In one of his early plays, Jonah, Paul Goodman wrote a marvelous throw-away line. Doomed to preach to the masses that did not want to be saved, doomed to be cast away at sea and swallowed by leviathan, poor Jonah cries out to the heavens: "It should happen to a dog to be a prophet of the Lord of Hosts."
The combination of street humor and exaltation, of prophetic vision and rebellious despair was what made Goodman one of the most elusive and yet most challenging talents of his generation. Poet, psychologist, anarchist, teacher, novelist, propounder of extreme solutions to mundane problems, he could never see why conventional critics often dismissed him as a gadfly. "I am a humanist," he said, "and everything I do has exactly the same subject—the organism and the environment. Anything I write is pragmatic—it aims to accomplish something."
After years of relative obscurity ("Decent poverty is really an ideal environment for serious people," he said), Goodman became a kind of youthcult hero in 1960 with the publication of Growing Up Absurd, in which he argued that problem children were the fault of a society that offered them only dull jobs and squalid ideals. Two years later in The Community of Scholars, he attacked the colleges as bureaucratic machines that had proved unable to provide youth with genuine learning. "The ultimate rationale of administration," he wrote, "is that a school is a teaching machine, to train the young by predigested programs in order to get preordained marketable skills."
Such sentiments—which many educational reformers now share—made him, in his own words, "the Joan of Arc of the free-student movement." Indeed, Goodman early favored abandoning compulsory education for a system that would allow every child to choose the kind of schooling that suited his taste —or even none at all. He also argued in favor of dismantling the larger universities and making them into federations of small colleges with a student body of about 450 and a faculty of 50. Schools and overgrown universities, however, were only part of the problem. In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, he wrote: "People have a right to be crazy, stupid or arrogant. It is our specialty as human beings. Our mistake is to arm anybody with collective power. Anarchy is the only safe polity."
Young Rebel. Shortly after Goodman's birth in New York's Greenwich Village, his father deserted the family, a loss that Goodman later viewed as useful: "Remember, a good father can be difficult for a kid; he has nothing to revolt against." When the young rebel graduated from City College, in 1931, he was too poor to enroll in Columbia, so he bicycled there and sneaked into the lectures of Philosopher Richard McKeon. Later, he hitchhiked to free courses at Harvard.