PARTISAN REVIEW
559
enrollment is heavily Black, elimination of requirements is frequently
taken as further evidence that the institution isn't educationally serious
and lacks standards.
Unfortunately, the experience of many teachers - and among them
the most well-intentioned and experimental of them - partly confirms
such suspicions. Those who attempt to give the students the freedom
they seem to want and need frequently are deeply frustrated by the
apparent waste of time that follows, by the student's lack of initiative
and perversity of direction and by the ingratitude and distrust of stu–
dents who apparently see freedom not in Goodman's terms but as a
particularly pleasant way to goof off and be rewarded. For the teacher
in these circumstances, the desire to backlash becomes overwhelming.
Not enough of the essays in this book deal with these frustrating realities.
Many a young teacher has walked into his first job with his head stuffed
with Goodman and Friedenberg, only to be bitterly disappointed by the
recalcitrant humanity of his students. But one of the most touching,
convincing and salutary essays in this book is a description by Anne
Long of her experience at the Vancouver New School, a description
which presents an altogether unsentimental and unutopian view of the
price of freedom even while refusing to regard the price as too high.
The essay suggests something of the distance we all need to travel if
we are seriously to revise the educational establishment so as to en–
courage students to work to develop their talents fully.
Wanting to believe in freedom, Miss Long saw nothing but failure
when she arrived at the school. The human outrages and horrors per–
petrated by the students would have taxed the strongest believer in
freedom. "Student artwork was destroyed, pencils and rulers karate
chopped, chairs broken up, desks smashed, sawed in half. The ditto
machine became a juvenile pornography and hate literature plant."
When Miss Long herself got the opportunity to share the direction of
the school, she was determined to do things differently, to bring some
kind of order out of the chaos of freedom. She saw that the students
themselves were frustrated by their apparently limitless freedom. But
the effect of her backlash was to convince her that the artificial imposi–
tion of assignments and activities on the students simply reestablished
their old wasteful relation to learning. Touchingly, she confesses her un–
certainties and finally summarizes the view to which she came, a view
which certainly is in accord with Goodman's, but one which is earned
because of the particular circumstances through which she had come,
circumstances which might - to others - have made the view untenable.
