The Deadly Halls of Ivy

Americans are sold on schooling and are continually pouring new billions into it. Yet for most youth, including the brightest, going to school for many years is not only a poor way of getting an education, but is positively damaging. The high schools and colleges can superficially be improved, of course, but their basic idea is wrong. For most students, schooling prevents education. It destroys initiative and the relation to society that education is supposed to be about.

Consider a usual case: a young fellow, 20 years old, in a college classroom. Let me point out some obvious facts about his situation.

The salient and astonishing fact is that he has been in an equivalent classroom for 14 continuous years, interrupted only by summer vacations. Although schooling has been the serious part of his life, he has spent those 14 years passively listening to some grownup talking or has doggedly done assigned lessons. (Even the lessons, by the way, have not been programed by the living teacher in front of him, but by a distant board of regents, a dean of faculties, a textbook manufacturer.) Our young man has never once seriously assigned himself a task or done anything earnest on his own initiative. Sometimes, as a child, he thought he was doing something earnest on his own, but the adults pooh-poohed it as play and interrupted him. Now he's a junior in college.

He's bright; he can manipulate formulas and remember sentences. For instance, during his last year in high school, he made good grades on a series of grueling state and national tests, regents, college boards, national merits, scholastic aptitudes. In this college, which is increasingly geared to process Ph.D.s, he has survived, though the washout rate is nearly 40 percent. He has even gotten a partial scholarship through the National Defense Education Act. Yet he doesn't especially like books, he is not scholarly, and he gets no flashes of insight into the structure or the methods of the academic subjects. This isn't the field in which his intelligence, grace and strength show to best advantage. He just learns the answers. Needless to say, he has already forgotten most of the answers that once enabled him to pass his courses, sometimes brilliantly.

The academic subject being taught in this particular classroom is intrinsically interesting--most arts and sciences are intrinsically interesting--and the professor, or even the section man, probably knows a good deal about it. But, especially if it is one of the social sciences or humanities, our young man does not grasp that it is about something; it has no connection for him. He has had too little experience of life. He has not practiced a craft, been in business, tried to make a living, been fired, been married, had to cope with children. He hasn't voted, served on a jury, campaigned for office, or picketed. If he comes from a middle-class suburb, he might never have even seen poor people or the foreign-borns. His emotions have been carefully limited by conventions, his parents, the conformism of his peer group. What, for him, could philosophy, history, sociology, political science, psychology, great music, classical literature, possibly be about? In The Republic, Plato forbids teaching most of the academic subjects until the student is 30 years old, lest the teaching and learning be merely verbal and emptily combative.

Our young man is not verbally combative. But sometimes he is stimulated, or piqued, by something that the teacher or the book says, and he wants to demur, argue or ask a question. But the class is really too crowded for dialog. If the teacher is a lecturer, the format forbids interrupting. And a chief obstacle is the other students. In their judgment, discussion is irrelevant to the finals and the grades--"Professor! Are we responsible for that on the final examination?"--and they resent the waste of time. They resent it if any individual is paid special attention. Even so, suppose that the professor, or the young section man, is heartened by the sign of life and does want to pursue the discussion. Then possibly, in the social sciences or the humanities, he might express subtle, speculative or dissenting opinions; he might ask about the foundations of an institution or refer to somebody's personal experience. At once a wall of hostility will rise against the teacher as well as the questioning student: surely he must be a Communist, pacifist or homosexual; maybe he is making fun of them. Feeling the hostility, and being, on the average, a rather timid academic, worried about tenure or advancement, the teacher signs off: "Well, let's get back to the meat of the course," or "That's beyond our scope here, why don't you take sosh 403?" or "That's really anthropology, young man, you'd better ask Professor O'Reilly, heh-heh."

Little of the teaching makes a student see the relevance, necessity or beauty of the subject. The teacher might indeed be interested in the latest findings or the ingenuity of the technique, but the student is at sea as to why he is studying it at all, except that it's part of sequence B toward a bachelor's. His confusion is aggravated by the fact that his generation, including the young teachers, has an exceedingly tenuous loyalty to the culture of the Western world, the ideal of disinterested science, the republic of letters. Mass culture, world wars, a largely phony standard of living rooted in status striving and material acquisitiveness, lack of community spirit; all these have torn the humanistic tradition to shreds. (I find these youth almost unteachable; though they are bright, eager and respectful, they simply do not dig what we academics are trying to say.) The humanistic function of higher education has been replaced: The university has become nothing but a factory to train apprentices and process union cards for a few corporations and a few professions. Their needs predetermine what goes on.

