Hartmut von Hentig

In 1972, Mother Earth News Magazine published an interview with Hartmut von Hentig, a German critic of education born in 1925. The interview took place in Cuernavaca, where von Hentig was attending a seminar - "Education for a Global Community of Man" - at CIDOC.

Illich acknowledged von Hentig in Tools for Conviviality and von Hentig wrote the foreword to the German edition of Deschooling Society. Judging by this interview in Mother Earth News, he was not entirely in agreement with Illich about what to do about education and schooling. While Illich argued for radical alternatives to compulsory schooling, von Hentig says the best approach is to work within the system and reform it. He wrote two books about his arguments with Illich over schooling and its reform: In 1971, Cuernavaca oder Alternativen zur Schule?, and two years later, Die Wiederherstellung der Politik - Cuernavaca revisited.

Evidently, this interview is one of the few pieces written in English about von Hentig that's available online. In German, there is a 1974 piece from Der Spiegel that discusses him in relation to Illich.

Some later photos of von Hentig are shown here.