The continuing education of Arthur Goodfriend, aged 79

Press, 2 September 1986, Page 21

The continuing education of Arthur Goodfriend, aged 79

By

STAN DARLING

Arthur Goodfriend has an artistic bent that has stuck with him since childhood, when it tended to get him into trouble at primary school. The 79-year-old American educator and author has been in New Zealand only a few weeks, doing the last part of a long research stint for a book that will probably be his last. He already has a rapidly-expanding journal of sketches and souvenirs from places he has passed through. He has a postcard view of Christchurch and the Port Hills from his small fifth floor office at the University of Canterbury, but his head is mostly down as he pores through materials on New Zealand education.

For many years, Mr Goodfriend has been comparing educational systems around the world. He wants to see if he can pinpoint reasons for their general failure to live up to their goals. So far, he likes what he has seen of our system. Comparatively speaking, that is. The system obviously has it faults, which are readily pointed out by such critics as Maoris, feminists, and Marxists, he says.

Still, from what he has heard, it may be more child-centred than systems in other countries.

Mr Goodfriend, who was brought up in New York City and now lives in Hawaii, will finish his research in November and head north to spend a year “paying for all the fun I’ve had,” he says. “I’ll see if I can’t come to some conclusions.” He has spent considerable time looking at the way people -are educated in Japan, Australia, America, Britain,•>' the Soviet

Union, and China. His interest in how education works, and often fails to work, goes a long way back. In many cases, he says, educational systems seem unable to adjust to the child.

At P.S. 171 in New York City, ‘I was always being rebuked and jut down,” he says. In his first /ear at primary school, he was :old to salute the American flag. He refused to do it.

He did not like the flag, he told the teacher. It was too complicated; too many stars and stripes. He liked the simpler, three-colour French flag better.

Mr Goodfriend’s mother told the teacher that the child felt that way because he was artistically inclined. “The teacher said your son is not an artist, he’s a traitor,” Mr Goodfriend recalls. Another time, he was sent home from school because nits were found in his hair. Incidents like that did nothing to endear him to the system. P.S. 171 is still there, and still a going concern, he says, “but it has now become a laboratory for progressive education.” Mr Goodfriend had writing ability and became the editor of newspapers, magazines, and yearbooks at school, but that ability was never cultivated. He was pushed towards science and mathematics by the system. “It was such a limited, terrifying experience,” he says of his early education. "I don’t think young people should be exposed to that kind of thing, but it is still going on. “Education is a big industry, and the systejjfedemands that the child fits the system, rather than

the other way around.” At university, he was unable to pursue liberal arts studies because he failed Latin twice. The City College had a rule that you had to leave if you failed three times, and he thought it was safer to- switch to the sciences.

When he graduated with a bachelor of science degree, he found interesting work “and my education really began,” he says. He was offered the chance to go round the world and do stories for the New York “Herald-Tri-bune” for a year, and jumped at the chance.

In Japan, China, Germany, and Italy, he saw how those countries and their educational systems were gearing for war. He became convinced, especially after the Second World War, that proper education was a necessary component for the avoidance of war.

He was in Paris, in 1940, on the day when the Nazis got round the Maginot Line. By that time, he was in advertising and merchandising. “My only purpose at the time was making money,” he says. “I had no ideals at all.”

During the war, he eventually became editor of the most widely read newspaper in the world in those years, the military’s daily “Stars and Stripes.” He was editor in Europe from 1944 to 1945, and in China in 1946, then spent eight months writing a history of the paper.

He later went to work for such magazines as “Life” and “Holiday,” furthering his education by travelling and observing. “It was an appetite to seeggie world that was really motivating me.”

In 1948, he went to China again as a member of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, a last ditch effort to keep the country from falling to the Communists. He wrote a book about what was'wrong with American foreign policy there. His views came to the attention of President Harry Truman, who sent him round the world to preach the contents of his book to American embassies.

He had an early- contact with Indochina, “where everything I was preaching was disregarded,” he says. “We should have been paying attention to the aspirations of people, not the Chiang Kai-sheks and so on. The American position generally has been to identify with prestigious elites Mr Goodfriend spent “10 to 12 very tumultuous years with the foreign service,” some ofizthem as a United States Infoißiation

Service public affairs officer in India and Indonesia. He had trouble trying to justify aspects of an American foreign policy “I felt was an unsaleable commodity.” When he left the foreign service, he went to work as an assistant to the chancellor of the East-West Centre in Honolulu. "It was sort of a lateral transfer from foreign service to education,” says Mr Goodfriend, who is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. He wrote “If You Were Born a Russian” in 1952, a book that described the life and education of a Russian from the cradle to the grave. Other books include "India: A Case Study in Intercultural Communication,” “What Is America?” and “The Cognoscenti Abroad.”

In spite of his early impressions of New Zealand education, which he has gleaned from teachers, students, and parents, “I don’t want to make it seem as if I’m unaware of its imperfections,” he says. He questions whether some systems are really turning out educated people. In Japan, for instance, where future executives are trained well for technological careers, some executives who read technical journals for their work read comic books to relax. Mr Goodfriend’s career included two years in the Philippines with the Peace Corps, where he helped turn out up to 40 comic books on health and .family planning. In his eight years of comparing educational systems, “ I have been trying to find out why it is that education fails to prepare young people for the world tar which we live.” I