Egleston Community High School in Jamaica Plain, an impoverished and broken-down Boston suburb populated mainly by Latinos and African Americans, was where Murray Levin, a retired Boston University political scientist, had gone to work, trying, as he puts it, to "teach and feel useful." Levin set out to teach social sciences; what he achieved was not only an awakened desire for knowledge among kids who had been routinely discouraged in that pursuit, but an insight into a world view derived from their everyday alienation.