title: Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Paul Goodman
description: <i>Growing up Absurd</i> by Paul Goodman pretty much founded the modern passion for school reform.  Paul Berman<br /> <br /> Paul Goodman, a man deeply dissatisfied with things as they are, deserves more attention than other less-conscientious objectors.His book is a highly serious effort to understand the relation between society and the disaffected youngster.  John K. Galbraith, <i>The New York Times</i><br /> <br /> Goodman might be called an intuitive sociologist in his unconventional, erratic yet convincing analysis of the encouragement toward human waste that our wasteful society provides. <i>Growing Up Absurd</i> is his cruelly apt phrase for this fatal lack of purpose and idealism. If [John] Updikes anxiety for his fellow man is subtle, Goodmans angry polemic leaves us no doubt what makes Rabbit run.  <i>The Washington Post</i>, 1960<br /> <br /> His impact is all around us.  Noam Chomsky<br /> <br /> Philosopher, poet, sociologist, pacifist, psychologist, writer, anarchist, open bisexual and spokesman for a generation. Paul Goodman ranked among the most influential thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century.  Ronnie Scheib, <i>Variety</i><br /> <br /> [The film] Paul Goodman Changed My Life pays tribute to a manpoet teacher social critic, guru without portfoliowhose name was once a household word and whose books were talismans of intellectual seriousness and social concern. His current obscurity is something this documentary, directed by Jonathan Lee and including eloquent testimony from friends, family and admirers, is determined to overcome.His most famous book, Growing Up Absurd, originally commissioned as a study of juvenile delinquency and later a bible of the 1960s student rebellion, remains essential and troubling reading for anyone who cares about the problems of the young.  A.O. Scott, <i>The New York Times</i>, 10/19/11, from his review of the film "Paul Goodman Changed My Life"<br /> <br /> Mr. Goodman is terrifying. Utopians usually are when we take them (or they take themselves) seriously. And Goodman is all the more terrifying because he is a rational Utopian who has most of analytical apparatus and theoretical formulations of modern sociology, psychology, historiography and aesthetics at his finger tips.  Webster Scott, <i>The Nation</i><br /> <br /> The best analysis I have seen of the spiritual emptiness of our technological paradise.  Sir Herbert Read<br /> <br /> Paul Goodmans <i>Growing Up Absurd</i> is an extraordinary good and important bookthe best book I know on the subject of youth.Goodmans is a serious, profound and old-fashionedly moral book. With great originality and lucidity, he argues that the Organization Man, the beat and the juvenile delinquent are merely reactions to the same basic problem.  Kenneth Keniston, <i>The American Scholar</i>
zlib_text: PAUL GOODMAN
  A VINTAGE BOOK
  V-32 $1.45
  
  Digitized by the Internet Archive
  in 2009
  http://www.archive.org/cletails/growingupabsurclpOOgood
  
  Growing Up Absurd
  
  GROWING UP
  ABSURD
  Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
  Paul Goodman
  Vintacre Books
  A DIVISION
  OF RANDOM HOUSE
  NEW YORK
  
  VINTAGE BOOKS
  cere published by Alfred A. Knopf,
  Inc.
  and Random House,
  Inc.
  © Copyright, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, by Paul Goodman.
  All
  rights
  reserved
  under
  International
  and
  Pan-American
  Copyright Conventions. Published
  in New York by Random
  House,
  Inc.,
  and
  simultaneously
  in
  Toronto,
  Canada,
  by
  Random House
  of Canada,
  Limited.
  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
  
  The author wishes
  to thank the following for permission
  to
  re-
  print material included in this book:
  The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.—for selection from The Empire
  City by Paul Goodman. ©
  1942,
  1946,
  1959 by Paul Goodman.
  Columbia University Press—for selections from The Development
  of Academic Freedom
  in the United States by Richar