Volume 20, Number 20 · December 13, 1973
Closing Time for Open Ed?
By Herbert R Kohl
Free the Children: Radical Reform and the Free School Movement
by Allen Graubard
Pantheon, 306 pp., $7.95
How to Survive in Your Native Land
by James Herndon
Bantam, 192 pp., $1.25 (paper)
Recently a conference on 'Alternatives in Education' was advertised in The New York Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and, I am sure, in other papers and journals throughout the country. A student who paid $250 plus room, board, and transportation could earn three points of college credit. On the same day the Sunday Times 'Arts and Leisure' section ran an ad for two lectures (at three dollars a piece) on 'The Open School System: Does It Work?' These are of course only minor indications of the growing industry that is selling 'open' and 'alternative' education. Houghton Mifflin has invested nearly a million dollars in producing 'Interaction,' a 'student-centered' language curriculum. There is an 'alternative school consortium' at the University of Indiana, not to mention the many consultant groups of itinerant veterans of the English Infant Schools, who, for a fee, will help a school or school system to produce open classrooms and alternative schools. I have counted thirty-five new books on the subject of 'alternative education' in the past two years.
Review, 2710 words
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