TO EDUCATE WITH LOVE

Hopefully education in America and elsewhere is about to modernize again and make another specific move, feeding off the work of A. S. Neill and friends, but this pedagogically blissed-out report on the classroom as encounter group doesn't offer much that is new or constructive. Greenberg -- he does not like to be named professor or doctor -- perceives that love is at the root of renovating the classroom. Teaching is love, honesty, providing a productive climate. Learning is a process of discovery made possible when people feel good about themselves. Other educators have been more specific and compared to the work of Caleb Gattengo (What We Owe Children, 1970), for instance, Greenberg comes across as wide-eyed, simplistic, general, even superficial -- like a hippy gone to university. He does have a valid and wonderful vision of the learning and teaching process, but in this book he transmits the wonder and not the work, the specific doing which can broaden the reality of that vision.