COMPULSORY MISEDUCATION

Paul Goodman

When at a meeting, I offer that perhaps we already have too much formal schooling and that
under present conditions, the more we get the less education we will get, the others look at me
oddly and proceed to discuss how to get more money for schools and how to upgrade the schools.
I realize suddenly that I am confronting a mass superstition. The mass superstition in question,
which is the target of this classic and iconoclastic work, is that education can only be achieved by
the use of institutions like the school. Paul Goodman argues that on the contrary subjecting young
people to institutionalized learning stunts and distorts their natural intellectual development
makes them hostile to the very idea of education and finally turns out regimented competitive
citizens likely only to aggravate our current social ills. He prescribes an increased involvement in
the natural learning patterns of family and community and of the sort of relationships fostered in
master-apprentice situations.

A great neurologist tells me that the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. Given the amount of exposure that any urban child gets, any normal animal should spontaneously catch on to the code. What prevents it is almost demonstrable that, for many children, it is precisely going to school that prevents -- because of the school’s alien style, banning of spontaneous interest, extrinsic rewards and punishments. (In many underprivileged schools, the IQ steadily falls the longer they go to school). Many of the backward readers might have had a better chance on the streets

Compulsory Miseducation

Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman was born in New York City in 1911, graduated from City College and received
his PhD. from the University of Chicago. He taught at New York University, the University of
Chicago, Black Mountain College and Sarah Lawrence, and lectured at colleges throughout
America.

He wrote for Anarchy, Commentary, Politics, Liberation, Resistance, the New York Review of

Booksand Win, and his books include novels, verse, plays and literary criticism. He was coauthor

of Gestalt Therapy, and wrote a classic of city planningCommunitas, with his brother Percival

Goodman.

His books of social criticism include Growing Up Upsurd, Utopian Essays and Practical

Proposals, The Society I live in is Mine, Like a Conquered Province, The Moral Ambiguity of

America, People or Personnel. Community of Scholars and New Reformation. He was one of the

contributors to The Dialectics of Liberation (Pelican). Paul Goodman died in 1973.