A b e c e d a r i a n

It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation and craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, and we have it available as our own.

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He was never at home in the world. His ideas about community belonged on the streets of 4th Century Athens or the Venice and Florence of Da Vinci in a time of scholarship and chivalry. It is the culture I am myself trapped in, he would say, and cannot think apart from. His obituary in the New York Times would have pleased him. It notes how his writings required 21 categories in the Catalogue of the New York City Public Library's Main Branch. From Education to Constitutional Law, Applied Linguistics to Drama. When he wrote "Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals" he'd walk the streets of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx to understand what the Greeks meant by Communitas: the ability to live in a social world and fulfill our membership as social beings. He would build a life's work around these key words: civitas and communitas (community and civic culture.) He'd ride the #6 train in early April, as the Bronx would pass by like a poem of Lorca's, when the first forsythias emerged and the Grand Concourse was a flood of yellow blossoms to observe the wide boulevards full of strolling couples; elders holding court from beach chairs on the corners; playgrounds full of children and congregations of bluejays; the ornate five story buildings with courtyards where people hung their wash and gossiped. His sociology would hold the health of a community depended on maximizing face to face encounters. To beautify our cities, the first step is to change the attitude with which people take their cities. His life work was in becoming a citizen.

1968. When he wrote "The Present Moment in Education", Charles Mingus composed and performed "Haitian Fight Song" at the Village Vanguard, an ode of rage and fury to the efforts of people to rid the world of injustice and make the schools safe for listening to Duke Ellington. The year that he wrote "The Present Moment in Education", a second Kennedy was shot live on television; Martin Luther King would bleed to death on a motel balcony in Memphis; the streets and universities of America were in upheaval; Paris would come to a standstill; a young mayor of New York would walk the looted streets of an angry Harlem without an overcoat in a relentlessly cold February dawn to call for calm; and the thump of police sticks could be heard around the world smashing skulls at the Democratic convention in Richard Daley's Chicago.

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1968. The year he wrote "The Present Moment in Education" fire was being taken by the young, but they had no idea what to do with it. Like Dewey, he sought the health of democracy in the interactions of civic life: where compassion, honor, integrity, and justice were practiced. After listening to Richard Nixon's inaugural address in 1968, he said, the simplest reason that cities are ungovernable, is that there aren't enough citizens.

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He dreamed backwards into a future rooted in community culture: where there was citizenly initiative, a life more leisurely with a sense of community and civic culture...free choice, lively engagement and social action. He was an idealist in the same way Whitman announced, full of democratic vistas. It was said he played handball every weekend on the Lower East Side. He was more intent on the business of life than any other pursuit. The urban America he dreamed of was landscaped on the cultural and political life of the community. His sociology was structuring all of society and the whole environment as educative. The polis. He smoked peyote with his brother Percival in the dessert above Taos where the sky and clouds were religious and spoke to him and wrote "Communitas." At school board meetings and city council hearings he would read excerpts of Emerson's "The American Scholar" to beefy Irishmen with their hands deep into pork barrel politics. At City College he soaked in the streets of Harlem discovering in the local the natural community function of public education. He spent his life as an idealist, dealing with the inventions of the holy spirit and the human spirit, using language to think about ideal solutions, human values, and new ways to do basic things.

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The argument of his life's work was this: every child must be educated to the fullest extent, brought up to be useful to society, and to fulfill her own best powers. There is no right education except growing up into a worthwhile world.

He believed in the transformative possibilities of being and becoming complex, full cultural historical participants in the world. His critique of schooling and school practice is a diatribe against isolation and hierarchy; how compulsory schooling in industrial 20th Century America deprived children and youth of access to and experience with the world and the repositories of culture and knowledge. He spoke out of love for Lucretius, who composed a lyrical epic in praise of change and uncertainty: that all learning was in living and that understanding involved the "whole person" not in merely receiving a body of factual knowledge about the world. Central to his thinking about learning was the desire to resuscitate the idea of apprenticeship. His theory of learning as an evolving form of experience that happens through diverse face to face encounters with adults, and as an integral and inseparable process of social practice bears a strong affinity to the cognitively based research of the last ten years.

His nemesis was bureaucracy. In 1962 with a budget over 700 million dollars, he described the New York City Board of Education as a vast vested interest...which goes on for its own sake, keeping more than a million people busy...pre-empting time and space in which something else could be going on...a gigantic market for textbook manufacturers, building contractors, and Graduate Schools of Education.

