ABSTRACT
When church people were engaged in the Honest to God and God is Dead debates a few years ago I thought they were lucky compared to school people. The questioning of their institutions provided a significant opportunity to rethink what they are about, whereas school people were inhibited from such fundamental rethinking by the sheer inertia and magnitude of the school enterprise. The unquestioned acceptance of schools as social institutions, if not as educational institutions, meant that school people would always have teachers to prepare and school problems to solve. School people had not been forced to do the fundamental rethinking required by church people. But this is changing. With the move toward free schools and the call by an ex-religious to DeSchool Society, 1 school people may yet be forced into the uncomfortable but very necessary practice of rethinking what they are about.
