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I fully sympathize with Mr. Brull's contention that in many instances family pressure toward achievement is brought to bear on the young (as I had stated in my paper) and aggravated by the high schools' feeding, clothing and libidinal restrictions. These same restrictions are already imposed on the grade school child and may stand in stark and traumatic contrast to the child's unbridled impulsivity rampant in a perhaps overly-permissive family.
All of us realize society's demand on the child in preparation for his later role in life. Justified or unfair, the demand has to be met. It is illadvised, therefore, to have the young student cut out paper stars and “express” himself with red crayons on green paper for weeks on end.
Why pretend that school is nothing more serious than organized, collective fun—interrupted only by an occasional, furtive glance at the blackboard whose 3 R's are quickly and apologetically erased by the ‘gentle’ teacher to make place for the less-taxing Red Riding and Robin Hood?
Not only will the child's tremendous capacity and eagerness to learn lie fallow for years, but his sense of responsiveness and responsibility will remain undeveloped as well and atrophy
even further by the easy “getting-by” subjects in high school. For many the clash with reality will be inevitable, painful and sometimes disastrous.
In deference to Ruth Benedict, the life struggle of our century cannot, however regretfully, be fought with a chrysanthemum, but only with a sword. The acquisition of knowledge can become so absorbing and can be made so fascinating for the young that disciplinary inconveniences are taken in stride. At the same time egos will be strengthened to withstand later temptations to shed demanding superegos.
If we accept and learn from the serious hippies (not their manneristic fellow travelers) that their brazen exhibitionism, hedonic dependency and unabashed inertia contain also their graphic protest against bourgeois bigoted ways and hypocri