Paradoxically, a college is a poor environment in which to train apprentices--except in lab sciences, where one works at real problems with real apparatus. Most of the academic curriculum, whether in high school or college, is necessarily abstract. A structure of ideas is abstracted from the ongoing professions, civic and economic activities, and institutions, and these ideas are imported into the classrooms and taught as the curriculum. This ancient procedure sometimes makes sense; it makes sense for aspiring professionals who know what they are after, and for the scholarly who have a philosophical interest in essences and their relationships. But for most students, the abstractness of the curriculum, especially if the teaching is pedantic, can be utterly barren. The lessons are only exercises, with no relation to the real world; they are never "for keeps." And many of the teachers are not practicing professionals but merely academics, interested in the words, not the thing. (As if recognizing the academic unreality, the college has recently been inviting outsiders, professionals, poets, politicians, etc., to give talks and readings and spend a week "in residence"; but this only makes the ordinary classroom seem duller by contrast, especially since the outsiders, who have no status to lose, are more outspoken or flamboyant.)

Our young man respects his teacher, perhaps unduly so, but he cannot help feeling disappointed. He had hoped, in a vague way, that when he came to college it would be different from high school. He would be a kind of junior friend of learned men who had made it: he could model himself on them. After all, except for parents and schoolteachers, he had had little contact with any adults. He thought, too, that the atmosphere in college would be--somehow--free, liberating, a kind of wise bull session that would reveal a secret. But it has proved to be the same competitive cash accounting of hours, tests, credits and grades. The teacher is, in fact, preoccupied with his own research and publishing; in both class and office hours he is formal and standoffish; he never appears in the coffee shop; he certainly never exposes himself as a human being. He is meticulous about the assignments being on time and about the grading, not because he believes in the system, but to keep the students under control; he does not realize that they respect him anyway. So, just as in high school, the youth are driven back to their exclusive youth "subculture," which only distracts further from any meaning that the academic subjects might have. As David Riesman and others have pointed out, the students and faculty confront one another like hostile, mutually suspicious tribes.

Also, in recent years, this alienation or lack of community has been badly exacerbated by the chaotic transition that almost every college in the country is now undergoing. The grounds are torn up by bulldozers; the enrollment is excessive; the classes are too large; the students are housed three and four in a room meant for two. The curriculum is continually being readjusted; the professors are pirated away by salary increases and contracted research. These conditions are supposed to quiet down eventually, but I have seen them now for seven or eight years and the immediate future will be worse. Meanwhile, a whole generation is being sacrificed.

An even deadlier aspect of transition is the knowledge explosion. New approaches and altogether new subjects must be taught, yet the entrenched faculty is by no means willing to give up any of the old prescribed subjects. This is a peculiar phenomenon: One would expect that, since the professors have tenure, they would welcome dropping some of the course load; but their imperialism is too strong--they will give up nothing. So our student is taking five, or even six, subjects when the maximum might better be three. Whenever he begins to get interested in something, he is interrupted by other chores. Rushed, he can give only token performances, which he has learned to fake. No attention is paid to what suits him, although without intrinsic motivation he will obviously learn nothing at all. The only time a student is treated as a person is when he breaks down and is referred to guidance.

Instead of reliance on intrinsic motives, on respect for individuality and leisure for exploration, there is the stepped-up pressure of extrinsic motivations--fear and bribery. On the one hand, there is the pressure of schedules, deadlines and grades, not to speak of the fantastic tuition and other fees that will go down the drain if the student flunks out. On the other hand, lavish scholarships and the talent scouts for the big corporations hovering about with tempting offers. In this atmosphere of forced labor--punching a time clock, keeping one's nose clean, and with one eye constantly on a raise in salary--disinterested scrutiny of the nature of things, the joy of discovery, moments of creativity, the finding of identity and vocation die before they are born. It is sickening to watch.

