Deschooling Society

The Education Debates Deschooling Society Lister Sinclair I’m Lister Sinclair. This is Ideas, with Part 7 of David Cayley’s series “The Education Debates.” Earlier programs in this series have dealt with the pros and cons of school reform; and, in these discussions, it’s simply been taken for granted that mass compulsory schooling is the proper way to educate. Tonight, we change tacks and put the institution itself into question. As American writer Paul Goodman once said, “It doesn’t necessarily make sense, just because we do it.” This new leg of our journey through education begins with a look back to the 1960s, a time when Goodman and others made radical criticisms of mass education and proposed alternatives. Along with Goodman, you’ll hear from Ivan Illich, the author of Deschooling Society, and from John Holt, whose book Teach Your Own became the manifesto of the home schooling movement. “The Education Debates,” Part 7, by David Cayley. David Cayley There’s a passage I’ve never forgotten in Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, a book he published in 1960. He’s writing about the use of the word “like” in the lingo of the beatniks. “Why,” he asks, “would someone say they were going to, like, Chicago?” Goodman’s answer is that it’s a way of hedging your bets in an increasingly artificial, increasingly manipulated world. Chicago might be only a false front, a movie set, a simulation. Better to play it safe and only admit that you’re going to something like Chicago. Paul Goodman lived from 1911 to 1972, mainly in his native New York. He was a poet, a novelist, a playwright, an essayist, a public intellectual and one of the inventors of gestalt therapy. Growing Up Absurd, subtitled Problems of Youth in the Organized System, was his first widely-read book; and it marked his emergence as a kind of Dutch uncle to the youth movements of the sixties. Four years later, he published Compulsory Miseducation. There he wrote, “It is simply a superstition, an official superstition and a mass superstition, that the way to educate the majority of the young is to pen them up in schools during their adolescence and early adulthood.” Schooling, he argued, had become nothing more than a technique of socialization and could no longer help most of the young in their search for love, meaning and vocation. Paul Goodman’s name has now faded into that middle distance of writers no longer current, not yet classic. But in the middle years of the 1960s, he appeared as a modern Socrates. Socrates, in ‘The Apology’, compares Athens to a large but lazy horse and himself to a stinging fly. “Every day,” he says, “I never cease to settle here, there and everywhere, rousing, persuading and reproving every one of you.” So it was with Goodman. For a few years, he gave as many as a hundred public lectures a year, speaking mainly at colleges and universities, but also at conferences, demonstrations, and protest meetings. Everywhere he went he denounced big education and argued for more vivid, more varied, less institutionalized ways of growing up. In the spring of 1965, just after the outbreak of the Free Speech Movement, one of the first great eruptions of the New Left, he lectured at the University of California at Berkeley and he told his listeners that most of them ought not to be enrolled in a university. Paul Goodman About 50 per cent of the people here in an academic environment ought not to be here in this academic environment. Not that they can’t do the work — because they obviously can do the work or they wouldn’t have gotten in — but because this isn’t the best way for them to be educated. They really couldn’t care less about academic studies. Another 30 per cent, I’m afraid, are at this school just because, since their early childhood, they’ve never done anything but go to school. And anything else seems utterly daring and dangerous. They’ve done lessons for five days a week since six years old, and they will do four more years of lessons here. And then they will, God save us, go to graduate school for three more years, and then finally, they will be faced with having to do something 72 The Education Debates Deschooling Society else but lessons. But you see, this is taking us up to 80 per cent. Now then, I’d say there’s another 15 per cent who tend to be very good scholars in a examination-passing way and a kind of mastering-the-subject way. They are young people who have their minds set on some kind of professional career which requires a certain amount of know-how and learning certain things in order to get on to the next step. And they do their lessons well. They’re well-motivated, et cetera. They obviously ought not to be in a community of scholars. I mean, if it’s physics they’re interested in, they should be apprenticed directly to General Dynamics, and not have the state or parents pay the apprentice training, which ought to be paid by the ultimate employer, since that’s what they’re after. Then there are those who really profit by an academic environment. These are not necessarily the brightest. They include some of the brightest, but they include people who would be C or D students, but who really are helped to grow up by a kind of philosophic inquiry and thorough study. And they’re bookish and all of that kind of thing. See, they’re the kind of people who, in the old days when we didn’t have this mass education, formed the solid body of the colleges, surrounded by the elite group who had to go because it was upper class to go. These are the real student types. Now, I’m not making an elite judgment. I don’t mean the real student types are the smartest or the best in any way whatever except in this line of being students. There are others who are bright. Take my brother as an instance. He quit school at the seventh grade. He’s now a very distinguished architect. If he had had to go to school he would never have become an architect. It would have ruined him. And he’s a very bright guy and a great teacher, as a matter of fact. He’s now a professor of architecture. But he just was not bookish or scholarly. He would have hated it. He would have turned out to be a juvenile delinquent, and that’s for sure, if he had had to go to school. David Cayley Paul Goodman’s older brother Percival had dropped out of school at age twelve. He found work in a New York architect’s office and sought education as it became necessary to advance in his profession. This was exactly how Paul Goodman thought education ought to proceed for those not of a studious temperament. Sending everyone through ten to twenty years of school, he reasoned, has two catastrophic effects. The first is that it corrupts the proper purpose of liberal studies, which have always been understood as a free, non-compulsory pursuit. Our very word for school derives from a Greek word, schole, meaning leisure. The second is that it is futile and vastly expensive to try to teach people what they have no motive for learning. In his Berkeley lecture, he illustrated the second point with a story. Paul Goodman Let me give you an instance. I have a daughter who is a very bright cookie. Now, she went to a very small college, Bard College. She was in Political Science, which is something she was really passionately concerned with. She’s got a great sense of indignation, is a splendid journalist and likes political science in all its aspects. But after two years she had gone through the tiny faculty and they told her, “Suzie, we’ll have to change your department because, you know, you’re wasting your time here and you either have to leave the school and go elsewhere to a bigger place or change your department.” She chose to change. So they put her in Mathematics. They thought that the change would be good. Now, Suzie’s a very bright cookie and, lo and behold, she graduated with the mathematics prize. All right. The next year, my boy was beginning at Bronx Science and he asked Suzie to help him with an algebra problem. And she looked at it, and she couldn’t do it, and I was struck and said, “But Suzie, you have that beautiful book of logs and sines and cosines in there, leather-bound, that you won. And now you don’t seem to know what a quadratic equation is.” And she didn’t know what a logarithm was. But she said, “Well, that’s nothing. I never had any interest 73 The Education Debates Deschooling Society in it, but I like to please, and he was a very nice man, and so he told it to me, and I did the homework, and I gave him back the answers, and, of course, I did very well on the tests, because I always do. But I was resolved from the very first moment that this would go in one ear and out the other, and it has.” And she was perfectly happy. Now, I think that was an insult to the teacher.

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