Blueprint for Counter Education

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.