens, but those can’t provide the

comprehensive education that schools do. Community gardens have no way of producing the

surgeons, engineers, and architects, for instance, that are required in a modern society. Sure, children

can grow up knowing how to make their own food, but what about the textile engineers required for

to make their clothing or the architects required to build their house or dentists for when they get a

cavity? There is a certain level of knowledge that is required for such skilled jobs that can’t be

provided through community learning. She does propose at one point to simply shorten the school

year, but without a radical change in the type of work we do in our schools that would do nothing but

make it harder for kids to learn the necessary information for the rest of their life. Programs in

countries with higher education ratings, such as Finland, have longer school years and offer state

mandated curriculums, but they allow the teachers to meet those requirements in any way they see

fit, from their teaching style to the textbooks they use. Students don’t have homework, but have

longer school days to account for all the things they learn – which ranges from music to science to

languages to textiles and metalworking. The classrooms are rarely more than twenty students large.

Their education always starts with a strong basis in literacy(Hancock). All of these things are proven

to improve learning in all areas of life, whether inside of school or outside, whereas community
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gardens have been tried and tested for years with the only concrete, testable results being science

scores, which improved (“Benefits”).

In order for students to get a well-rounded education, you must offer them other avenues

outside of just planting their own food, since that leaves out so many other aspects of life that should

be taught. The biggest roadblocks to education in the United States today are lack of freedom for

instructors and lack of funding for the schools themselves, not the lack of homegrown carrots. Most

students, myself included, learn much more from college prerequisites than from years of high

school, all because of the frequent standardized testing that requires a strict teaching plan with very

little room for the instructor to customize the environment for how they teach best and how they

believe students learn best. The lack of funding also plays a part by cramming too many students into

a single classroom because the school can’t afford to pay for more teachers. What this country needs

isn’t necessarily more community gardens, but a system more to the core of what Boggs was trying

to convey, a system that treats students like individuals rather than products to be turned out into

society(90).

Part of Boggs’ plan with community gardens, however, was beyond education and more

towards building communities. While a community garden may be a great start towards that, the

building can’t end there. Her proposals to great these great communities stopped after the community

had created the garden, with no more suggestions as to where to go next. There must be some sort of

follow-up or the garden itself will be useless, nothing more than a relic of lost initiative. The Detroit

Summer programs, for instance, or the Catherine Ferguson Academy – both shining examples of her

ideals brought into the real world, but within a few years both fell apart. The one initiative that she

created that still survives today is the Earthworks program, and their main source of survival is not

their community garden, but the other programs they have for the community such as bike repairs.

They expanded their reach and kept trying to interact with the community in new ways, and in doing
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so kept themselves alive long after the other static programs. The garden cannot be the beginning and

end of the community outreach. There should be more substance to it than just planting some seeds.

These initiatives have to keep an eye on what the community needs and figure out ways to help

alleviate that need or to solve it entirely. Only then can these community building projects survive,

by reaching out and knowing the people that they are serving and who are serving them.

In conclusion, Boggs’ criticisms on common leftist ideas is that they are “narrow [and]

static,” when in fact her own ideas have evolved into the same(47). While her ideas ay have been

revolutionary and new at the time of inception, by now they have fallen out of the revolutionary track

and are simply underdeveloped. The biggest barriers in the way of Grace Lee Boggs’ “(r)evolution”

is that her ideas haven’t grown to fit the times, and are much more suited to the world that Grace

grew up in than the world that we are growing up in now. The only way to achieve the utopia Grace

talked and wrote and dreamed about is to take her ideas as just that, ideas, and expand on them to fit

the modern world. Make them bigger and better and more inclusive of the globally social world we

live in. Incorporate social media, widespread information, apps. Make it something that people will

strive to be a part of and make your community one to look up to - “A city of hope rather than a city

of despair.” Grace Lee Boggs’ revolution is just the start. Where we go from there is where history

will be made.
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Works Cited

McLaughlin, Katie. “5 things women couldn't do in the 1960s.” CNN, Cable News Network, 25 Aug.

2014, www.cnn.com/2014/08/07/living/sixties-women-5-things/index.html.

“Benefits of a School Garden.” NC Cooperative Extension News, guilford.ces.ncsu.edu/sgn/benefit/.

Hancock, LynNell. “Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution,

1 Sept. 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-

49859555/.