Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

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You know, when the German universities failed in 1933 it wasn't because they were state-paid and state-run and therefore had no choice but to do as the state told them, but because the professors didn't avail themselves of the freedoms they had. They didn't assert themselves. There are many opportunities to stand up to the authorities built into the system itself—loopholes, if you will—if only people will take advantage of them. Push the system as far as you can until they kick you out of the place you're in, then go to another place. Because you're a qualified person and have the skills and credentials to get another position, you can do that. Only after you've really exhausted all your freedoms and have no realistic hope left to move the system from within should you leave, leave in protest . . . and perhaps this is what many teachers and professors should do. Perhaps many have reached this point.

LIFESTYLE: Often, though, people who choose to play gadfly and push from the inside lose their qualified status. If they become too insistent in their demands they're suddenly blackballed and must choose between buckling under or leaving the system at once, perhaps with responsibility to a family and no plans for the future.

VON HENTIG: I know this happens, and I'd hesitate to tell every teacher—especially those with families to support—to agitate from within until the system's forced to strike back in a way that might destroy him . . . I couldn't ask martyrdom of anyone. But I do ask every teacher, in the system or not—every person engaged in helping others to become self-determined, to put up resistance to the forces that impinge upon their lives and to try to change society where it's wrong—to examine how his own life stands in relation to his teaching. There's no use pointing to the nice places in literature and history where others have lived courageously if the teacher doesn't try to do so himself.

LIFESTYLE: But is it really practical to stay within the system? The comment has been made that the evils of tools (or institutions) have two sources: the attitudes of the people using them and the nature of the tools themselves. It's a waste of resources for a person with the right attitudes, talents and drives to tie himself to an inadequate or unfeasible tool.

VON HENTIG: I agree that both a person's tools and his motives must be of the right kind. No matter how effective my tool, I won't accomplish any positive changes with it if I have the wrong attitude . . . if I use the instrument only to become rich or famous or to take trips to Cuernavaca all the time, for instance. By the same token, if my tool's unfeasible I must certainly give it up, for no matter how good a person I am I won't achieve anything worthwhile with an implement I haven't chosen wisely.

At the present time, however, I feel there's more sense—at least in Europe—in making my changes at the place where I am. All jobs and professions have a political bearing and if—from my position as a teacher of teachers—I can open a few people's minds to see that, then I'm accomplishing something and my instrument is working.

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