Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

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But to make the best use of their institutions people must learn to assert themselves and to use what powers they have to their fullest. Every day we must say to ourselves, "What powers do I have and what can I do with them?" We must stop trying to avoid responsibilities and decisions. I sometimes think of a line written by Bertolt Brecht, "I have not been able to oust the men in power, but as long as I have lived they have not slept as well."

That's how it is for me . . . I have a task that confronts me every day with something positive I can do. "Doing" for me consists not in saving the world at one fell swoop but of staving off a little bit of evil each day. The evils come back again and again, but my associates and I are able to do one small thing, to take in a few students and teachers that we can help and protect. That's a good thing to do, isn't it, to help and protect somebody?

LIFESTYLE: What do you think of young people themselves leaving the existing school systems, dropping out and searching for something else on their own?

VON HENTIG: I fear that many of them don't have the maturity or the experience to be successful in finding something different on their own. This has been encouraged by many well-meaning radicals, but I think that it's an undutiful shirking of responsibility. I've never understood how these people can expect children to know better than adults how to escape the clutches of the custodial institutions—called schools—in which they've been imprisoned.

The children who've revolted . . . what have they said that hasn't been said before by critical grownups? They've just reverbalized it and I'm really doubtful whether this is helping them to become free. To say, "Now children, go ahead out and make your own colony," is nothing but another way in which adults manipulate young people, because to leave them entirely alone to "do their own thing" is really forcing them to recopy us in all our bungling ways. What else can they do? They can't copy elephants, and without a chance to carefully examine and test what they're doing they'll just use grownups as models because they know of no other possibility.

This strikes me as taking Rousseau's natural education—in which the child isn't "taught", but is given every opportunity to learn on his own as his physical, sensual, moral and intellectual development progresses—to its extreme. Rousseau said that no one who goes about education in this manner should fool himself into believing he's being non-authoritarian . . . because, in fact, this is the most authoritarian type of education. The grownup—whether teacher, parent, advisor or hero to the child—has complete control because the youngster doesn't realize how even his will is being directed by the subtle way in which the adult chooses what the child is exposed to. And what children left wholly to their own devices are exposed to is the entire world and all its faults and vices, with no tempering voice to help them discriminate the good from the bad.

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