Finally, we must say something about the animal and community life from which our collegian has come into this (continued on page 206)Halls of Ivy(continued from page 108) classroom. The college has spent a lot of Government and foundation money on pretentious buildings with plush lounges, but the food is lousy and the new dormitories are like Bedlam for want of soundproofing. It's a world tailored for catalog photographs, not for living. The administration is strongly against fraternity houses because of the exclusion clauses and because they destroy cohesiveness of the student body; these are excellent reasons, but one sometimes suspects that the motive is chiefly rent gouging, since with urban renewal and area redevelopment many colleges have become great landlords. (In fact, some prestigious centers of learning are, under fictitious names, urban slumlords; or alternately, they gobble up neighborhoods, dislocate tenants, disrupt communities.) If students want to live off campus in their own cooperatives, they are avuncularly told that they are not mature enough to feed their faces and make their beds. There are exquisitely elaborate regulations governing sexual and convivial behavior--days and hours and how many inches the door must be open and whose feet must be on the ground. If these 19- and 20-year-olds were factory hands, nobody would fuss about their sex lives or drinking habits, so long as they arrived punctually at the plant the next morning; as students, they are supposed to be the chosen of the land, the hope of the future, but they are not "responsible." Needless to say, despite the regulations, the young make love anyway, but frequently the conditions are not charming. The degrading atmosphere of the much-publicized "wild college weekend" develops as an inevitable reaction to, or revolt against, such strict and patronizing regulations.

The administration claims to be in loco parentis, yet many of these young men and women had more freedom at home, when they were still kids in high school. The psychologist in charge of guidance has made a speech about the awful plight of unwed mothers--with about as much compassion as they used to speak of "bastards"--but he will not ask the infirmary to give contraceptive information on request. One has more than a strong suspicion that all this parental concern has nothing whatever to do with the students' welfare, but is for public relations. The college motto may be Lux et Veritas, but there is a strong smell of hypocrisy in the air.

Maybe the most galling thing of all is that there is a student government, with political factions and pompous elections. It is empowered to purchase the class rings and organize the prom and the boat ride. Our young man no longer bothers to vote.

Now our average student's face isn't quite so blank. It is wearing a little smile. The fact is, he is no longer mechanically taking notes but is frankly daydreaming, as he used to in the sixth grade, ten years ago. Think of it: There might be four or five more years of this, for his father wants him to continue in graduate school. This will make 19 years of schooling.

This is an appalling prospect! He will now have to do "original research" under these conditions of forced labor. And he will be in a panic about failing, or not getting the assistantship, because he now has a wife and an infant to support.

Of course, many of the unfavorable college conditions that I have been describing can be, and should be, improved. In my book The Community of Scholars, I suggested a number of expedients. Grading, for example, can be scrapped (keeping tests as a useful pedagogic device). There can be more part-time active professionals in the faculty, to generate a less academic atmosphere. There are several arrangements for teachers to pay more attention to students, discover their intrinsic motivations, guide them in more individual programs. The social sciences can be made less unreal by working pragmatically on problems of the college community itself and its immediate rural or city environment. The moral rules can be reformed to suit the purpose of an educational community, which is to teach responsibility by giving freedom in an atmosphere of counsel and support. Certainly these and other reforms are possible.

Nevertheless, when we consider those 14 years, 16 years, 20 years of schooling, we cannot avoid a far more disturbing question. Why is the young man in this classroom in the first place? It suits him so badly! He is bright, but not bookish; curious, but not scholarly; teachable, but not in this way. Of course he must be educated, everybody must be educated; but has school been the best way to educate him? We have seen him in other situations than school, when he looked far brighter, both more spontaneous and more committed; when he learned a lot, and fast, simply because he wanted to or really had to. Maybe, for him, the entire high school and college institution, in the form that we know it, has been a mistake. If so, what a waste of his youth and of the social wealth!

Every child must be educated, brought up to be useful to himself and society. In our society this must be done largely at public expense, as a community necessity; certainly Americans ought to spend more on it than they do. But it is simply a superstition, an official superstition and a mass superstition, that the way to educate a majority of the young is to keep them in schools for 12 to 20 years.

