Paul Goodwin
(1911-1972)
The crucial question is not what ought to be taught, but whether the teaching-and-learning makes any difference. Is it committed or merely "academic"?
The Community of Scholars, Goodman, 1962
Just above the statue of radical progressivism are the wings of Paul Goodman, hovering hawk-like over the educational reform movement of the 1990's. In Goodman can be found all the language that prefigures the work of Jean Lave and other cognitive and situated learning specialists of the last twenty years.
The city as school was not a slogan for him. It meant as teacher: locating and being in touch with the multiple sources of culture in a community. There is no other way for them to grow up to be free citizens, except by discovering that culture is after all natively their own; useable by them....
Like Debbie Meier he helps us imagine what a good school is like...full of human beings.
Growing Up Absurd, Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals belong on the table next to The Lives of Children and Kohl's The Tattooed Man" for giving us ways to imagine what good schools are like when they are meaningful places full of powerful adults and children.
He is a kind of Socratic figure whose books are almost like literary interrogations not only of "schooling" but the big picture of life in the middle of the 20th Century. And like Socrates, he too will lose favor in the courts of Athens, and isolation will be his hemlock. In his idealism is the faith in liberal education and the capacity of every citizen to be free and exercise initiative in the world.
The body of his work Growing Up Absurd 1956; Compulsory Mis-Education The Community of Scholars 1962; Communitas and Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals read today as if they were a handbook for the Restructuring and Essential School movements. There is no right education except growing up into a worthwhile world.