"Notes Toward an Ideal College" (first published 1973)

by Gerald Grow

School of Journalism, Media & Graphic Arts

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee FL 32307 USA

Available: http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow

Program

The Centering Core Program

All good education teaches people to be increasingly self-educating. Educational--and personal--maturity is a process of increasing inner-direction and decreasing dependence on external authority. However, the educational system as a whole seems geared to produce a divided student: one who on the one hand is highly dependent on external authority, because he has gotten so good at following directions he can't stop; and on the other hand is deeply resentful, sometimes openly rebellious toward these authorities. By the time most students reach college, they have had many years of learning to be clean and neat and write their names in the upper right hand corner, last name first, followed by the date, and so on and on. This is not bad in itself. But by itself, this kind of education undermines an individual's ability to reach the relative freedom of mature interdependence. The ideal college would start in kindergarten, helping teach students to make their own decisions and learn from their own experiences. Unfortunately, we can't do that; but instead have to start with freshmen--already deeply formed by an educational philosophy often at odds with the ideal of self-regulation. Therefore, the core program of my ideal college would consist of a series of courses and programs and experiences aimed at grounding each student sufficiently in his own physical and psychic center; attuning him sufficiently to his own values, feelings, and needs; acquainting him sufficiently with his own talents, capacities, and motivations-that he will begin to be in a position to choose an education for himself. This calls for an active program. Doing nothing about this (as we do now) means endorsing the dependency and timidity that the school system currently encourages. How would such a program work? No one knows. Yet I think for the first time there is enough educational and psychological--and human--knowledge available to create such a program. It requires the best, most humane experts doing their best thinking-and testing their plans against the experience of students in the pilot program. I can't say what the final version would look like. But I can offer some general ideas on what I think it might do. In the first place, the Centering Core Program would focus on developing human beings. Our goal is for each student to become--not a student or an employee or a sportsman or anything else--but a person in his own right. This is not easy. Much in our thinking and in our institutions encourages half-people. They follow directions better, make fewer waves. And live smaller, more nervous lives. One of the basic steps in the Centering process is to bring students increasingly into contact with their emotional lives. This may sound trivial next to the older ideal of teaching the Great Minds of the Past; but in the long run, I believe this is far more important. We need an atmosphere in which students are encouraged to experience themselves on more and more levels. Students might participate in exercises designed to put them gently into contact with unacknowledged parts of themselves-so that these many wandering selves may contribute their energies constructively toward the person's mental-emotional-bodily self. This involves two basic procedures: (1) a strengthening of the students' energy and expressiveness; and (2) the removal of blocks to their experience of themselves and the world. As more blocks are removed and as more authentic experiences emerge, students will find themselves more fully alive, more interested in explorations, and less in need of orders. This process can be long and difficult. No one really knows how to do it on a large scale--yet. I am not proposing encounter or any other present form of therapy, but something much larger: an attempt to gather together under one roof many of the now-dying functions of the church , the family, the traditional college, and the community. There, we can attempt the basic task of cultivating whole human beings who, hopefully, will begin to create a self-perpetuating society of health and human fulfillment. By transforming people, education could help transform the world. This program would seek a vital balance between personal security and personal risk. Present educational institutions seem to complicate a student's insecurities in order to make him more tractable. If we worked to make people genuinely themselves, secure in the experience of their own lives and needs, we would have to re-face the questions of: What is Important? Why do anything? Why read Plato? Will a vibrantly alive person even bother with Shakespeare? Can history contribute anything to a life of richer experience? I suspect that active, growing, exploring students, expanding from their felt centers, will seek knowledge much more actively than traditional students who read because they are told to. A well-centered student could risk liking something out of the ordinary because he could test it against his own needs and experiences. Such a student could also risk liking the classics without feeling intimidated. The Core Program would also try to bring students into contact with the most important things in life-not just books. People would be brought to consider birth and death, making a living, old age, childhood, illness, politics, the natural world, technology and the media, the nature of the world they will have to live in and transform, sex, love, the family, the nature of change, the human body, the life-cycle, the possibilities and limitations of their lives, the parameters we live and work and love in.