The hard task of education, as I see it, is to liberate and strengthen a youth's initiative, and at the same time to make him able to cope with the activities and culture of society, so that his initiative can be relevant. In a democracy, each citizen is supposed to be a new center of decision. But schools and colleges, as we have them, are boxes in which the young mainly face front and do assigned lessons according to predetermined programs, under the control of professional educators who are rarely professional in any other way. Then by magic, after years of nothing but this, the young are supposed to decide their own careers, make a living in a competitive market, choose to marry or not marry, and vote for President of the United States.

At no other time or place in history have people believed that such schools were the obvious means to prepare most youth for most careers, whether craftsman, farmer, industrial worker, nurse, architect, writer, engineer, lawyer, shopkeeper, party boss, social worker, sailor, secretary, fine artist, musician, parent or citizen. Many of these careers require a lot of study; some need academic teaching; but it has never before been thought useful to give teaching in such massive and continuous doses.

The idea of everybody going to a secondary school and college has accompanied a recent stage of highly centralized corporate and state economy and policy. Universal higher schooling is not, as people think, simply a logical continuation of universal primary schooling in reading and democratic socialization. It begins to orient to careers and it occurs after puberty, and jobs and sex are not usually best learned about in academies. In my opinion, there is no single institution, like the monolithic school system increasingly programed by a few graduate universities (and the curriculum reformers of the National Science Foundation), that can prepare everybody for an open future of a great society. What we are getting is not education but regimentation--baby-sitting, policing, brainwashing and processing technicians for a few corporations at the public's expense. (About 35 percent of college graduates go into the corporations; a good percentage enter government service and teaching; less than 2 percent engage in "independent enterprise.") We are in an increasingly closed society, dominated by the sovereign and the feudal corporations. Instead of education being a means of liberation, independence and novelty, everybody pays for schooling that rigidifies the status quo still further.

At present, facing a confusing future of automated technology and entirely new patterns of work and leisure, the best educational brains ought to be devoting themselves to devising many various means of educating and paths of growing up, appropriate to various talents, conditions and careers. We should be experimenting with different kinds of schools, with no school at all, using the real cities as schools, or farms as schools, with practical apprenticeships, guided travel, work camps, little theaters, community service, etc. Probably most of all, we need to revive the community and community spirit in which many adults who know something, and not only professional teachers, will pay attention to the young.

Instead of new thought, the tendency is crashingly in the opposite direction--to streamline, aggrandize and totalize what we have. (Just recently, with the unanimous applause of all right-thinking people, Congress appropriated another two billion dollars for college buildings.) Last year more than 60 percent of our 17-year-olds graduated from high school, and the President is leading a vigorous campaign to cajole and threaten the rest back into school. About 35 percent go to college and, by 1970, it is hoped to push this figure to 50 percent. It has recently been proposed to make the two-year junior college compulsory. Among all liberals and champions of the underprivileged, it is an article of faith that salvation for the Negroes and Spanish Americans consists in more schooling at the middle-class level. And all educational observers, from hard-liners like Rickover, through James Conant, to "liberal" thinkers like Marty Mayer, insist that salvation for America lies in tightening and upgrading middle-class schools and getting rid of progressive methods that might give the kid a chance to breathe.

Like any mass belief, the superstition that schooling is the only path to success is self-proving. There are now no professions, whether labor-statesman, architect, or trainer in gymnastics, that do not require college degrees. Standards of licensing are set by boards of regents who talk only school language. For business or hotel management it is wise to have a master's. Access to the billions for research and development is by Ph.D. only, and prudent parents push their youngsters accordingly; only a few are going to get the loot, but all must compete. Department stores require a high school diploma for a salesgirl; this might seem irrelevant, but it speaks for punctuality and good behavior. Thus, effectually, whether it is rational or not, a youth has no future if he quits, or falls off the school ladder. Farm youth can still drop out without too much clatter, but the rural population is now only eight percent and rapidly diminishing.

We can understand and evaluate our present situation if we review the history of schooling in this country during this century.

