Volume 4, Number 10 · June 17, 1965
Rites of Passage
By Morton White
Coming of Age in America
by Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Random House, 300 pp., $5.95
Who would have thought thirty years ago, when this reviewer took a deadly course in what was called education, that in the year 1965 America would produce a specialist in that subject who could refer knowingly to Gide's actes gratuits and to Der Rosenkavalier, quote Ortega y Gasset favorably, write stunningly about the feelings of high school students, and defend the life of the gentleman? One might just as well have predicted that America would, in the words of the late J. L. Austin, produce a goldfinch that quoted Virginia Woolf. And yet Professor Friedenberg is just such a rarity. From Davis, California he cries out against the leveling tendencies of the American high school and of American society. In his argument he uses all the statistical means and modes at his disposal, and he discourses learnedly about autonomy and empiricism; and yet during the whole procedure his prose sparkles and his heart aches for the neglected humanist in the eleventh grade. He believes that in our mass society too many high school students have been turned into opportunists and that the sensitive adolescent intellectual has as good a chance of coming through the American high school happily as an honest man in a Madison Avenue public relations firm.
Review, 2946 words
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