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OUR DISCUSSION TODAY ON THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE of psychoanalytic education receives its impetus from two sources. The first is the tenth anniversary of COPE, marking the 10 years of national institutional attention by psychoanalysts to their functioning as educators, a decade of self-conscious search and study and of growth and maturation in this role qua educator, of which we can be duly proud. The second, the more powerful and even more compelling instigator of our exploration here together, is the searching, and in some ways revolutionary, reassessment from its lowest to its most advanced levels, that pervades the entire general educational enterprise today, and that indeed is raising fundamental questions about every aspect of even the most entrenched of the traditions and assumptions that characterize it.
For example, serious social critics, such as Paul Goodman (1964), in assessing the implications of the decline in IQ's that occurs in the course of ghetto schooling raises such fundamental questions about sacrosanct institutions as whether formal schooling (what he calls our system of "compulsory mis-education") is necessary at all, since those children could hardly do worse without it. In this same nihilistic vein, Illich (1969) calls for the abolition of all compulsory schooling, declaring the school to stand toward education the way the church once stood toward religion; and Lasch and Genovese (1969) assert that our schools function primarily as babysitting services for our elementary grade students, and for our high school students as places of custody and detention that keep our teenagers both off the labor market and out of police