By 1900, our present school system was established in its main outlines, with almost universal primary schooling, in a great variety of local arrangements. Yet only six percent of the 17-year-olds in that year graduated from high school. Maybe another ten percent would have graduated if they could have afforded it (recently James Conant has estimated that only 15 percent are "academically talented"). Now we may assume that those six percent were in classrooms because they wanted to be there. There were no blackboard jungles or startling problems of discipline. More important, such students could be taught a curriculum, whether traditional or vocational, that was interesting and valuable for itself; they were not merely being chased up a ladder by parents and police, or pulled up by the corporate need for Ph.D.s.

But who were the 94 percent who did not graduate? Obviously they were not "dropouts." They were, as I have said, everybody: future farmer, shopkeeper, millionaire, politician, inventor, journalist. Consider the careers of two well-known architects who were born around that time. One quit school at the seventh grade to leave home and support himself. After a few jobs, he gravitated to an architect's office as an office boy and found the art to his liking. He learned draftsmanship in the office, and French and some mathematics on the outside (with the help of friendly adults), and he eventually won the Beaux-Arts prize and studied in a Paris atelier. Today he has built scores of distinguished buildings and, as the graduate professor of design at a great university, is one of the most famous teachers in the country. The other architect happens to be the most successful in America in terms of size and prestige of his commissions. He quit school at age 13 to support his mother. Working for a stonecutter, he learned to draw, and in a couple of years he cut out for New York and apprenticed himself to an architect. He studied languages and mathematics in competition with a roommate. Via the Navy in 1918, he went to Europe with some money in his pocket and traveled and studied. Returning, he made a splendid marriage, and so forth.

These two careers--not untypical except for their éclat--are almost unthinkable in our day. How could the young men be licensed without college degrees? How could they get college degrees without high school diplomas? But they had the indispensable advantage that they were deeply self-motivated, went at their own pace, and could succumb to fascination and risk. Would these two men have become architects at all if they had been continually interrupted by high school chemistry, freshman composition, psychology 106? Indeed, it would be a useful study, which I have not made, to find how many people who grew up from 1900 to 1920 and have made great names in the sciences, arts, literature, government, business, etc., actually went through the continuous 16-year school grind, without quitting for good, or quitting and occasionally returning.

As the decades passed, higher schooling began to be a mass phenomenon. In 1930, 30 percent graduated from high school and 11 percent went to college. And by 1960, we see 60 percent have graduated, of whom more than half have gone to college. Who now are the other 40 percent? They are the dropouts, mostly urban-underprivileged and rural. From this group we do not much expect splendid careers in architecture, politics or literature. They are not allowed to get jobs before 16; they find it hard to get jobs after 16; they might drop out of society altogether, because there is now no other track than going to school.

What happened to the schools during this tenfold increase from 1900 to 1960? Administratively, of course, we simply aggrandized and bureaucratized the existing framework. The system now looks like the system then. But in the process of massification, it suffered a sea change. Plant, teacher selection and methods were increasingly standardized. The students were a different breed. Not many were there because they wanted to be there; a lot of them, including many of the bright and gifted, certainly wanted to be elsewhere and began to make trouble. The academic curriculum was necessarily trivialized. An important function of the schools began to be baby-sitting and policing. The baby-sitting was continued into the rah-rah colleges, to accommodate the lengthening youth unemployment.

Naturally, in the aggrandized system, educational administration became very grand. This was important because of the very irrelevance of the system itself, the inappropriate students and the feeble curriculum. Stuck with a bad idea, the only way of coping with the strains was to have more assistant principals, counselors, truant officers, university courses in methods, revised textbooks. Currently, we are getting team teaching, visual aids, higher horizons. And to compensate for the mass trivializing of the curriculum, there are intellectually gifted classes, enrichment, advanced placement. (Also, opportunity classes for the dull and 600 schools for the emotionally disturbed.) The freshman year in college has been sacrificed to surveys and freshman composition, to make up for lost ground and to weed out the unfit. Correspondingly, from 1910 on, school superintendents have become scientific business managers and educators with a big E, and college presidents have become mighty public spokesmen. Public relations flourish apace.

Until recently, however, the expansion--though abundantly foolish--was fairly harmless. It was energized by a generous warm democracy and an innocent seeking for prestige by parents becoming affluent. By and large, the pace was easygoing. Few adolescents had cause to suffer nervous breakdowns because of the testing, and one could get a gentlemanly C by coasting. The unfortunate thing was that everybody began to believe that being in school was the only way to be educated. What a generation before had been the usual course--to quit school and seek elsewhere to grow up--became a sign of eccentricity, failure, delinquency.