 

He admired the Athenians for their astuteness in child development because their word for school meant serious leisure and their notions of schooling comprehended the place of curiosity and wonder in the lives of children. They comprehended school as a place for children to play games...sing, act Homer, and be taken around the city to see what went on. His proposals to eliminate high schools emerges from the Greek ideal of the polis: of making all the parts of the community as educative as possible (see Lawrence Cremin: The Transformation of Public School) and enlarging the multitude of ways for children and youth to acquire experience and achieve competency. He wasn't the first to recognize that the entire concept of education needed to be rethought; that substantive learning occurs outside of settings labeled as educational. While he was writing "Growing Up Absurd" he'd take long walks through Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen in New York's lower West Side where he'd linger along 10th Avenue in the Italian Delis and fruit stores and bakeries, pausing in coffee shops and public libraries and community centers, to remind himself of the obvious: the need to stop seeing learning as something preliminary or preparatory, but threaded through all the layers of experience.

His idealism was carved out of Whitman and Emerson: faith in a liberal education and the capacity to be free and exercise initiative in the world.

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The crucial question is not what ought to be taught, but whether the teaching and learning makes any difference. We educate the young according to the possible future of mankind. For school to matter it has to provide opportunities for youngsters to gravitate to what suits them...to engage them in the work of society. With all the money spent on research and development, hardware, computers, tranquilizers, America can think up only one institution for its young human resources. ...There is no single institution that can prepare everybody for a future of entirely new patterns of work and leisure. ...The best educational minds should be devoting themselves to devising various means of educating and paths of growing up. ...We should be experimenting with different kinds of school, no school at all, the real city as school, farm schools, apprenticeships, guided travel, work camps. little theaters, local newspapers, community service. ...What we need more than anything is a community spirit, in which the adults who know something, (and not only professional teachers) will pay attention to the young.

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The body of his work ("Growing Up Absurd", 1956; "Compulsory Mis-Education", "The Community of Scholars", 1962; "Communitias: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life", 1947; "Utopian Essay and Practical Proposals": 1951) is a handbook and index for much of progressive and libertarian education. He is part of an historical trajectory that runs from Socrates to Myles Horton, with echoes in the work of educators like bell hooks, Ira Shor, and those who balance scholarship with social activism. His theories of children and learning, youth and apprenticeships, teaching and the organization of public schools would become embedded in the restructuring and essential school movement that has proliferated in the 1990's.

To Goodman education and social planning were integral. By disintegrating communities...we destroy human scale and deprive people of manageable associations. The world according to Goodman: Government could not be trusted to ensure our quality of life. Robert Moses would be his Cain, a politician who would engineer a policy of leveling whole blocks to build a legacy of highways and bridges and the subsequent slow torching of inner city New York. When they built the Cross Bronx Expressway that cut across the heart of the Bronx, he organized residents and members of the arts community to chain themselves to the poles of seesaws and to the benches in the parks. In "Utopian Proposals" he warned of life in an automobile culture and pointed out that in the decade following the end of the Korean War (1958) New York City alone spent one million dollars per mile for a parkway system that was transforming the residential patterns, the behavior of its inhabitants, and spawning the beginning of suburban culture. It was a social policy he claimed, based on relocation and dislocation, as enlightened as the reservations were for fixing the "Indian Problem" in 19th Century America. It would be called "urban renewal." Government could not be trusted to ensure our quality of life.

Schools had lost the beautiful academic and community functions that they by nature possessed. The young grow up into a world not interested in persons, except to aggrandize itself. Youth are insulated by not being taken seriously. The social machine is interested only in aptitude,...not in identity, or vocation or...initiative. The other poverty in America was in leadership's lack of imagination. We don't invent great programs because not enough mind is put to the task. No one dreams up remarkable work projects. The problem with our schools is the same problem with our cities: they don't structure life; a worthwhile life. He understood the profound need of youth to belong to something; and the pressing need to be proud of something: Communitas and Civitas. Make it easier for youngsters to gravitate to what suits them, to provide many options for quitting and returning. To engage them more directly in the work of society...to have useful products to show to educate for a decent society in the foreseeable future. He understood the logic of having youths and artists work together. He proposed a broad spectrum of projects from mobile theater troupes, youth camps, urban restoration projects to the construction of parks and recreational spaces. The meaning of community is people using one another as resources. He believed that therein lies the energy for urban renewal and cultural conservation. He understood the poverty that would ensue, the cultural and historical deterioration that would set in, if you separated the generations.

 

Use the adults of the community -- the druggist, storekeeper, mechanic -- as the proper educators of the young into the grown-up world. ...All youth need face to face community in order to grow up. Try to overcome the separation of the young from the grown-up world....

 

He proposed closing school buildings to encourage teachers to use the city as a school: its streets, cafeterias, stores, movies, museums, parks, factories. ...Use the real-subject matter than an abstraction of the subject-matter. Since we teach for life, try to get closer to it.

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He advocated decentralizing urban schools into small units, 20 to 50 (prefiguring the charter, magnet, and essential schools of the 90's), by using new spaces for schools in storefronts, clubhouses, museums, the basements of housing projects and libraries. Tiny schools...which would combine play, socializing, discussion and formal teaching.

