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Bruno Bettelheim's highly critical and uncompromising assessment of American education merits serious attention. Bettelheim, always the gadfly, did not offer a novel educational theory or methodology. Rather, he placed aspects of education under his psychoanalytic lens and offered a number of significant insights and observations that are discussed in this paper. His contribution to the field of education was one of challenging conventional wisdom by bringing his unique psychoanalytic perspective to bear on issues of serious concern to parents and teachers. Teachers in training and teachers of teachers would, I hope to demonstrate, benefit from an acquaintanceship with Bettelheim's writings on education.
The reader will be spared the oft-repeated chronicle of the deterioration that has taken place in so many school systems. Bettelheim was deeply concerned by the increase in school violence and the accompanying moral decay, and by significant declines in literacy and pupil emotional well-being.
Bettelheim and like-minded psychoanalytically informed thinkers, were, perhaps, better prepared conceptually for such a dismal state of affairs. Freud's dual-drive theory, with its inclusion of forces in each of us that aim for destruction and self-destruction, helped him make better sense of the “culture of nihilism” (Montagu and Watson, 1983) that pervades many schools.
Bettelheim shared his concerns regarding the status of the American educational enterprises in a 1981 interview with Elizabeth Hall. As early as that, he observed: “What they [our children] are really afraid of is chaos—the chaos within that would destroy them, the chaos in the streets” (Hall, 1981, p. 44).
However well intentioned, efforts to improve our nation's schools will be hindered, he argued, if existential agonies such as