Volume 3, Number 7 · November 19, 1964
The Education of James Conant and Paul Goodman
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Two Modes of Thought: My Encounters with Science and Education
by James B. Conant
Trident, 96 pp., $3.95
Shaping Educational Policy
by James B. Conant
McGraw Hill, 134 pp., $3.95
Compulsory Mis-Education
by Paul Goodman
Horizon, 189 pp., $3.95
Each of these books is about education and costs $3.95. They have little else in common. The detailed, practical knowledge of the inter-relationships among state, federal, and private Beureaucracies as they attempt to influence educational policy, which Dr. Conant exhibits in Shaping Educational policy seems hardly to have affected is Two Modes of Thought. And neither author shows any interest in the educational phenomena that the other treats as central. There is not a line in Conant's work to suggest that he is even aware that a student spends actual years in school and is affected personally by the experience and ennui that constitute the curriculum—that this is his life, and the only sort of life the state authorizes him to have. Conant's conception of the educative process is as empty as a lunar landscape has been, up to now; there are certain features, and these are sharply drawn, but there are no people and if there were there would be nothing for them to breathe. Goodman, on the other hand, simply dismisses the administrative apparatus that fully occupies Conant in Shaping Educational Policy as the unnecessary evil that makes up The Organized System. He knows what it does, but is too contemptuous of it really to care how it works; he sketches it in vividly but without much verisimilitude, like landscape in a fifteenth-century painting of Saint Sebastian Tormented by Doubts and Serpents.
Review, 2686 words
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