Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

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If we start doing things like this there may soon be a pretty big turnover of teachers . . . but it's a crime to stand there telling those children how many tons of wheat Australia produces while they sit there starving.

The teacher's primary task should be political education . . . helping people learn to make decisions in the face of other people's power—or their own non-power—on the basis of incomplete information and under pressure of time. In other words, children must be prepared to function effectively under the conditions they're going to find in the real world.

I should also say that politics is a mobile or flexible way of regulating common affairs, as opposed to stable ways such as fixed and immutable laws or morals or the regulations printed up and hung in the corridor telling who's to do the sweeping on Wednesdays and who on Fridays. Political decisions are specifically concerned with changes, with the flow of events that we're constantly involved in, and the ways in which these choices are made must be very informal and flexible so that much change can be facilitated as readily as possible.

That's what schools are really for, to teach people how to make political decisions. To leave the children in the streets or with their mothers who have no knowledge of anything but what they already suffer from is worse than useless. How can these children learn to respond to their problems in a way that will make any real changes in their situations? Children brought up in awful conditions by unenlightened people will more than likely become unenlightened people themselves.

Illich speaks of establishing networks of meeting places for people to get together and educate themselves. I don't believe, however, that the things he proposes will result in the necessary political education. He says that next August there'll be a meeting at CIDOC of all the people who've opened academic coffeehouses and set up libraries and other "networks" of that kind . . . if he thinks these things are an answer to the huge established schools and powerful bureaucracies, then gracious, he must be naive! The coffeehouse doesn't offer anybody a job. It only offers him a place where he can chat and—if it's as expensive as CIDOC—a cup of coffee that he might not be able to pay for. Only the wrong people, only the members of the leisure class who're a little ashamed of their wealth, will go there in shabby clothes and long beards . . . trying to imitate some existentialist bard.

LIFESTYLE: And you feel that by working from within, the system can be modified to provide political education through existing channels?

VON HENTIG: I would work within the system, yes—although I wouldn't recommend it to everyone—because I'm in a privileged position in a German university with an immense degree of autonomy. My position gives me an opportunity to help people, and that's reason enough for me to stay. Outside the system I wouldn't enjoy this leverage . . . I'd be a nincompoop, a nobody.

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