St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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I: is now eight years since the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley announced active stu- dent discontent with the educational system. No major institutional change has followed at the University of California. The most significant event has been conversion from a semester to a quarter system, “for more efficient utilization of the physical plant” in accordance with the state’s Master Plan. . . Higher education, as presently institu- tionalized, serves to create new knowledge, to transfer certain information and skills, and to impart certain kinds of social and cognitive conditioning. It is organized to serve these functions in the interest of the established structures and relationships of power (however one describes them). And it serves them in ways largely wrelevant or inimical to the learning needs of free people in a just society. In the Sixties the condition- ing in the schools began to be challenged and rejected by the young as cramping human potential and leading to death .. . I think the outlines of what will replace the present version of higher education are already visible. What the last fifteen years have been about—the awakening of social consciousness among the young and its development through politics into counter- culture and toward new community—is the growth of a new process of mass, ongoing “higher” education. What follows is a set of notes on the “alternative system.” The alternative system is largely decen- tralized. It has no institutional form in the sense we understand that concept. It is nota single establishment doing predictable business, in fixed modes, endlessly dupli- cated. Rather, to map its workings, we have to understand it as a network that is diverse, mobile, and evolving. The network includes the many sorts of groups people that have organized to connect directly with the learning and learning action they now feel they need: free clinics, free schools, underground papers and radio stations, crisis centers, free universities and student-run experimental colleges, media collectives (from video to posters), minority liberation groups, anti-war and military resistance groups, — tutorials, y oga meditation aikido “growth” centers, ecology and consumer-action groups, and so on. Each of these categories currently includes between 200 and 800 nodes. Each node consists of a group of ten to a hundred people, their energies focused on work that involves the lives of many others. (Thus even this “counter-cultural” of the alternate system may be seen to involve numbers of “teachers” fraction and “students” on the same order as the official system.) The common denominator is change— the learning of new ways. Thus each node is 30 How We Learn Today in America By Michael Rossman intense with the energies of transformation, and each person is impelled toward change from within and without. Many do change; that the average serious stay in a single node is around eighteen months is evidence of this. Thus many nodes have similar life-spans dispersing to pass their functions on to others while their people move on to new learning. Unlike conventional organizations, these are transient, disposable: They fit like thin clothes on the lives of the people within them. How can one make a catalogue for such a college? At any rate, we are trying. The Yellow hundreds of People’s Pages in Boston lists local organized learning resources. Similar directories flourish now in thirty cities, and a dozen efforts at ongoing national directories of sectors of the network have begun since Vocations for Social Change, on the West Coast, undertook the first one... The condition of the different, and not only in the sense that valued faculty is ‘‘nonprofessional resources” are equally with “‘professional.” Despite the present glut of gurus, if you ask those whose work makes these nodes, “What do you do?” very few will say, “I teach” (though most will confess this in some sense if you them). Knowledge from through the press comes practice, practitioner; increasingly, our instruction comes from people engaged in work in the world. The have specialist role of ‘Teacher as we conceived it is fading; teaching will remain—everyone’s birthright, used more flexibly and integrated into the action of lifes Seeing this net of meta-stable eddies in the general swirl as the ground of an educa- tional process, the difference between its basic learning group and the basic group of the institutionalized system (the class) is striking. A class consists of people with minimal mutual commitment come together by inor- ganic schedule and program rather than common life purpose; joined for brief, iso- lated meetings on a fixed schedule in a longer arbitrary time; encountering one an- other in only one of their many dimensions, © in an authority-centered society with fixed roles; dominated by a punishment reward framework of motivation; acquiring a spe- cialized splinter of knowledge already pre- pared; and, beyond this, training in data pro- | cessing and social conditioning. | In free-learning groups, from communes | to more organized nodes, people joined by . common interest and mutual design choose | to commit themselves to come together ex- | tensively and intensively over an open-ended | period. They meet each other on as many of | their human levels as they can, in a demo- | cratic peer society that generates its own norms and internal motivations, to learn and — to create the general and particular life knowledge needed. | I may seem to be describing this” alternative educational system much too | loosely, for at the level of karass and commune and somewhat at the level of the - organized nodes, it merges indistinguishably with the other processes of everyday life. But that is precisely the point!

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(he (ower EDUCATION 1972, The Register and Tribune Syndicate “You should do better than this in art. | had your brother and he was VERY good!” The Family Circus by Bil Keane Reprinted courtesy The Register and Tribune Syndicate 29

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— = — — — — a = a ey | stitutions of mass (higher) education are a sent cultural innovation. Why should we ve assumed that the form in which they essed the function of extended citizen wning was immortal? As the function of cher becomes despecialized, so (from our rspective) the education comes deinstitutionalized and is freed to reconfigured with the “other” processes our integral lives—perhaps in forms hard process of = KD Or Zo CTT f AAs iia | i; to recognize. But forms there will be, for, actually, talk about ‘‘institutions’’ versus “deinstitutionalization” is nonsense, as is the argument about ‘“‘structure” versus ‘“nonstructure.” There is no nonstructure; even chaos has within it the form of whatever consciousness persists through it. If an institution is the shape in which a basic human need is serviced in society, then what es Sl, a Yael, S Aes | | ) Le ) 4 | am = so. sketchily describing as a process-system is an institution in an early stage of evolution. But it takes an understanding different from that provided by the standard model of “institution” to recognize in this swirl of first of the higher form appropriate to current motion a model institutional changing age. our August 19, 1972 Copyright, Suturday Review, Inc. 31