Compulsory Miseducation

Compulsory miseducation is word play on a concept that was long considered a pillar of progres-sivism: universal compulsory education. In order to participate in social and economic and political life, reformers argued over decades and decades, all children, not just the privileged, should be granted access to learning, and all families, not just the enlightened, should send their youngsters off to school. This idea is now embraced the world around. Indeed, the “UN Convention on the Rights of the Child” calls on all state parties ratifying the document to accept a standard of universal education through the elementary years.

Despite its progressive origins and resonances, the idea of compulsory schooling took a decidedly sinister turn in the hands of authoritarian state powers: Soviet schools were compulsory, as were German schools during the Third Reich. Compulsory education appeared to contain, then, possibilities in direct opposition to enlightenment and freedom; there was a distinct potential for mass indoctrination, herding and deceiving, disciplining and punishing, commanding and controlling. Even in putatively democratic countries, societies exhibited tendencies in their schools that had the distinct odor of totalitarianism: the old-school whip and isolation cell and all the modern technologies of despotism from mystifying and manipulative propaganda to mass spectacle and targeted scapegoating.

Paul Goodman, poet, prolific writer, engaged intellectual, and activist anarchist of the 1960s (as well as fatherly inspiration to that era's student, peace, and queer movements), popularized the term with the publication of his work, Compulsory Mis-Education, in 1964. Goodman wrote on a wide variety of matters including education, Gestalt therapy, city life and urban planning and design, children's rights, politics, literary criticism, and more. In an interview with Studs Terkel, Goodman noted that although he seemed to have a number of eclectic and divergent interests, they were in fact all one fundamental concern: How to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature; he simply refused to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community could not exist.

Goodman was the author of dozens of yeasty and germinal texts: Growing Up Absurd was perhaps his most famous best seller, but Gestalt Therapy invented the field, and Being Queer was a landmark in the emerging gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Goodman thought that it was pathological to be prevented from making love to someone of the opposite sex and equally pathological to be denied the experience of homosexual love. What he found obscene was the way society makes people feel shameful and criminal for doing ordinary and profoundly human things.

Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals and Little Prayers and Finite Experiences influenced a propulsive generation to think and act in new and liberatory ways. His critique of modern education was that it killed the spirit of youngsters and left them bereft of curiosity and creativity. Goodman described his politics as anarchist, his love as bisexual, and his profession as a man of letters, but many saw him as more even than that—he became in important ways the 20th-century Thoreau, the quintessential U.S. mind of his time.

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