But suddenly, since the Korean War, and hysterically since Sputnik, there has developed a disastrous overestimation of studying and scholarship. Mothers who used to want their offspring to be "well adjusted," are now mad for the I.Q. and the percentile. Schools that were lax, democratic or playful, are fiercely competitive, and an average unbookish youth finds himself in a bad fix. He may not be able to cope with the speed-up and the strict grading, yet if he fails there are loud alarms about his predelinquency, and there are national conferences on dropouts.

It is an educational calamity. Every kind of youth is hurt. The bright but unacademic can perform, but the performance is not authentic and there is a pitiful loss of what they could be doing with intelligence, grace and force. The average are anxious, the slow are humiliated. In the process the natural scholars are ruined; bribed and pushed, they forget the meaning of their gift. Nothing is studied for its own sake. Bright youngsters "do" the Bronx High School of Science in order to "make" MIT, just as they will "do" MIT in order to "make" General Dynamics.

I doubt that any of this rat race is useful. Given quiet and food and lodging, young scholars would study anyway, without grades. According to the consensus of teachers of science, reported in Jerome Bruner's The Process of Education, drilling, testing and competition--the sine qua non of our educational system--are incompatible with learning to do creative research. Is there evidence that most creative youngsters, whether in sciences, arts or professions, especially thrive on formal schooling at all, rather than by exploring and gradually gravitating to the right work and environment? For some, schooling no doubt saves time; for others, it is interruptive and depressing. On lower levels of performance, do the technical and clerical tasks of increasingly automated production really require so many years of boning and test-passing as is claimed? I asked the United Automobile Workers how much formal schooling is required for the average worker in the most automated plant. The answer was: None whatever. (It takes three weeks to break in a man.) In a year in the Army, average inductees somehow learn to read blips and repair machinery. To put it bluntly, generally speaking it is not the fancy training that is lacking, but the jobs.

For urban poor kids who are cajoled to not drop out, the miseducation is a cruel hoax. They are told that the high school diploma is worth money, but what if the increment amounts, after several years, to five dollars a week? Is this worth such arduous effort, in itself distasteful and to them unnatural? Isn't a lad wiser to choose the streets for the few years of his youth?

Of course, there is no real choice. Poor people must picket for better schools that will not suit most of their children and won't pay off. Farm youth must ride to central schools that are a waste of time for most of them, while they lose the competence they have. Middle-class youth must doggedly compete and be tested to death, to get into colleges where most of them will cynically or doggedly serve time. It is ironical. With all the money spent on research and development, for hardware, computers and tranquilizers, America can think up only one institution for its young human resources. Apparently, the schooling that we have already had has brainwashed everybody.

This is the social and historical background out of which our young friend has come to that dazed look in the college classroom. He has been through a long process that has sapped his initiative, discouraged his sexuality, dulled his curiosity and probably even his intellect. His schooling has distorted earnestness and ambition. If he went to a good suburban high school, he no doubt engaged in the fun and games by which middle-class youth sabotage the system. Even the highly intelligent often resist by "underachieving"--they do not want to achieve in this way. Much of the social life and subculture that defeats the schools' purposes is spiteful despair. School is pointless, but it prevents anything else. A fellow can't quit and earn his own money.

What to do for him, or at least for the next generation of him?

Here are some possibilities:

Maybe the chief mistake that we make is to pay too much direct attention to the "education" of the children and adolescents, rather than provide them with a worth-while adult world in which they can grow up. In a curious way, the exaggeration of schooling is both a harsh exploitation of the young, regimenting them, and a guilty coddling of them, since mostly they are useless in our world and we want them to waste their hours "usefully."

Certainly, directly useful real activities would be more cultural than the average classroom for the average youth.

We must start from where we are. A promising present expedient is to develop the many public enterprises that we have been neglecting, for they can also be educational opportunities for the young, as lively alternatives to continuing in school, and to spend on these some of the money now misused on schools for the nonacademic. (It costs $750 a year to keep a youth in a New York City high school; also, more than $2000 a year to process him in a reform school.)

