Blueprint for Counter Education

Radical pedagogy from Bauhaus to Black Mountain: a defining document of '60s counterculture

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, 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 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, an 80-page booklet features a conversation with the original Blueprint creators, Maurice R. 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.

Marshall Henrichs is a painter as well as a graphic designer; he studied with Richard Lindner, Walter Murch, George McNeil and Fredrico Castellon at the Pratt Institute. After graduation, he worked for several major New York publishers including Doubleday, where he served as art director. Among his editorial projects were various mainstream projects but also counterculture outliers such as Blueprint for Counter Education and Ira Einhorn's 78–187880 (Doubleday, 1972).

Larry Miller, sociologist, was a member of the editorial collectives of the New American Movement newspaper and the journal Socialist Revolution/Socialist Review. He has written about major theorists and writers such as Marx, Gramsci, Althusser and Machiavelli.

Maurice R. Stein is an American sociologist and innovator in higher education. Stein is co-recipient of the 1987 Robert and Helen Lynd Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed by the American Sociological Association’s Community and Urban Sociology Section. Retired from Brandeis University since 2002, Stein resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Paul Cronin is the editor of On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director (2004), a collection of writings by British director Alexander Mackendrick; Werner Herzog’s A Guide for the Perplexed (2014), an interview book with the German director; and Lessons with Kiarostami (2014), based on workshops conducted by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. His films include “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” The Making of Medium Cool (2001; re-edited 2013), Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 (2003), In the Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead (2006) and A Time to Stir (forthcoming, 2017), a 15-hour historical documentary about the student protests at Columbia University in 1968.

Adam Michaels is the cofounder of New York–based design studio Project Projects and the founder of Inventory Press. His work focuses on the active synthesis of typography and images―as well as editorial and design work―as a means of conveying significant content to diverse audiences. Project Projects works on books, exhibitions, identity systems and websites with clients such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, MoMA, SALT Istanbul and Steven Holl Architects, and has been chosen twice as a finalist for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. The studio's work has been widely published, and its principals have lectured and taught both nationally and internationally. The third and most recent title in the Inventory Books series is The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels, which was further elaborated upon as a full-length vinyl LP entitled The Electric Information Age Album.

Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Pierotti Chair of Italian at Stanford University, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 1999. A cultural historian, designer and curator, he is the author of over 20 books and hundreds of essays. His most recent books are The Electric Information Age Book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012); Modernitalia (Peter Lang, 2012); and Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), coauthored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld and Todd Presner. The Library beyond the Book, coauthored with Matthew Battles, was published by Harvard University Press in 2014. Schnapp is professor of romance literatures at Harvard, where he also teaches in the Department of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, in addition to directing metaLAB and codirecting the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.