Growing Up Absurd, assigned in college classes across the country, was a synthesis of a large body of work published in the 1950s that critiqued what Goodman termed the “Organized System,” the bureaucratic and corporate straitjacket analyzed by William Whyte, David Riesman, Vance Packard, and C. Wright Mills. But in opposition to these previous commentators, Goodman, in the words of historian Kevin Mattson, joined his fellow leftist Mills in making “clear that what often appeared as cultural problems — conformity and alienation — had political roots and demanded serious social reform.” Goodman argued that it was “curious” that the two most analyzed phenomena of the time — the “disgrace of the Organized System” and the problem of disaffected youth — were treated as separate entities except by youth rebels themselves. Goodman combined these two popular strands of social commentary — a critique of the bureaucratic society with an analysis of juvenile delinquency — and argued that the former caused the latter.

Goodman’s disdain for the corporate-organized society tied together his various intellectual interests. For example, his Gestalt theory of psychology posited that, in order for people to overcome their sense of alienation, they must reject the social structures that impeded self-awareness or self-actualization. In other words, the pursuit of an authentic self was not merely narcissistic: it required political transformation. This commitment to political reform also grounded his writings on youth culture and education. Goodman said he was motivated to write on the topic of education after one particularly sad conversation with a group of teenage boys. When he asked the boys what they wanted to do when they grew up, they shrugged their shoulders and unanimously answered, “nothing,” a response that brought to his eyes “tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity.” Goodman believed that “the simple plight of these adolescents could not be remedied without a social revolution.”

Goodman’s educational philosophy, as he often made explicit, was not far removed from Dewey’s pragmatism: Dewey’s democratic theory of education was consistent with Goodman’s thoughts on autonomy and decentralization insofar as Dewey believed schools should permit children to be boisterous and physically active in pursuit of meaningful, authentic learning. Goodman agreed with the Deweyan theory that society should adjust to the innate demands of young people rather than vice versa. However, Goodman recognized and was harshly critical of the ways in which Dewey’s thought had been co-opted. “Dewey’s pragmatic and social-minded conceptions,” Goodman lamented, “have ended up as a service university, technocracy, labor bureaucracy, suburban togetherness.” He was sensitive to the fact that those who propagated the despised “Organized System” — those like James Conant who sacrificed the individual to the “cult of efficiency” — were prone to invoke the authority of Dewey in defense of their project. Goodman blamed Conant alongside a multiplicity of educational actors: “timid supervisors,” “bigoted clerics,” “ignorant schools boards,” and, last, but certainly not least, the “school-monks,” his label for “the administrators, professors, academic sociologists, and licensees with diplomas who have proliferated into an invested intellectual class worse than anything since the time of Henry the Eighth.”

The gravest error of the “school monks” was that they wanted to further inflict their methods of socialization upon teenagers because they wrongly attributed the growing number of juvenile delinquents or “beats” to the “failure of socialization.” He wrote:

Growing up is sometimes treated as if it were acculturation, the process of giving up one culture for another, the way a tribe of Indians takes on the culture of whites: so the wild babies give up their “individualistic” mores and ideology, e.g., selfishness or magic thinking or omnipotence, and join the tribe of Society; they are “socialized.” “Becoming cultured” and “being adjusted to the social group” are taken almost as synonymous.

This socialization process, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to — “our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, socialization was the problem, not the solution, and was doomed to failure because it prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”

Goodman’s Populist critique of corporate society was powerful but flawed in the way that he romanticized pre-corporate America, a time and place when men supposedly exercised their “capacities in an enterprise useful to society.” The worst evils of the Organized System, in Goodman’s eyes, were its emasculating effects. “The present widespread concern about education is only superficially a part of the Cold War, the need to match the Russian scientists,” he contended. “For in the discussions, pretty soon it becomes clear that people are uneasy about, ashamed of, the world that they have given the children to grow up in. The world is not manly enough.” Goodman explained the rowdiness of adolescent males as a by-product of their need for authentic male behavior:

Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we can’t give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody’s property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice.

Goodman limited his analysis to boy culture because their future prospects were dimmer. “A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, ‘make something’ of herself,” Goodman argued. “Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act.” The boys, on the other hand, were being asked to run “the rat race of the Organized System.” The timing of his gendered argument was unfortunate, particularly since it was made just a few years before Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, in which she contended that women were the true victims of middle class conformity. That being said, Goodman’s overall critique of the education system was not limited by his idealized conceptions of male culture, particularly his arguments against compulsory education — what he called the “universal trap” — that he made in a collection of essays published in 1964 by the title, Compulsory Mis-education.

