In the 1960s, Paul Goodman proposed remaking New York City’s public schools.
The school system had something like a million students and 50,000 teachers. The typical class had one teacher and almost 30 students.
Goodman didn’t want to think in terms of classes. He wanted tiny schools of 25 students. Each school would have four teachers: a licensed teacher, a college kid with no license, a parent and a teenager who might have graduated from high school.
Goodman claimed that the new system wouldn’t cost any more than the old one.
The proposal gets to the quality of Goodman’s thought that I admire. We humans do things collectively that promote the common good — like educating the young. How we do that is a choice. Goodman was good at making us, the commoners, see that we have a choice and that our current choice might not be the best one.
I’m a dinosaur, but I always hope to find that quality of thought when I look at a newspaper’s editorial page. I want to see imagination.
Every community has problems, and I read editorial pages because I hope to see somebody taking a stab at solutions. It helps if that stab is intelligent, inspired, imaginative. Discussions start.
• “Paul Goodman Changed My Life,” a documentary film directed by Jonathan Lee and released in 2011, is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XimPXYMsIY
The discussion about public education begins around the 40-minute mark.
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