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He understood the cycles and rhythms of learning. He proposed to structure sabbaticals and breaks and return points, for students and for teachers -- to avoid spirit breaking and regimentation.

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He understood the necessary ecology of connections, association, face to face contact between the generations. The meaning of community is people using one another as resources.This came to him, like an epiphany, after reading Margaret Mead's, "Why is Education Obsolete?" while in the Donnel Library, on an early December day in 1959 when 53rd Street smelled of red and green lights and the toasty smells of chestnuts and hard salted bagels rose from the vendors on 5th Avenue.

Liberty is the exercise of initiative in a mixed city. His vision was a coherent one: the health of our schools was interdependent on the health of our cities. Every street and avenue should be studied as an individual artistic problem. Create the opportunities of diversifying the city scape, of beautifying the city, and designing a more integrated community Life. The ideal for New York or any vast city is to become a large collection of integral neighborhoods sharing a metropolitan center, create a human scale community, of manageable associations between the individuals and families and the metropolis... His idealism embraced the possibility of a higher quality of experience, a leisurely future with a sense of community and social action. His toxin would not be Socrates' hemlock but his own frustration. His progressivism didn't seek to improve or reform the schools but to reinvent the world. There is no right education except growing up into a worthwhile world.

To Goodman there is pedagogy and social prophesy. He collected images of parks like some people do the names of athletes or actors. His idealism, like Dewey's, grew from the realm of the practical and the useful. His brother Percival's drawings of New York's waterfronts in "Communitas" and "Utopian Essays" are like the notebooks of Michaelangelo: visual-study poems of city as a sustainable and beautiful place: wide boulevards, waterfronts full of parks and restaurants, open air markets, residencies and recreational areas. He imagined a New York by the end of the 20th Century as a city as leisurely and pedestrian as Venice: Every street and avenue studied as an individual artistic problem. In the classic essay "Banning Cars From Manhattan" (1947) he proposed closing off most of Manhattan's streets and converting them into a fund of land for neighborhood planning. To make real democracy possible required integral planning to create a human scale community; a prophesy that would later be employed in the waterfront cities like Boston, Baltimore and Toronto.

He saw himself as a scholar with affiliation to a community of scholars. He understood the role of being a mentor. His generosity was as vast as his love for literature. Holt, Dennison, Kohl, Kozol, Herndon...they all looked to him for counsel and inspiration. When Herndon would be in town they'd go to Wave Hill in the Bronx, a garden that overlooked the Hudson and the majesty and sweep of the Palisades. He always said it was a good place for dreaming. That even in urban spaces you needed sanctuaries. Place to visit for sustenance. Spaces that could inspire and provoke. Or he would take them all to Yankee Stadium to see the Giants against the Packers or the Cleveland Browns. He would quote from Goethe on how The poetry of public occasion is the highest kind, how the health of a culture could be measured in the resiliency of its games. He loved the contradiction: a lover of the Greeks and professional football. They'd drink brandy from a silver flask, feel the energy of 60,000 citizens when they stood to cheer a goal line stand or Sam Huff making an open field tackle of Jim Brown. Or they would gather, like in Plato's symposium: Dennison, Holt, Kohl drinking beer and chasers in cafés off of Bleecher and Houston, in the dead of New York City winters, to discuss their visions of minischools, community libraries, and storefront schools. It's a goddamn shame that Progressive Education has never been tried in this country, he said in "The Community of Scholars", in 1962, except in a few small schools for a few years. He would smirk to know how his assessment proved wrong. How less than half century later, the system from the South Bronx to downtown Brooklyn would be full of such experiments.

He died angry. Forgot what his student James Herndon would write about in his classic "How to Survive in Your Native Land" forgot that if you only work in order to change things, then you will go nuts. Forgot "the details," all the kites and questions and dogs and lizards --- the details, the reasons for our work, the fundamentals of whatever knowledge and love you get. Died angry. Suffered three heart attacks before he turned 61. Grew old and in his oldness turned bitter. The social machinery does not want initiative. Idealism is astonishingly without prestige. The possibility of a higher quality of experience arouses distrust rather than enthusiasm. My proposals are viewed as impractical. ...Direct solutions of social problems disturbs too many fixed arrangements. In the winter before his death he would walk through Riverside Park with his hands deep inside his pockets reading "The Trial of Socrates" and feeding pigeons. His bitterness would rise over him like an itchy arm. They could never see the obvious, how elemental were the needs of youth for community and for work, human work as Lucy Sprague Mitchell would call it.

In the week following his death, the handball courts and parks from Delancey Street down to the East River were packed and bristling over with human activity. The sounds of Dizzy Gillespie and Machito rose over the summer drenched streets like the morning smells of the bakeries he would stop and visit. It was the neighborhood's way of honoring him, residents said.

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There is no right education except growing up into a worthwhile world.