Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

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Instead of this silence, children need challenge and resistance from adults... and they need, above all, respect. In A.S. Neill's SUMMERHILL one great, great thing was made clear: Neill never lies to a child. When children ask questions, he tells them why—as best he can—things are the way they are. Then the child has a frame of reference from which to say no and try to escape or change things.

LIFESTYLE: What about free schools, then, in which grownups do take this responsibility but in atmospheres far different from those of custodial institutions, as you call the public schools?

VON HENTIG: Free schools are just again schools and have their own hidden curriculum. They can be equally as damaging as the system we already have, because they're mostly parochial or sectarian institutions and can be very hidden away, very concealed from view. There's no guarantee that what's going on in them in the long run will be any less foolish than what's now being done in public schools . . . and the people have no control over free schools. What must be emphasized more than anything else, I think, is public control. The community must be interested, constantly discussing what's happening in their schools and constantly interfering. The job can't be left to some functionary put into bureaucratic authority and told to see that regulations made twenty years ago are still followed to the letter. Teachers need help, and help should take the form of cooperation and criticism from the public.

LIFESTYLE: Often a free school is set up on a commune, so you have a community with a school operating as an integral part of it . . .

VON HENTIG: There's the public control! That's exactly the kind of thing I mean, and if this happens, it's good. The commune, though, must not be made up of people all of one mind so that no criticism or variety of viewpoints is ever brought in.

If education becomes the province of private, parochial institutions its usefulness will be lost, because public control will be lost. Free schools can be a very good tool, under the proper conditions, for scaring public schools into doing their job, being really public and open to popular criticism.

LIFESTYLE: Robert Mendelsohn, former director of Operation Headstart's medical program for preschool children from poor families, offers the proposition that it's not possible for the radical movements to accomplish anything like that, because free schools, free health clinics and the like are allowed to exist only because they serve the purposes of the system . . . they reach at best 5% of the people, but give a widespread impression that something important's being done. As soon as the radical operations become really effective, however, they're squelched.

VON HENTIG: That could very well be the case . . . it was certainly true for conscientious objectors in Germany. For many, many years they were way below 1% of the population—totally insignificant—then when the membership suddenly began to climb the government took notice of them and tried to stop the movement.

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