Goodman believed that compulsory education was not only wasteful, but did positive damage to adolescents. It was, in his eyes, partly responsible for an “upsurge of a know-nothing fascism of the right.” “I am profoundly unimpressed,” Goodman wrote, “by our so-called educational system when, as has happened, Governor Wallace comes from the South as a candidate in Northern states and receives his highest number of votes (in some places a majority) in suburbs that have had the most years of schooling.” Goodman’s left-wing critique of the schools mirrored Max Rafferty’s right-wing analysis, not so much because they both asserted that education was helping prepare the way for totalitarianism, but because they attacked what Goodman termed the “fascist vital center” from their opposite flanks. Rafferty might have found much to agree with in Goodman’s argument that the compulsory educational system was a “vast vested interest that goes on for its own sake, keeping millions of people busy, wasting wealth, and pre-empting time and space in which something else could be going on. It is a gigantic market for textbook manufacturers, building contractors, and graduate schools of education.”

For Goodman, if compulsory schooling was democratic, then democracy must have been synonymous with “regimentation.” “The educational role is, by and large,” Goodman intoned “to provide — at public and parents’ expense — apprentice-training for corporations, government, and the teaching profession itself, and also to train the young, as New York’s Commissioner of Education has said, ‘to handle constructively their problems of adjustment to authority.’” It was in school that people learned that life is routine, depersonalized, and “venally graded.” And it was in school that teenagers learned that, in life, it is best to abdicate authority to one’s superiors. This was what Goodman labeled “mis-education” or “socializing to the national norms and regimenting to the national ‘needs.’”

Goodman theorized that literacy was once imperative to democracy because people created their own social existences instead of being asked to adjust to an already-existing social order. “By contrast,” he asked, “what are the citizenly reasons for which we compel everyone to be literate? To keep the economy expanding, to understand the mass-communications, to chose between indistinguishable Democrats and Republicans?” Because a technocratic and managerial elite made all of the life and death decisions — decisions about the economy and war — the only justification for mass literacy was that people could be more efficiently propagandized. From Goodman’s point of view, mass illiteracy was better by comparison.

In opposition to [James] Conant and others who favored staying the nation’s current educational course, Goodman called for a fundamental transformation:

The dangers of a highly technological and automated future are obvious: We might become a brainwashed society of idle and frivolous consumers. We might continue in a rat race of highly competitive, unnecessary busy-work, with a meaningless expanding Gross National Product. In either case, there might still be an outcast group that must be suppressed. To countervail these dangers and make active, competent, and initiating citizens who can produce a community culture and a noble recreation, we need a very different education than the schooling that we have been getting.

In order to be educated, young people had to be de-schooled or de-programmed. This was his call for “real” progressive education, education that would represent human rather than mechanical values.

Goodman had no problems with progressive education per se, which he defined as “the attempt to naturalize, to humanize, each new social and technical development that is making traditional education irrelevant.” Rather, he complained that progressive education “was entirely perverted when it began to be applied” because “Americans had no intention of broadening the scientific base and taking technological expertness and control out of the hands of the top managers and their technicians.” Goodman complained that the “democratic community became astoundingly interpreted as conformity, instead of being the matrix of social experiment and political change.” By differentiating between the theoretical intentions of Dewey and the ways in which progressive education had come to be practiced, Goodman set himself apart from his contemporaries who also critiqued the schools:

The recent attacks on Deweyan progressive education, by the Rickovers and Max Raffertys, have really been outrageous — one gets impatient. Historically, the intent of Dewey was the exact opposite of what the critics say. Progressive education appeared in this country in the intellectual, moral, and social crisis of the development of big centralized industrialism after the Civil War. It was the first thoroughgoing analysis of the crucial modern problem of every advanced country in the world: how to cope with high industrialism and scientific technology which are strange to people; how to restore competence to people who are becoming ignorant; how to live in the rapidly growing cities so that they will not be mere urban sprawl; how to have a free society in mass conditions; how to make the high industrial system good for something, rather than a machine running for its own sake . . . That is, progressive education was the correct solution of a real problem that Rickover is concerned with, the backwardness of people on a scientific world. To put it more accurately, if progressive education had been generally adopted, we would not be so estranged and ignorant today.

For truly progressive education to take hold, education had to become less demarcated, more informal. With his own childhood in mind, Goodman desired that the city itself replace the school building. He also wanted unlicensed adults to have more influence over the lives of children, in order to diminish the separation between childhood and adulthood characteristic of modern life “and to diminish the omnivorous authority of the professional school-people.”

Goodman’s ideal school was Deweyan in the best sense: the curriculum was organized around interests innate to intellectual development; the boundaries between learning and doing were erased. For those like Goodman, progressive education so defined was one plausible means to a less stifling, less technocratic society geared towards Cold War imperatives. However, unlike Goodman, most progressive educators were committed to an American liberalism that suffered from its all-encompassing commitment to waging the Cold War, which rendered secondary those aspects that drew many to it in the first place, namely its humanizing components.