Yes, I am deeply concerned. Through our wonderful radio station, WGDR, I've done some interviews with Stu Bautz about the nature of progressive education and its relation to Goddard. As you may know, Forest Davis has just issued a book about Tim's years at Goddard--Forest's memories of his 17 years as faculty member and Dean, and a lot of material Tim wrote. It's published by "The ADamant Press [which is Forest], West Church Road, Adamant, Vermont 05640.

I've also talked at some length with students about my experience at Black Mountain College, contrasting it with my experience at Antioch, from which I had transferred to BMC. Both were considered "progressive colleges." Antioch was avowedly in the business of producing "well-rounded" junior executives and/or engineers, etc., and did pretty well at it, thanks to its "Co-op" program (alternating work with study); Kilpatrick thought that was a good idea because knowledge was tested in real work. But the classroom work at Antioch was very conventional: lectures, "sections" for discussion, led by upperclass students, a very ordinary "liberal arts" curriculum. There were, however, some not so ordinary teachers who bucked a little against that mold. And Antioch had a good, "democratic," community life: no clubs or fraternities or special rooming privileges, and it was hard to know whether one's friends were rich or poor. One might come after a while to call some faculty by their first names; others, never!

There was also a "community government," headed by a "community manager" who chaired a "community council," elected by proportional representation with the number of votes each person had determined by her or his years at Antioch. Thus there were many progressive and democratic elements. It was, however, clear where the real power lay: in the President's and Dean's offices. And there were required courses and required phys ed, and grades on papers and for courses, and a grade-point system, and all too little attention to who got what jobs (they were assigned) for the required co-op work periods.

Black Mountain was very different. In the first place, it was very small--in my 2 1/2 years there, about 65-80 students, and a faculty of 14-17 (it grew as the college opened its doors to refugees from Germany and other countries--this was wartime). I had known a good many people at Antioch, especially those interested in theater and literature, and a smattering of persons who stood out in various ways. At Black Mountain everybody knew everybody. The classes were very small, never more than a dozen if I remember rightly, and there was lots of discussion. Lectures weren't part of courses; a number of the faculty presented things in the evening that one could go to or not--I usually found them fascinating; we could always ask questions afterwards.

Creativity in some form was at the center of the curriculum--science students were doing real experiments, theater people were inventing ways of making scenery and props and costumes without spending any money, and trying to find aspects of ourselves in the characters we were acting; there were many students in visual arts, music, writing, weaving, usually with their own studios, sometimes working in courses in those areas, sometimes on their own. In one ongoing course a German doctor/psychologist/philosopher was being assisted by students (some of them were faculty members) in developing what was later named phenomenological existentialism.

Admistration was headed by a "rector," a teaching member of the faculty who served for no fixed number of years, though rotation was expected. Faculty meetings planned the academic program; one might ask to attend them, and I and the woman who later became my late first wife did so and were embarassed when one of the faculty said as we entered, "Here come the Brains." A member of the faculty (math and physics) was also the liaison with the "anonymous donors" (turned out to the Forbes family) who kept the place going. Students found their slots: I became, for instance, the college printer; exercising a skill i'd learned by hanging around the printshop where the high-school newspaper I'd helped edit was printed. My wife-to-be, a poet and student of literature and history, wrote news releases for the Asheville paper. One student, with some wealth behind him, built a "quiet house" for meditation, with a little help from his friends, and wove the curtains for its windows. Most students helped build the new Studies Building, when the college was about to move from its site, for its first seven years, in an old hotel. The old progressive adage about learning to do by doing was very alive there: Black Mountain was very much a DOING place.

A happy indication of progressivism at work: faculty said what they wanted to teach (determined in the faculty meeting) and listed the courses or projects; students signed up for them; and then, unbelievably, the faculty sat down and made a schedule that had no conflicts in it. That was one of the flexible but very real structures in the college. Given the no-conflicts schedule, it was assumed you would be at the meetings of the courses you'd signed up for unless you were really sick, and people WERE there. No attendance record needed to be kept. A related part of the structure: there were no "3-credit" or "5-credit" courses; credits were granted for transcript purposes on the faculty member's estimate (based on observation and evidence of preparation, etc.) of the number of hours a student had put into the course.

