Radical education: What went wrong?

Abstract

Disappearance of the educational radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s has brought a collective, albeit silent, sigh of relief from the educational establishment. Radicals launched vitriolic attacks education claiming that schools irreparably harmed children and laid the foundation for society's destruction. In their introduction to Radical School Reform, Beatrice and Ronald Gross wrote, isn't that our schools fail to achieve their stated purposes, that they are not exalted places their proponents proclaim. Rather they are not even decent places for our children to be. They thwart, they strifle children's natural capacity to learn and grow healthy.1 In How Children Fail, John Holt stated that the demands placed children are trivial, dull, limited, and simply bore the children. As a result, he concluded nearly all children in school fail. Generally, radical critics fell into one of two camps: those calling for outright abolition of school as was known and those waxing outrage at what schools and teachers did to the individual child. Abolitionists concluded that as institutions schools were bent promoting competition, perpetuating racism, and expressing economic imperialism. Paul Goodman emerged as spokesman for the abolitionists. Goodman concluded that schools promoting generally worthwhile learning should be replaced by training centers designed to provide specific occupational skills. In Compulsory Mis-education Goodman states that on the whole education must be voluntary rather than compulsory, for no growth in freedom occurs except by intrinsic motivation.2 While Goodman stressed alternatives to school involving opportunity to learn the job, Everett Reimer'sSchool Is Dead and Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society recognized need for abstract learning and called for a series of learning networks where such knowledge could be gained.3 Although differences existed among Goodman, Illich, and Reimer, they formed the nucleus of the movement to dismantle the entire school system and to replace it with a system of free choice educational alternatives. Jonathan Kozol, in Death at an Early Age, Herbert Kohl, 36 Children, and James Herdon, The Way It Spozed to Be were among those portraying inner city schools as tragically destroying children. Teachers were depicted as inhuman and uncaring individuals functioning in an authoritarian system. Together the system and its teachers combined to degrade students