Imagining the Future: Growing Up Working Class; Teaching in the University

Educational Foundations, Summer 2003 by Hursh, David

Noting how Mills and Greene linked their own personal problems with public issues, I reflected on how formal education rarely helps people make those connections. As a sophomore I read Paul Goodman's books, Growing Up Absurd (1960) and Compulsory Miseducation (1964), in which he criticized education for preparing students to fit into society and the workplace rather than to critique and reform it. Goodman denounced the educational system for not providing students with skills to analyze and change the world but, instead, "guaranteeing the right character" (1964, p. 21). It is in schools, he wrote, that

our citizens learn that life is inevitably routine, depersonalized, venally graded; that it is best to toe the mark and shut up; that there is no place for spontaneity, open sexuality, free spirit. Trained in the school, they go on to the same quality of jobs, culture, politics. This is education, mis-education, socializing to the national norms and regimenting to the national 'needs.' (1964, p. 23)

Goodman echoed Dewey's criticism that education focused on the needs of business and provided narrow job training in the vocational track and the narrow academic focus in the college prep track (Weltman 2000, p. 184). He criticized the then New York Commissioner of Education for stating that: "The educational role is, by and large, to provide - at public and parents' expense - apprentice-training for corporations, government, and the teaching professions itself. And also to train the young to handle constructively their problems of adjustment to authority" (1964, p. 18). Goodman detested the idea that education should be preparation for the needs of corporations and government, for fitting "people wherever they are needed in the production system" (1960, p. 4).

Goodman argued that the emphasis on meeting the needs of the bureaucracy caused many of our difficulties with adolescents. Schools offered adolescents few "worthwhile experiences." Further, he deplored the post-war culture of production and consumption that "dried up the spontaneous imagination of ends and the capacity to invent ingenious expedients" that "disintegrated communities," and "destroyed human scale" (1962, p. 10). Such acceptance made it difficult to offer proposals to change schools and society. Consequently, he felt it was increasingly difficult to propose alternatives: "The structures and folkways of our society are absurd, but [most people feel] they can no longer be changed. Any hint of changing them disturbs our resignation and rouses anxiety" (1962, p. 6).

Educational institutions rarely assist and mostly undermine our ability to connect our personal or private troubles and the larger social structure. This is, as I have argued elsewhere (Hursh, 2003), because modern capitalist society assumes a consensus has emerged around valuing economic production and consumption over everything else, linked with instrumental rationality.

Yet Goodman was not quite so pessimistic in other publications. In Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (1962) he urged us to create alternative visions of the future. Similarly, Greene calls for a space of dialogue and possibility. Realizing that it is not enough to critique social inequities but to change them (Marx, 1932), I took seriously Goodman's proposal that we develop communities and educational institutions that would connect the personal with the public and provide spaces for democratic dialogue. Further, as a working-class male I found more reward in creating institutions and working alongside others than in theorizing possibilities.