The democracy was, it seems to me, first of all in the faculty, who planned the program together. There were committees (admissions, for instance) and students were important members of them. Students elected each semester three student officers, who automatically attended faculty meetings. At the beginning of the semester the students proposed and voted on a few "student agreements" about

daily life at the college. At the same time it must be said that the faculty could become authoritarian in relation to student behavior of a flagrant kind, deemed to threaten the reputation of the college. [That kind of disappeared in 1944 and the following years; it was a very different college then from the one I'd known and, you will guess, deeply loved, in 1940-43.]

If, as Tim wrote, the Goddard philosophy of education begins with the individual student, then I should say that Black Mountain's philosophy--in its first decade, the 1933-43 years--was similar to Goddard's. I would phrase it this way: that learners come first; that learning, not teaching, is at the center of progressive education, and teachers are there simply to help the learners learn. And I agree with old Kilpatrick, who said that you learn only what you need to learn, are ready to learn, and can accept inwardly (which asks teachers to help the learners truly identify their learning needs, get the readiness that will help them meet the needs, and permit the learning become part of their selves, change their selves (for education is change--a change that Dewey called "the reconstruction of experience"). I think that was all going on at Black Mountain, though we didn't talk much about it.

Antioch was different: the "product" seemed to come first, with "symmetry" and "well-roundedness" (and success) as the names of that product. History, I suspect, would show that both of those institutions were attended by many interesting, even important persons, who may be presumed to have learned something there. But I think they would not be interesting or important in the same ways.

Goddard has done pretty well over many years, and there are things here that I would like to believe can't be damaged by the wrong president (and we've had a few along the way). The thing I fear most about the current incumbent is that he will bankrupt the college, for he's not the money-raiser we were led to expect. I fear, too, that he will impose on us a Dean who has little or no idea of what progressive education is about, and will head us more in the Antioch-or even the Middlebury--direction. I worry that he will fire some (or all) of the part-time faculty, several of whom seem to me very important to our curriculum.

Just at present, I worry that our necessary concern about what could be called internal politics--this possible firing of faculty as an example--will get in the way of our equally necessary rethinking of curriculum, for we've lost that "philosophy of curriculum" that the college had when I arrived here in 1948. It linked the study of democracy with economics, sociology, and psychology, saw literature and other arts as related to the role of the individual in society, helped students come to understand history as part of their own autobiographies, and led them into the natural world to study science in terms of the interrelation of living and nonliving species, systems, formations. Instead, we seem to have settled for whatever a faculty member thinks it might be fun to teach or that s student or small group of students say they want to study (which is very different from what they might be helped to discover, with the aid of their faculty advisors, about what they need to learn).

What one needs to learn, Dewey realized (and Kilpatrick must have too, for he led a radical group of faculty at Teachers College), isn't JUST personal, it's also social. Students may have to be helped to realize that they need to understand, because they will have to deal with, governmental and economic policies and systems. At the moment, and for many years now, we've had no group studies that address those questions. A few students get worked up about racism, more about sexism and "oppression," a number about the Native Americans, a fair number about the environment; but none, as far as I can see, about the world-wide population explosion; about an economic system that is continually refined to move assets from the poor to the rich while destroying the middle class--and about other economic system; or about a political system built on supporting that economic system --and about other possible political systems. (Vermont's Cal Coolidge, I think it was, who first pronounced "The Business of America is Business"--or was it "The business of Government is Business"?)

Our failure to rethink curriculum comes, it seems to me, not from distrust in or dislike of progressive education, but from failure to see the differences between wants and needs; to misvalue the whims of individualism as equal to or the same as the productive contributions of individuality; and--to say it again--to fail to recognize that "needs," as a necessary basis for learning, are both individual and socio/politico/economic. These are failures of faculty as much as they are of administrators, though the administrators have forgotten that Goddard was founded, and accredited, as an experimental institution, but has not planned and carried out an experiment in many deacades. My guess is that many trustees don't give much of a damn whether we're experimental or not, progressive or not. You will know from this long reply that I do.

There is something stirring. A couple of young women students have instituted what they call a "revolution," asking all community members to come to community meetings and propose major changes that will bring life back into the old body. They're naive in their understanding of how changes happen, and appear to have little idea of what progressive education's theoretical underpinnings are, but they have started some people thinking. One thing that may come of this is a lot of discussion about "progressive educaton" at the beginning of the Fall semester--what various people think it "is," what it may or might mean to individual students, and -- importantly -- what is NOT: license to do whatever you want whenever you want. Some faculty and administrators have been at these (so far, two) community meetings, and some of us have had something to say.

I hope this discourse is of interest to you. It's been of interest to me to write it.

Will Hamlin

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