Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Second, they should form political groups, and the issues they discuss should be the controversial ones of their profession and their society. Teachers today are almost all members of unions, which are good only for raising salaries, gaining security and planning parties.

And third, teachers should be able to practice what they preach. They must be strong, self-determined people and be able to give account for their actions in a reasonable way. The things that they moralize about should be the reality of their lives, as much as possible. But teachers often aren't this way . . . instead they take the oracles from science and hand them down unexamined to the children, they take all the orders from the authorities and say, "This is what we have to do." People like that cannot produce free citizens, free personalities. Educators must accept responsibility for their own lives and how they conduct themselves before they can help others to do the same.

I'm convinced that in order for teachers to be able to do these things, there must be a teacher scarcity. Only if you have a dearth of teachers will it be necessary to call in people from outside the "family" who haven't had to crawl through all the tunnels that have forced so many teachers to curve their backs. We're fortunate in Germany to have a teacher shortage, and it's changed our scene for the better. Now the good person who wants to teach has a little bit of leverage and the government can't force out everybody who doesn't think exactly as he's told.

Of course, this has two sides . . . with a shortage, the bad teachers must be kept because there's no one to take their place. But they're kept anyway. I haven't seen any bad teachers being kicked out.

LIFESTYLE: Many people don't share your desire to remain within the system. Some have dropped out to form communes and intentional communities in an attempt to change their lives in a personal way that they felt wasn't possible in "straight society". What do you think of this?

VON HENTIG: As I say, I don't advise everyone to stay in the system. In many respects the commune movement represents changes that are positive and desperately needed. We must get away from the big, abstract units in which we're caught—nations, for instance, or even large cities—because nobody understands how they function or how he might be able to say "I'm responsible for this" or " We're in charge of that." The "I" and the "we" are getting lost because no one can grasp his role within these gigantic monsters.within these gigantic monsters.

John Holt quoted someone—Henry Ford, I think—who said there's nothing wrong with bigness itself . . . Holt maintains that there is something wrong, and he's absolutely correct. In the face of bigness people feel small, confused and impotent . . . objects of some unfathomable machinery. We're in a worse state now than some primitive tribes were under the magic forces of their gods because we really don't know machinery is operated.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print