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strategies for change 145
recommendation that children learn geography, for example, by
examining the physical world. Goodman urged teachers to ‘use
the city … its streets, cafeterias, stores, movies, museums, parks
and factories’ as sites for education. Children learned far better
from experience than they did through abstraction.
3. Bring non-teachers into school: ‘the druggist, the storekeeper,
the mechanic’ to break down the barriers between the school and
the adult world.
4. Abolish compulsory attendance. The model here was A.S. Neill’s
Summerhill, a progressive school in which pupils attended
lessons voluntarily.
5. Build small school units, equipped with ‘a record-player and
pin-ball machine’, to allow children to integrate work and play in
a friendly environment.
6. Send children out of school to farms for ‘a couple of months a
year’. For as long as ‘the farmer [fed] them and not beat them’,
farm visits would help children to think of alternatives to urban
living. 45
Ward and Goodman approached urban planning as they
approached education: with a view to finding ways of overcoming
alienation and providing a context for co-operation. One of Ward’s
inspirations is Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin’s attempt to
show how agriculture and industry can be integrated to provide a
basis for local self-sufficiency and decentralized systems of production
and consumption. 46 Ward denies that he is necessarily fixed to
the idea of ‘small is beautiful’ and believes that practical anarchism
can be made to operate in the context of consumer society. His idea is
not to rebuild the environment but to use planning and architecture
as tools that allow individuals and communities to continue with
their anarchist experiments in social living. Thus planning is something
that should be wrested from the control of government and put
in the hands of those responsive to the needs of dwellers and users.
In Communitas, a book which Ward describes as ‘one of the most
stimulating of the last century’, Goodman outlines his ideas of city
planning. The book, originally published in 1947, ends with a
master plan for the re-development of Manhatten. The purpose of
the plan is to make New York ‘a city of neighbourhoods wonderful to
live in, as leisurely and comfortable as it is busy and exciting’. It
involved using the waterways and developing the shores of the Island
as ‘beaches for bathing, boating and promenade’, and developing