Student-Centered Programs

Institutions do not spring from a deity, nor do they come to us with a perfect wisdom from the past. They are human creations. They are designed to meet human needs. People live in them and through them. Some of our basic institutions are now undergoing rapid and radical change (education and marriage). The unusual growing pains now experienced in our culture arise in part from our helplessness in the face of human institutions, our inability to see them clearly, our habituation to established ways of doing things, and our over-respect for the past. All must be tested against the basic criterion: does it foster a fulfilling life? Much of life consists in designing, modifying, and/or living in human institutions (like schools, families, and governments). College could be a place where people gain practice in forming, testing, and changing the institutions which shape their lives. When a student designs her own curriculum--alone or with a group of friends--she may not devise the most efficient way to learn, say, urban problems. But she will probably do fine. And, more important, she will gain experience in the basic human skill of creating institutions for herself to live through. Similarly, a student-organized commune can be a powerful learning-situation where people come to grips with the problems of social and individual life. Teachers probably shouldn't have much to do with such student-run programs, except to act as consultants. The first task of a teacher is to lead a fulfilling life. The second task is to teach. And if that life is whole enough, students will seek the teacher out, in order to learn how to live better. And even one lost in the wilderness can be good at teaching survival skills.

Work-Study

A good education is grounded in (1) personal identity, (2) human relationships, (3) deep relationships with the living past, and (4) a life in the world. Books are not enough. Students need to do, to work, to risk, to fail, to meet real situations outside the classroom and pit themselves against them. Therefore some kind of work-study program seems best. Here, students would periodically return to the college in order to ground and integrate their experiences to test themselves against the past and against art's vision of human possibility, and to re-center. A college could become a place where one question is foremost: "Are you living as well as you could?" --And College could cultivate old and new approaches to enriching life.

Role of the Great Books

The goal is not to study Great Books for their own sake, but in order to re-activate those levels of human creativity from which the Great Books sprang. More than the past, we need a renewed capacity for generating our own Great Books and great solutions. Great Books programs traditionally suffer from teaching too much respect. They tend to cow students. They produce critics rather than creators. They focus too much on the recorded experience of another person, not enough on the student's own. Any program, including Great Books, Humanities, Sciences, Art, Social Sciences, or even professional training, is good if it can be used to discover and strengthen the student's center, his capacity for experience, and his creative living.

Multiplicity

An ideal college would be full of alternative ways of growth. At one time, the church or a professional program might have been enough. A liberal-arts curriculum might have been enough. But no longer. Now we need active, well-grounded explorers in all areas: Eastern thought, humanistic and somatic psychology, growth groups, the bodily arts, the creative arts, the roots of religious experience, the natural world, performing arts, humanistic sciences, human relationships, even just plain work, just plain reading and writing, just plain traditional disciplines (treated as means, not ends), even just watching a flower unfold or the sun rise and knowing this is as important as Aquinas. --What have I left out?

The Role of Experience

Some remarkable individuals, such as Emily Dickenson, have lived rich lives within a seemingly narrow range of experience. Most of us, however, would be better off to seek a certain nutritional variety in our experiences. What we are and what we think is largely determined by what we do. Students should have available a wide range of vital life experiences, human beings, and modes of living. Much that there is to learn cannot be learned from books. For example, students should not study religion, but actively seek and cultivate religious experience. Then they will know that all theologies are attempts to make sense out of something simple, direct, and real in human life. Students should not only study literature, but also seek literary experience: the experience of feeling, needing to express something, expressing it, testing that expression, and celebrating the process. They should come to view great art as a valuable celebration of their own potentiality, a higher ordering of experience. Students should not only study scientific law, but also scientific method: the actual human activity of discovery and testing, intuition and failure, law and revolution. Whenever possible, students should rediscover basic physical laws, and come into contact with scientists who, are working on the murky forefront of knowledge, far from the misleading certainties of textbooks. Genuine experience is rare. Most of what we call "experience" is mere repeating of established patterns, filling in categories, or punching buttons. Real experience contains a strong element of uncertainty; it demands a personal, creative response; it may be almost invisible; it may seem trivial. In the long run, though, experience is all there is. Learning is good when it leads to richer experience of one's self and the world (not that the two are separate). Learning is bad when it constricts experience through inducing too set patterns, too much "respect," or a general timidity. Above all, college should seek to cultivate that class of experiences which are integrative, generative, personal and social, individual and cosmic. "Peak experiences" are not accidental. They are accessible to everyone, as recent humanistic and somatic psychologies have shown. Great Books and great art are only one way to approach peak experiences. The goal is for the student to generate, in the course of his ordinary living, peak experiences and creative responses that are comparable to the best of the past. Or which, at least, fulfill in the student's own life the same function writing Hamlet must have served for Shakespeare. Authentic creation, whether or not objectively "good," can sometimes serve the ends of individual growth better than the great classics. The goal is wholeness, not applause.

Final Premise

All premises and processes in this paper are hypotheses. Any or all of them could be wrong. Their value lies in how much can be learned from thinking them through and testing them.

[End of article.]

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