As one listens to the comments made on the Goddard campus at the commencement season by alumni, students and their parents, he comes to feel that there is a unique quality about the College, a quality that is much needed in American life, yet one that is hard to define. During the course of the academic year, those who are intimately associated with the College are inevitably involved in ascertaining, discussing and analyzing its weaknesses. This involvement, which occurs in counselling, community meetings, committees, Board meetings, conferences, faculty discussions and incidental conversations, is so continuous and so. engrossing one in sometimes unmindful of the Significant contribution Goddard makes to higher education. The purpose of the first part of this report is to take a closer look at the elements that constitute Goddard's unique quality. It should be obvious that such a venture is not free from bias.

The starting point at Goddard is respect for the individual. During a period in which a premium has been placed on conformity, when the ultraconservative and timid have tried to control the thoughts and expressions of men by restrictive legislation, when it has been asserted that people exist to serve the state rather than the other way around, the College has stood firmly for the sacredness of personality. It has insisted that individual differences should be recognized, that each student be encouraged to think his own thoughts, act in accordance with his conscience and develop to the fullest his own potentialities.

At the same time, there has been a concern that each individual should become socially conscious and responsible. The daily work program, community government, student participation in the determination of policy and in classroom discussions are some of the means by which Goddard students educate themselves for responsible living by carrying responsibility.

From the beginning the College has operated on the principle that the best way to learn show to live in a democratic society is to live in a democratic institution. Because of its devotion to the democratic ideal, Goddard has avoided the evils of ranking its teaching and administrative staffs, it has accepted its students according to their individual merits and without regard to color, creed, family position or wealth. No false and superficial barriers have been erected between students and teachers. The relations have been friendly and informal with respect being shown to teachers by their students not because of their title but because of their character and their worth as men and women.

The democratic idea at Goddard has been interpreted to mean that responsibility for the welfare of the community, in this situation the College, should be shared by young and old, by staff and students. Working on this basis there has been no sharp line marking off the responsibilities of students from those of staff, there has been community government rather than student government. Under this plan the faculty is continually informed of the ideas, problems, interests of students while the latter have had the experience of working with older persons on issues and situation of real importance to them. In an important sense the College has adapted a valuable feature of the small community of our grandfathers by which the young obtained most of their education as workers and citizens by working with their elders. The absence of destructive horseplay among Goddard students is good evidence that it is a practice worthy of wider use in our colleges. The community in which people live is in itself a powerful educative force and the way they live determines their learning. Living in a democratic community demands responsibility, and so one learns responsible living.

Goddard has tested thoroughly the idea that a liberal college is a place for living. It has demonstrated the soundness of the idea. Its program is rooted in the lives of its students. It is a community in which students and teachers study and seek to understand the problems and issues of their lives and their times. To do this they use the great resources of literature, art, science, psychology, philosophy, history. As they discover old truths and new facts they

put them to work and make them a functioning part of their lives. They make plans and they execute them. Experiments are proposed, criticized and tried. They create. There are failures and there are successes. There is action.

The curriculum at Goddard is actually the life of our times, including all the resources that extend to all lands and back through all ages of man. It consists of the ideas, situations, processes, problems, ideals that condition the lives of those who make up the college community. Though it is never wholly the same for any two students, there are many common elements. It is the aim of the College to create a situation in which the student will learn how to use the resources in books, people and nature as he strives to understand himself and the world around him. Courses are pursued and subjects studied, not to pass examinations and to earn marks, for such devices are impediments to learning, but rather to affect present living, to extend present understanding and to enable one to act more wisely as he goes about his daily affairs.

Because the lives of Goddard students are now so strongly affected by events and ideas in other countries, there are courses on Africa, Latin America, India, China, the French and Russian Revolutions, and Scandinavia. Modern man is a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, yet he lives in a community where there are face to face relationships. For studies in the latter area, the College draws on the rich resources of Vermont and especially the Upper Winooski Valley. Many Goddard graduates have found the inspiration for their choice of careers by actually working among the people and in the small communities of the state.

At the same time that Goddard undergraduates have found excellent learning situations in the life among Vermont's hills and valleys, the College has made its facilities available to the wider community. It has encouraged people to participate in and to enjoy art, music, drama, folk dancing. It has fostered area and neighborhood groups concerned with the study of such matters as public schools, community development and recreation. During the winter and summer months, it has made it possible for adults to experience the satisfactions that can be derived only from living and learning in a residential school.

