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NAT HENTOFF
ment, financial, political, or military, to control the apparatuses
of which they are nominally in charge has become apparent,
except to the limited extent that these pretended makers of
policy can discover and render themselves subservient to tech–
nical imperatives.
There are those, and Wilkinson seems to be among them, who
seriously doubt that the process by which the technological servant
is becoming the master can be stopped. But there are some new
radicals who, while not quietly confident, are intent on making the
attempt. So far, however, it has been difficult to find a consensus
among them about what can
be
done to make man the master-of
himself and of
his
techniques.
I
will,
therefore, review a variety of proposals that have been
advanced, but emphasize again that, despite the urgency which
characterizes this new "movement," there has not been nearly enough
hard thinking about alternatives or about means of implementing
them. Robert Theobold's proposal is by now familiar: a guaranteed
annual income which would permit everyone to get as his
right-not
as a subject of the welfare bureaucracy and its investigators--enough
money to live with dignity whether he "produces" or not. Among the
hooters at this idea have been, predictably, those outraged at the
prospect of millions of people vegetating in idleness. "I don't believe,"
Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz declared righteously, "that the world
owes me a living and I don't believe it owes anybody else a living."
And, in view of the values now permeating this society, the TheobaHl
idea might well produce a future similar in its bland essentials to
that described by Ellul.
Crucial, however, to the concept of the break between work
(as defined presently) and income is an allied attempt to change
those societal values. And in this context an insistence on a basic
revision of the way we educate teachers as well as students is funda–
mental to the new radicalism. I am not here going to examine ways
in which education can foster individuality and spontaneity. Possible
guidelines are already present in the writings of Paul Goodman,
Jerome Bruner and Edgar Friedenberg, among others. Goodman has
quite accurately described our schools as "petty-bourgeois, bureau–
cratic, time-serving, gradgrind-practical, timid.... In the upper grades
