Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

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The totally ignorant man cannot be blamed for these things . . . so it's the duty of education to eliminate the totally ignorant man and replace him with a man who can—and will, by virtue of his enlightenment—take responsibility for his society.

This can be called political training, but I don't like the word "training". It's dangerous because it can be interpreted in so many perverted ways. Rather, I would say that the highest purpose of schools should be to enable children to realize that whatever they do has a political influence on others, is politically meaningful. This should be done very early in the child's life, because it begins to affect him very early. He should know that there are many ways to organize for the commonweal . . . he should understand the alternatives and why his society has a particular one instead of some other. The emphasis should always be, however, on finding all the alternatives, even those that are directly opposed to the one he presently lives.

Children should experience as much as possible the real problems that face us, and get exercise in using all the means by which solutions to them might be achieved. Because we all depend upon one another, society is unsafe if they don't.

LIFESTYLE: Some people claim that receiving education in a school atmosphere makes a person very narrow in scope and lacking in imagination . . . the ways of doing things that teachers tell him about in class might be all he could ever come up with. If these claims are true, then aren't schools doing exactly the opposite of what you're advocating?

VON HENTIG: But it's the people who say this that have no imagination, because they can't free their minds of the image of the big brick school building standing there with its teachers inside pointing to their books and saying, "Read paragraphs one through four and you'll know all the alternatives, children." That's not the way to experience politics, and I must emphasize the word "experience".

The day before yesterday I walked through Cuernavaca with Illich. We visited a small school and in it were children who were visibly undernourished, tiny little wisp-like creatures . . . three of them fitted easily onto a bench meant for two. I couldn't rid myself of the question of what I would do if I were a teacher there. I'd leave the oldest in charge of the class and tell them, "Now you all stay here and go on with this business that you're doing while I take these five hungriest ones out."

I couldn't buy these children food every day, but we could find ways to get food, whether we had to steal it or work for it or forage it somewhere . . . whatever we had to do. If we were successful, fine. If the authorities returned us to school because it's a scandal for a teacher to behave in that fashion—even if the whole thing were a failure—it would still have been a political experience that might help the kids to look out a little better for themselves in the future.

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