Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

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This didn't, however, make the situation worse for our CO's. Rather, it ended up helping them because their plight was publicized, and under pressure from the press and public opinion the government had to allow these boys to find meaningful alternatives to the military. I don't know how this phenomenon might operate in the United States, though.

LIFESTYLE: So you think it's possible for the free schools to sustain their success even after the movement begins to get big, if they can gain the right leverage and exposure to the public?

VON HENTIG: I'm not so much concerned with their success, per se, but with how they effect the rest of society, which will have a lot to do with whether they can manage to solve the two major problems facing them. First, children must be happier while in school and must have all the freedom that they need to grow up and experiment and to find out who they are and how wicked and how nice the world is. Second, children must be provided with a chance to survive in a society that has not yet changed while all this has been going on. If kids are very free and protected, then grow up and enter a society which makes all kinds of harsh and inhuman demands on them . . . well, this isolated childhood will deprive them of the ability to cope with the bad parts of society, which they'll have to face sooner or later.

LIFESTYLE: NEW SCHOOLS EXCHANGE says the free school movement is going downhill in the United States because many of the most sensitive and most intelligent teachers, who dropped out of the regular schools, are in turn dropping out of the alternative schools. NSE claims that people with that m uch capability feel confined spending more than, say, two or three years working with little children.

VON HENTIG: That's a problem of the teaching profession in general. In Germany we speak of the "professional diseases" that teachers succumb to. Living with children all the time and having no contact with grownups makes them into caricatures of teachers, people who always know better, who always look down on others, who're always benign but superior and who never have conflicts (except the ones that they hide because they're terrible).

I'd stress three things that teachers must do in order to avoid contracting these dreaded diseases. First, they should always know what society is and what people outside of schools actually do with their lives. In their training, teachers get a certain amount of information about the subject they'll be teaching and a certain amount about the theories of child development and so forth, but they don't learn a bit about life! They ought to be forced, really, to go into industry, social work, politics, community administration—to have experience with real life—or else they can't function as teachers. They should be continually involved with their society and should never become isolated in their role, hiding from the "real world". If they aren't able to involve themselves in other things while they're teaching, they should take frequent sabbaticals . . . not to libraries or universities, but away from the schools altogether.

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