He suggests that formal education lasts too long, teaches the wrong social class values, and increasingly damages students over time.

[3] Goodman's subsequent book, The Community of Scholars (1962), and his experience in the classroom, informed his criticism of American schooling and the development of Compulsory Miseducation.

[1] Goodman thinks education should strengthen children's preexisting drive towards refining their own abilities for usefulness in society[7] while developing community spirit.

[1] Goodman criticizes the structure of academic curriculum, and connects it with "programmed instruction" and schooling that emaciates the mind proportional with time.

[4] He wrote that Goodman's approach was unreasonable and contrarian: for instance, his stances in favor of sexual expression and against the importance of literacy in schools.

Friedenberg felt that Conant's Shaping Educational Policy complemented Goodman's Compulsory Miseducation, as both shared a common though disparate interest in the distribution of power within schooling structures.

He added that Goodman's "empirical inductive and ... theoretical-deductive" logic was complete and that the work provided little apart from a neat interpretation of the reality within schools and its effect on students' human attributes.

[10] Friedenberg wrote that Goodman's proposals are "pertinent, concrete, modest, and inexpensive", practical in their aims, and already implemented on a smaller scale.

Hentoff said that the book's key flaw was its position in a "political vacuum", offering no means for society to acknowledge Goodman's expressed unviability of their schooling model.

[11] Donald Barr (New York Herald Tribune Book Week) wrote that Goodman seemed like "an itinerant peddler of sedition" who spoke of virtuous "dissonance".

[12] Nigel Melville (Fortnight) placed Goodman alongside Herb Kohl, Neil Postman, Jules Henry, and Everett Reimer as part of an education anti-orthodoxy, or new orthodoxy under Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire.