WHO PUSHED HUMPTY DUMPTY or The Confessions of a Headmaster

by Donald Barr ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 1971

If your longhaired youngster is into drugs, out of school, and mouthing Marcuse when you ask him to help with the dishes, whom do you blame? (a) Yourself. (b) Keniston, Friedenberg, et al. (c) His teachers. (d) Foolish multiple choice questions like this one. Donald Barr, controversial Headmaster of the Dalton School, attacks all those possibilities in this congeries of pieces which he has been writing over the years ever since he was at Columbia. They have appeared previously in the New York Times magazine section, Vogue, the S.R., etc. Barr was once a Marxist; today he calls himself a house conservative or political reactionary; John Holt compared him to Max Rafferty. Very simply, he represents morality, order, and stability; also both discipline and freedom (""each without the other destroys itself""). He also says a great many things people may not and have not liked: parents are promiscuously permissive since they withhold 'imperatives'; the new culture is ""downward. The more barbaric one acts, the higher one stands in this culture."" Today's protesters would find some other target were there no Vietnam to project their own internal problems on the world. Alienation becomes ""Dysrelation-aggression"" but then why do we ""continue to underwrite the uproar."" Barr, an experienced educator, devotes a good many of these articles to curricula (""The definitive does not exist, but the boring certainly does""), programmed instruction, testing procedures, science, and reading along with the larger social-environmental problems. He writes with flair and presence and he should easily persuade those in the middle distance of lime and circumstances.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION