ABSTRACT
It was the summer of 1973 and I lived on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village. I was a relative newcomer to New York City, having moved there from a small upstate college town with my ‘counter-cultural squeeze,’ Michael, an Abbie Hoffman look-a-like. We had been at the center of the political and cultural ‘revolution’ on our campus and were ready to expand our horizons. Part of our political involvement at Cortland was with alternative education, including a community ‘free school’ for elementary-age children where I was the headteacher. Having been influenced by such diverse thinkers as Jonathan Kozol, Paul Goodman, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, A.S.Neill, Paulo Freire, Murray Bookchin, and yes-Maxine Greene-we saw the intimate connections between education and social-political change.
