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EDUCATION AND ECSTASY by George B. Leonard

EDUCATION AND ECSTASY

By

Pub Date: Oct. 8th, 1968
ISBN: 1556430051
Publisher: Delacorte

Look magazine will serialize this post-Summerhillian fantasy and the publishers will extend attention further. But the book is hardly coherent--it's pseudotechnical conjecture with a reliance on muzzy maxims: ""Education, at best, is ecstatic,"" or ""The times demand that we choose delight."" All more hopeful than helpful. He parlays a popular education writer's acquaintance with teaching machines, light shows, psychedelics and behavior psychology into his model Kennedy school where a child can roam freely from one super-computerized-fun learning device (designed to teach calculus or sensory awareness) to total environments, and on to a center where he can get complete feedback on his progress at his own pace. These are a middle-aged man's ""ecstatic"" daydreams, and his notions are derived from the seminars for openminded adults he sometimes conducts at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. The accounts of the Big Sur weekends, largely encounter groups on a particular theme, are fascinating to frightening. The school he projects sounds impossible, and the book is repetitive, inconsistent, dangerously ""ecstatic.