GOODMAN, PAUL (1911–1972)

Social and educational critic Paul Goodman was referred to by his biographer, Taylor Stoehr, as a "prophet." Revered by the youth movement in the 1960s, his ideas on education and youth were extremely appealing to many people on the political left.

Goodman was born in New York, and raised amid the urban, Jewish intellectual community. He graduated from City College of New York in 1931. Goodman earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, but moved back to New York and lived with his wife Sally until his death. His major works on education were Growing Up Absurd, Community of Scholars, and Compulsory Mis-Education, but he also wrote many articles that dealt with de-schooling, alternative education, mini-schools, and free universities.

The publishing of Growing Up Absurd in 1960 brought Goodman to the public as a social/educational critic. The book was rejected seventeen times before a publisher accepted it, after Norman Poderhotz serialized it in the then leftist Commentary. Goodman spent the last twelve years of his life teaching courses at universities in New York, speaking on campuses throughout the country, and as a visiting professor at San Francisco State University and the University of Hawaii. Goodman never held a tenure track appointment. Growing Up Absurd was adopted in education and sociology courses throughout the country. The book was read as a condemnation of the alienation and oppression in American society and schools, and was a forerunner to the educational criticism of John Holt, Herb Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, and Edgar Friedenberg. For sixties activists, as well as liberal educators, the book provided an analysis of the wrongs of American society and education.

Goodman published Compulsory Mis-Education and Community of Scholars as a single volume in 1962. The books were assigned reading in education courses and initiated thoughtful educational criticism. Compulsory Mis-Education became somewhat of a blueprint for de-schoolers as well as for the alternative school movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. Critical of education from kindergarten through the university, the work led seamlessly into Community of Scholars, which emphasized Goodman's endless quest for community while criticizing the status quo. Goodman spent much of his time in his final years bringing his philosophy on education to college campuses. He was actively antiwar, but he warned student activists of the danger in "action for the sake of action." He continued to write, mostly about educational criticism.

Decentralizing Power, Taylor Stoehr's biographical work on Goodman, is a collection of Goodman's writing on social and educational criticism. The general theme of the work is community life. Goodman's initial discussion of the issues and problems of youth analyzes the youth movement–both idealism and alienation–with the latter being predominant. He speaks of power-beating community, coining the phrase "school monks." The theme of community is also prevalent in his important essay on children's rights. Goodman laments the lack of community and gently criticizes both Maria Montessori and A. S. Neill for educational practices that ask children to become adults too quickly.

At the same time, he lauds Neill's school, Summerhill, for delaying socialization and protecting the wildness of childhood. Goodman discusses schools as therapeutic communities, where children can escape from bad homes and bad cities. Goodman also offers a plan to abolish high schools and to replace them with apprenticeships, academies, youth houses, and therapeutic free schools–in fact, it is a deschooling plan that preceded Ivan Illich's book, Deschooling Society.

Although Goodman was philosophical, and asked searching questions about people's relationship with the world, his educational proposals were practical and simple. As a teacher, his classroom was an interactive laboratory. His proposals asked that education allow the same for young children, adolescents, and adults.

See also: Alternative Schooling; Community Education; Education Reform.

bibliography

Goodman, Paul. 1960. Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in Organized Society. New York: Vintage.

Goodman, Paul. 1962. Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars. New York: Vintage.

Stoehr, Taylor. 1994. Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman's Social Criticism. New York: Black Rose Books.

Alan Wieder

GOODMAN, PAUL 1911-1972

Education critic

Outspoken Critic of the System

Although there were numerous voices in the media during the 1960s criticizing the educational system, none was as outspoken or irreverent as Paul Goodman. Goodman, who studied classics at the University of Chicago and whose doctoral dissertation used Aristotle's Poetics to analyze and explain a body of contemporary literary works, attacked all parts of the U.S. educational system of the 1960s with an eye toward this question: What are the criteria for separating what appears to be from what really exists in academia? He looked at institutional relations as a direct confrontation with other humans, not impersonal establishments, and he staged these confrontations often and loudly. Over the decade Goodman's critiques became more and more political and therefore more and more public; the subsequent arguments he made were notable for their form, their force, and their consequences.

Schooling versus Education

Goodman's strongest argument against the system claimed it was not merely failing to improve students, but it was actually harming them. As he writes in the preface to Compulsory Mis-Education (1964), "I do not try to be generous or fair.… We already have too much formal schooling, and the more we get, the less education we will get." Goodman did not spare any level of schooling. As he explained, "In the organizational plan, the schools play a non-educational role—in the tender grades the schools are a baby-sitting service during the time of the collapse of the old-type family and during a time of extreme urbanization. In the junior and senior grades, they are an arm of the police, providing cops and concentration camps paid for in the budget under the heading 'Board of Education.'" The primary educational purpose of the schools, he argued, was "to provide apprentice training for corporations, government, and the teaching profession itself, and to train the young to adjust to authority." Although he felt that the schools had served as a democratizing force, he believed that with changing conditions they had become "a universal trap," and democracy had begun to look like "regimentation." This educational practice, he argued in a debate with James B. Conant, had "saddled us with an inhumane and uncitizenly society, with slums of engineering without community planning, with unphilosophical medicine, a sheepish electorate and a debased culture. This is the education of the Organization."

Schooling as a Symptom of a Larger Problem

Goodman's criticism of the system was expressed in several major publications during the decade: Growing Up Absurd (1960); Compulsory Mis-Education, and the Community of Scholars (1962); and People or Personnel: Decentralizing and the Mixed System (1965). Widely quoted in the media, he was also regarded as an inspiration for emerging student radicals. As Todd Gitlin, president of SDS, remarked, "We loved him for his bad manners. He was the insider's outsider, enormously learned yet economically and socially a man of the margins." Goodman's assault on the system went beyond a critique of the schools; he extended his attack, arguing, for example, that "A major pressing problem of our society is the defective structure of the economy that advantages the upper middle-class and excludes the lower class. The school people loyally take over this problem in the war on poverty, the war against delinquency, retraining the jobless, and so forth. But by taking over the problem, they themselves gobble up the budgets and confirm the defective structure of the economy." One of Goodman's greatest influences on the decade was to shock the public into considering the real meaning of education. A liberal thinker who disdained liberal political policy, Goodman anticipated many of the problems that would arise with the Great Society's attempts to alleviate the inequities in educational opportunities.

Sources:

Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-Education (New York: Horizon, 1964);

Goodman, Compulsory Mis-Education, and the Community of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books, 1962);

Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Random House, 1960);

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987);

James Edward McClellan, Toward an Effective Critique of American Education (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968).

Goodman, Paul (1911–72), New York psychoanalyst and author, whose writings include Communitas (1947), with his brother Percival, on city planning; Growing Up Absurd (1960), an intense personal and sociological attack on the “eclectic, sensational, …phony” U.S. culture and its baneful effect on youth; The Community of Scholars (1962) and Compulsory Mis‐Education (1964), which criticize contemporary U.S. education; New Reformation (1970), advice to young dissidents; Like a Conquered Province: The Moral Ambiguity of America (1967); several volumes of poetry, gathered in Collected Poems (1974); plays, including Faustina (1949) and The Young Disciple (1955); novels, including The Grand Piano (1949), The Dead of Spring (1950), and Making Do (1963), experimental in form but setting forth the same nonconformist views of his nonfiction; and literary criticism in The Structure of Literature (1954). He had a great following among youth in the 1960s, and his writings continued to be collected posthumously through the 1970s.