Blueprint for Counter Education: Curriculum * Handbook * Wall Decoration * Shooting Script

Description

Maurice R. Stein and Larry Miller's Blueprint for Counter Education is one of the defining (but neglected) works of radical pedagogy of the Vietnam War era. Originally published as a boxed set by Doubleday in 1970 and integrated into the design of the Critical Studies curriculum at CalArts, the book was accompanied by large graphic posters that could serve as a portable learning environment for a new process-based model of education, and a bibliography and checklist that map patterns and relationships between radical thought and artistic practices - from the modernist avant-gardes to postmodernism, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College, from Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin to Buckminster Fuller, Paul Goodman and Norman O. Brown - with Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan serving as points of anchorage. Blueprint for Counter Education thus serves as a vital synthesis of the numerous intellectual currents in the countercultural debate on the radical reform of schools, universities and ways of learning. To accompany this new facsimile edition of the book and posters, a 64-page booklet features a conversation with the original Blueprint creators Maurice Stein, Larry Miller and designer Marshall Henrichs, as well as essays from Jeffrey Schnapp, Paul Cronin and notes on the design by Adam Michaels of Project Projects.

Maurice R. Stein is an American sociologist and innovator in higher education. Stein is co-recipient of the 1987 Robert and Helen Lynd Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed by the American Sociological Association's Community and Urban Sociology Section. Retired from Brandeis University since 2002, Stein is a long-time member of the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement. Larry Miller was a member of the editorial collectives of the New American Movement newspaper and the journal Socialist Revolution/Socialist Review. He has written about a wide range of areas including major theorists and writers such as Marx, Gramsci, Althusser and Machiavelli; the theorization of classless societies; work; memory; postmodernism; and the sociology of tourism.

During the Vietnam war and the counterculture movements of the '60s and '70s, new ideas on education began to circulate, connecting education with avant-gardism and postmodernist art. Sociologists Maurice Stein and Larry Miller wrote the Blueprint for Counter Education to revolutionize the education system--Sarah Spellings "New York Magazine" For having deepened our sense of one of the best known artists in the comics medium, this small treasure is the coffee book of the year.--John Eisler "Rain Taxi" One of the defining works of radical pedagogy of the Vietnam War era. First published in 1970, integrated into the Critical Studies curriculum at CalArts (where the authors served as deans and faculty), the original work was accompanied by posters intended to serve as a portable learning environment for a do-it-yourself, process-based model of education.--Jeffrey Schnapp "Harvard University, metaLab" Blueprint for Counter Education by Maurice R. Stein and Larry Miller is one of the defining (but neglected) works of radical pedagogy of the Sixties era.--Steven Heller "Print Magazine" If the basic measure of an avant-garde classic is appreciation long after its initial appearance, then Blueprint for a Counter Education... scores. Perhaps one of the most extraordinary books published by an American commercial publisher... Nearly fifty years later, Blueprint for a Counter Education has been reprinted.--Richard Kostelanetz "Rain Taxi" The spirit of Stein, Miller and Henrichs' Blueprint for Counter Education remains resonant today. At its core lies the daring notion that, at any given time, in any given place, as needs and circumstances change, any group of people has the potential to build its own house of ideas.--Edward M. Gomez "Hyperallergic"