Κριτική της κατεστημένης παιδείας: Υποχρεωτική δυσεκπαίδευση

by Paul Goodman, Πωλ Γκούντμαν, Λουκάς Θεοδωρακόπουλος (Translator)

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1977

About the author

Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.

Reviews

[Jordan Kinsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent iconoclastic work, that remains amazingly timely in its fiftieth year. That said, educators are such pessimistic folk. Many of the things that Goodman claims will spell the doom of humanity within ten or twenty years did not turn out to do so, but the very same issues are being claimed now to certainly spell the doom of humanity in the next ten or twenty years. Something tells me that schools will continue to be profoundly broken, students will continue to survive them, and the sun will continue to rise in the morning.

One particularly tasty tidbit:

"A program - e.g. to prevent drop-out - will be, by an attentive teacher, exquisitely tailored to the children he works with; he will have a success. Therefore his program must be standardized, watered down, for seventy-five schools - otherwise it cannot be financed - although now it is worthless."

[Siddiq Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Besides one of the best book titles ever, this is a tour-de-force of how schooling works to degrade the mind together with alternative proposals for real education. 50 years later, it is STILL ahead of its time.