Volume 19, Number 8 · November 16, 1972
Schools for Scandal
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community
by Martin Duberman
Dutton, 527 pp., $12.95
Educational Commune: The Story of Commonwealth College
by Raymond Koch, by Charlotte Koch
Schocken, 211 pp., $6.95
Since the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley signaled the official opening of the American student revolt in 1964, so much attention has been given to various efforts to improve or reconstruct the obviously inadequate and dangerous model of American higher education that earlier efforts to found experimental colleges recede into the background. But the 1930s were perhaps more fruitful in devising interesting varieties of possible educational experiences than the past decade has been. Bennington, Antioch, Reed, Sarah Lawrence, and the College of the University of Chicago all launched programs designed to provide a more liberal approach to college education than that afforded by the major-and-elective system, course grades, and accumulated credits. All these institutions continue to flourish. But their survival and continued vitality may attest less to the excellence of their programs than to the relative abundance of their resources at the time they began them. Of these, only Bennington was actually founded in the Thirties. Sarah Lawrence was born in 1928, which, fiscally, was a different century, and the other three were long established.
Review, 3398 words
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