For instance, there are scores of thousands of ugly small towns in the country to be improved, where adolescents could do most of the work. These could be local affairs, or private enterprises, or we could apply to the purpose the Youth Work Camps proposed by Senator Humphrey in 1959, modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Thirties, but with smaller gangs and paying the youth Army minimum. (Incidentally, after the smoke of criticism cleared away, the CCC was judged to have been economically worth while, and many of its products have been lovely and lasting.)

Another necessary enterprise is community service like the Friends' Youth for Service. Mobilization for youth might be useful if it got out of the antidelinquency business and out of the Department of Justice. In the past few years, hundreds of students have in fact left their disappointing colleges to work on Negro problems in the Northern Student Movement, CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Here is a suggestion for the nonacademic who are especially bright and talented. In order to countervail the mass communications that swamp us with mediocre canned entertainment and brainwash us with uniform information, we need hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little theaters, little magazines, independent local papers, unaffiliated radio stations. These would furnish remarkable opportunities for youthful spirit and labor under professional direction. (To help finance these, I have elsewhere proposed a graduated tax on the size of the audience of the mass media, to create a fund earmarked for the counterbalancing independent media.)

In general, vocational training, including much laboratory scientific training, ought to be carried on as technical apprenticeships within the relevant industries. Certainly the big corporations have a direct responsibility for the future of their young, rather than simply skimming off the cream of those schooled, tested and graded at the public expense.

Interestingly, the retraining and rehabilitation programs of the Departments of Labor and Justice usually have better educational ideas, including schooling, than the direct school-aid bills. Since much of the Federal aid to education has been balked because of the hang-up on the parochial-school issue, some of the money has been allotted indirectly and more effectively, but not through the school systems.

Small farms should be used as educational environments. Consider if June through September a small farmer of depopulating Vermont would put up half a dozen New York slum children. He would get $100 a head--it costs $600 a year to keep a child in a New York City primary school. This, across the country, would rescue thousands of economically marginal farms and bring thousands of others back into operation; and it is, without doubt, a wise policy to reverse the 8 percent rural ratio to something nearer 25 percent, if it can be done not on a cash-crop basis.

Again, on the model of the GI Bill, we might boldly allot a certain amount of public-school money--now allocated to college, high school, and even primary school--directly to the students or parents, to be voluntarily used for any purpose plausibly educational. This would produce a great variety of educational experiments, some weird, some excellent. But there is no such uniformity of need or educational theory as warrants the present improbable uniformity of the public schools from coast to coast.

Most important of all, given academic as well as unacademic alternatives, the young can be allowed to experiment in their 12 to 16 years of lessons rather than feel that they are trapped and must face front. Late bloomers might then choose to return to formal academic study, without having been permanently soured by schooling that was inappropriate to them, and that they underwent unwillingly. Surely many on the GI Bill profited by going to school maturely, when they knew what they wanted and were sexually sure of themselves.

Finally, let me fit these proposals for secondary and higher education into the present framework of the colleges and universities. Returning to their tradition of agriculture and mechanics, the big state colleges could become administrative centers for the public enterprises mentioned above: town improvement, radio stations, rural culture, health and community service. Many of the students would have been working in the field on these projects; and they could soft-pedal the compulsory academic program that now wastefully leads to 50 percent dropouts. Conversely, the liberal-arts colleges could return to their authentic intellectual tradition of natural philosophy, scholarship and the humanities. Professional and graduate schools could work far more closely with the working professionals and industries in society, with whom many of the adolescents would have served apprenticeships. They would thus avoid the present absurdity of teaching a curriculum abstracted from the work in the field and then licensing the graduates to return to the field to learn the actual work.

I realize that all of this--like much else that I have written--is hopelessly "utopian." We are in the enthusiastic flood tide of a delusion about schooling that can sweep us to a future of prefabricated, spiritless and fundamentally ignorant people. But let me ask young readers to consult their own experience, and to consider what they want for their younger brothers and sisters and for their own children. Schooling is one subject where the young know more than their elders; they are closer to it and they have had more of it. Unfortunately, they can't imagine alternatives, any other ways of growing up. But that is what we--and they--must put our minds to.