BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : An Argument in Favor of the Public Education System : THE POWER OF THEIR IDEAS: Lessons for America From a Small School in Harlem <i> by Deborah Meier</i> , Beacon Press, $20, 202 pages

If we are facing something that looks a lot like social revolution in America--a whole generation of young people at risk of failure, despair and violence--then the front-line of the struggle is the classroom at the public school down the street.

Where else do we have a real chance of rescuing our children from the hopelessness that expresses itself in drug and alcohol abuse and open warfare on the streets? Where else will young men and women of diverse backgrounds learn to recognize each other as fellow citizens rather than race or class enemies?

And, amid all the talk of vouchers and character schools, where are the visionaries who will show us how to rescue the public schools from well-intended but mostly anxiety-driven “reformers” who see the private school as the only place to properly educate our children--or, at least, the children of those of us who can afford to pay the tuition?

Well, Deborah Meier is one.

Meier has earned a reputation as something of an educational miracle worker for her accomplishments in founding and running alternative public schools in New York City, where parents and students are literally empowered to make choices about the quality of their schooling. Now she’s out and about on the think-tank circuit, and “The Power of Their Ideas” can be seen as a fiery manifesto of Meier’s plan for the salvation of public education.

“It turns out that public schools, in new and different forms, are the best vehicle for nourishing the extraordinary uncapped capacities of all our children,” declares Meier. “The question is not, ‘Is it possible to educate all children,’ but rather, ‘Do we want to do it badly enough?’ ”

Meier spent some 30 years as a public school teacher in Chicago and New York, and her long service in the classroom only enhances her credibility as an advocate for genuine reform in public education.

“Defending public education is difficult” she concedes, “but the best defense is by example.”

So Meier describes one experiment in public education that has succeeded. Central Park East (CPE), a cluster of four alternative schools in Harlem. The problems that CPE tries to solve--the problems of race, poverty, overcrowding--are typical enough, but the success of its children is both surprising and heartening: Some 96% of the first seven classes to complete elementary school at CPE went on to graduate from high school, and two-thirds proceeded to college.

What makes the difference at CPE, Meier explains, is a principled but also open-minded effort to find out what really works in the education of children.

“Without a radical departure from the authoritarian model,” Meier argues, “one strips the key parties of the respect which lies at the heart of democratic practice and good schooling.”

Respect, Meier suggests, is the secret of success in public education. “Since students view the school as theirs, vandalism is rare and artwork abounds on otherwise cracked walls,” writes Meier about the CPE campus. “Bathrooms are functional. Toilet stalls have doors. Physical violence is almost unknown.”

And the lofty ideals that Meier endorses turn out to yield the kind of results that most educational reformers seem to care about--grades, graduation from high school, success in higher education and the work world.

“We don’t know what most accounts for their success--actual academic skill, work habits, attitudes, or perhaps just the capacity to relate to adults, to negotiate complexity and independence,” Meier concludes.

Meier is not fooled by nostalgia for the good old days of public education, which she writes off as a case of selective amnesia: “The myth of a golden educational past allows many of us to ignore the reality of inadequate commitment that has crushed expectations--and rekindled racism--for more than three decades.”

Nor is she seduced by pretty stories of opening up private schools to the public at large through such gimmicks as tuition vouchers or charter schools: “Giving up on public schooling,” she argues, “would mean leaving our nation’s children in the hands of unknown baby-sitters with unknown agendas.”

What private school lacks--and what Meier regards as the single highest calling of public education--is a place to learn the skills of citizenship in a troubled and tumultuous country where people of different races, religions and degrees of affluence must encounter each other every day.

“The Power of Their Ideas” is ostensibly a book about the survival of public education, but it is really nothing less than a plan for the survival of freedom and equality in the United States. As Meier argues so compellingly, there is really no distinction--public education is the place where democracy is nurtured and preserved, and the crisis in American public education is not less than a crisis in American democracy.

“Schools embody the dreams we have for our children,” writes Meier. “All of them. These dreams must remain public property.”