Inherent in the whole educational program of the College is the idea that learning is an active process in which the purpose of the learner is of supreme importance. It is recognized that unless the student develops and directs his energy toward desirable goals, there is likely to be little growth. The Goddard student has to accept the responsibility for his own education, he has to develop his own ideas, he acquires his own stock of facts, and he has to find his own set of answers. The Goddard teacher is not engaged to disseminate knowledge but to encourage learning. His task is not to provide the right answers but to assist in the search for answers. His work is not to tell students what to think but to insist that they learn how to think. And so the Goddard classroom is a place where students are active, where they talk, present ideas and receive criticism, where the teacher raises questions, stimulates thought and facilitates growth.

Only in a small college can all the conditions essential for the fullest educational development of young adults be found. Goddard is deliberately small, and in the light of our present understanding of the requisites for growth, learning and character development, it ought to remain small. But it need not limit itself to a hundred students. A community of 300 of which 250 are students will still allow the necessary face-to-face, informal, direct and informed relationships so important in the educational process.

However, the small college has its limitations. Though the experiences provided its students can be more vital and stirring than those of our large factory-type institutions, there are certain types of experience which neither group of institutions can provide. It is for this reason that during January and February Goddard extends its campus to include shops, laboratories, factories, offices, boats and farms, in cities, towns and waterways throughout the country. In these places the students meet new faces, become acquainted with other ways of living and different kinds of persons. In a very real sense they test how fully they have learned some of the things they have tried to learn in library, classroom and student residences. Perhaps more than anything else they are called upon to live the traits they are building into character.

In its concern for the individual Goddard has, from its beginning as a college, given a prominent place to counselling. It has insisted that each student be allotted not less than an hour every week for meeting alone with the staff member assigned as his counsellor. In these meetings there is opportunity for the student to seek the unifying elements in all his experiences. He can use them to see more clearly the pattern he is making of his life, and as his counsellor raises questions concerning his studies and his other activities, he may have reason to seek new and perhaps better standards for living.

As the Goddard faculty has become better informed concerning the nature of the individual and more skilled in the educational process, it has attached more importance to self-understanding. It has always been concerned with helping individuals to change, but like teachers everywhere, it has not understood well the factors that stand in the way of change and growth. Though there has been tremendous progress in the behavioral sciences in recent years, our educational institutions have been laggard in helping their students to know and to free themselves from the restraints of which they are unconscious victims.

Dr. Lawrence Kubie said at the Goddard commencement a year ago, "Without self-knowledge it is possible to be erudite; but never wise.

" . . . just as the battle for political freedom must be won over and over again, so too in every life the battle for internal psychological freedom must be fought and won again and again, if men are to achieve and retain freedom from the tyranny of their own unconscious process, the freedom to understand the forces which determine their thoughts, feelings, purposes, goals and behavior."

In this vital realm, according to Dr. Kubie, Goddard is one of a few pioneering institutions.

To those who are concerned about preserving the finer elements in our culture the work done at Goddard during the last sixteen years is of more than ordinary significance.

In an age when the independence of the individual is being seriously diminished by the massive power of government and corporate business, Goddard College encourages individuality and the development of each student's potentialities.

At a time when the great traditions of America are threatened with extinction in the drive for conformity, Goddard stands for diversity of opinion, freedom of thought and expression, and creative enterprise.

To meet the challenge of civic indifference and lack of concern for the public weal in democratic America, Goddard plans its educational program so that living at the College requires learning social consciousness and moral responsibility.

To develop the capacity for independent judgement and self-criticism, Goddard students are required to establish their own goals and to evaluate their own academic progress rather than having to rely upon the marks and tests of instructors.

Democratic societies are dependent on the abilities of their members to think critically in group situations. Classes at Goddard are designed to achieve this purpose by use of discussions to which every student is expected to contribute in an informed and constructive way.

The educative values of living and working in a community have long been recognized by students of society, but Goddard is one of the few colleges that is organized as a community and has been successful in making these values available to its students.

The increasing complexity of modern life and the reduction in hours of remunerative work have given new significance to the education of adults. Through its conferences, workshops and residential schools, Goddard has for sixteen years been contributing to the growing interest in and understanding of adult education.

While hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer from and are rendered almost impotent by insecurity and fear, Goddard works at the task of helping each individual to know himself in order that he may be free from irrational fears and attain real serenity of spirit.

With or without the United Nations, Americans are citizens of the world. It is in recognition of this status that at Goddard many courses dealing with other cultures and other nations occupy a much larger place than in most liberal arts colleges.

These are some of the elements that make Goddard unique among American colleges. It is small, it is dynamic, it is dedicated to teaching, that is, to creating an environment in which people can educate themselves. It breathes the spirit of freedom. It stands for moral responsibility. It is experimental and pioneering. It places a high value on sincerity and integrity. Its material resources are meager, and the conditions of living are simple, but its spiritual resource passeth all understanding.

Editor's note: This text was selected from Forest Davis' book Things Were Different in Royce's Day (1996)]