St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

Page 42 text:

The New Naturalism By Daniel Yankelovich Sick my colleagues and | first began to study the revolution in campus values in the mid-1960s, I have been reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s dictum that “oreat ideas often enter reality in strange guises and with disgusting alliances.” Whitehead was referring to the emergence, three millennia ago, of the idea of the essential equality of men. But our studies have led me to won- der whether the college student move- ment might conceivably harbor an idea of comparable importance. Should its claim to transform our moral sensibili- ties and national life-styles be taken seriously? Were we witnessing a new chapter in an authentic and serious movement in American cultural history or merely a nervous spasm elicited in re- sponse to the unsettling events of our time? In the course of our research with college students, | have come to regard these questions as the most crucial ones that can be raised about the student movement. Critics of student protest offended by long hair, rioting, open sexuality, and challenge to authority, see mainly the strange guises and dis- gusting alliances. Devotees of the coun- terculture, on the other hand, romanti- cize the movement, hailing each new a- ? berration as the inspired expression of 38 a great idea. But is it not possible that both sets of judgements, even though they seem to contradict each oth- er, form a single truth? Is it not like- ly, as Whitehead implies, that any im- portant new idea as it struggles to be born will assume transitional forms, some of them ugly and contaminated by passing circumstances? My own conclusion is that White- head’s formula holds true for the stu- dent movement: It does harbor a great idea, and that idea has entered current American reality in many strange and misleading guises. Conceptually, the movement’s central idea is neither whol- ly original nor yet a platitude. It has, in fact, recurred as a theme of our civilization many times over hun- dreds of years, though it has probably not been urged in so compelling and noy- el a form since the time of Rousseau. The essence of the idea is that we must initiate a new stage in man’s re- latedness to nature and the natural. In the hierarchy of values that consti- tute man’s conception of the summum bonum; the student-led cultural revo- lution elevates nature and the natur- al to the highest position. Whatever is natural is deemed to be good; whatever is artificial and opposed to nature is bad. But what is truly natural and what is opposed to nature? The answer is by no means self-evident. We have i- dentified almost twenty meanings of the concept “natural” as the student movement defines it. Some meanings are obvious, others are subtle. Some are superficial expressions of life- styles that students experiment with and then abandon like so many one- night stands; other meanings are fun- damental to man’s existence. To be natural, in the student lexicon, means: To push the Darwinian version of nature as “survival of the fittest” into the background, and to emphasize

Page 41 text:

Ili f | vhich success would no longer be associated pi vith skin color, economic background, or yther “‘irrelevant” factors, but only with ac- “ual merit. What they wanted, in short, was what they called “equal opportunity.” | Their strategy for achieving equal op- T lested on a series of assumptions that went oughly as follows: |) Eliminating poverty is largely a matter of relping children born into poverty to rise ‘but of it. Once families escape from poverty, hey do not fall back into it. Middle-class ‘thildren rarely end up poor. 2) The primary reason poor children cannot sscape from poverty is that they do not ac- quire basic cognitive skills. They cannot ‘ead, write, calculate, or articulate. Lacking hese skills, they cannot get or keep a well- paid job. 3)The best mechanism for breaking this . ‘vicious circle” is educational reform. Since y +. 2 —— q ‘e children born into poor homes do not ac- quire the skills they need from their parents, 4 they must be taught these skills in school. ’ This can be done by making sure that they , if ‘attend the same schools as middle-class chil- ‘ ‘dren, by giving them extra compensatory yy programs in school, by giving their parents a voice in running their schools, or by some | ‘combination of all three approaches. | | | | | | Our research over the last four years suggests that each of these assumptions is erroneous... Implications for Educational Policy These findings imply that school re- form is never likely to have any signifi- cant effect on the degree of inequality among adults. This suggests that the prev- alent “factory” model, in which schools are seen as places that “produce” alumni, probably ought to be abandoned. It is true that schools have “inputs” and “out- puts,” and that one of their nominal pur- poses is to take human “raw material” (i.e., children) and convert it into some- thing more “useful” (i.e., employable adults). Our research suggests, however, that the character of a school’s output depends largely on a single input, the characteristics of the entering children. Everything else—the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers—is either secondary or com- pletely irrelevent, at least so long as the range of variation among schools is as narrow as it seems to be in America. These findings have convinced us that the long-term effects of schooling are relatively day-to-day internal life of the schools, in contrast, is highly variable. It follows that the pri- uniform. The cost of participating in a social system. mary basis for evaluating a school should be whether the students and teachers find it a satisfying place to be. This does not mean we think schools should be like mediocre summer camps, in which children are kept out of trouble but not taught anything. We doubt that a school can be enjoyable for either adults or children unless the children keep learning new things. We value ideas and the life of the mind, and we think that a school that does not value these things is a poor place for children. But a school that values ideas because they enrich the lives of children is quite different from a school that values high reading scores because reading scores are important for adult success . . . In America, as elsewhere, the long-term drift over the past 200 years has been to- ward equality. In America, however, the contribution of public policy to this drift has been slight. As long as egalitarians as- sume that public policy cannot contribute to equality directly but must proceed by ingen- ious manipulations of marginal institutions like the schools, this pattern will continue. If we want to move beyond this tradition, we must establish political control over the eco- nomic institutions that shape our society. What we will need, in short, is what other countries call socialism. Anything less will end in the same disappointment as the re- forms of the 1960s. SR of Education, October 1972 Copyright, Saturday Review, Inc. The “cost of living” is not the cost of buying some fixed set of goods and services. It is the 37

Page 43 text:

The students’ cultural revolution is liberal radical on equality and authority, but conservative on community. itead the interdependence of all things a1 species in nature. To place sensory experience ahead of iceptual knowledge. To live physically close to nature, athe open, off the land. To live in groups (tribes, communes) sher than in such “artificial” social gits as the nuclear family. To reject hypocrisy, “white lies,” and fier social artifices. To de-emphasize aspects of nature il- jninated by science; instead, to cele- rt all the unknown, the mystical, and |» mysterious elements of nature. To stress cooperation rather than (mpetition. To embrace the existentialist emphasis being rather than doing or planning. To devalue detachment, objectivity, d noninvolvement as methods for finding lth: to arrive at truth, instead, by pect experience, participation, and ‘olvement. To look and feel natural, hence rejecting makeup, bras, suits, ties, arti- ficially groomed hairstyles. To express oneself nonverbally; to a- void literary and stylized forms of ex- pression as artificial and unnatural; to rely on exclamations as well as silences, vibrations, and other nonverbal modes of communication. To reject “official” and hence artific- ial forms of authority; authority is to be won, it is not a matter of automatic en- titlemen t by virtue of position or official standing. To reject mastery over nature. To dispense with organization, ration- alization, and cost-effectiveness. To embrace self-knowledge, introspec- tion, discovery of one’s natural self. To emphasize the community rather than the individual. To reject mores and rules that inter- fere with natural expression and function (e.g., conventional sexual morality). To preserve the environment at the ex- pense of economic growth and technology. The counterculture is well named. As Kenneth Kenniston noted, it defines it- self, at least in part, in terms of what it opposes. And what it opposes consti- tutes a huge part of our culture. Yet, as the varied definitions of nature and the natural suggest, the positive side of the counterculture is the more significant one. Three themes in the new naturalism of the student movement stand out—the stress on community, the apparent anti-intellectual- ism, and the search for what is sacred in nature. It is a mistake to think of new student values in conventional political terms. The student movement is generally identified with political radicalism, and many of its views come from radical theorists. But some of its leading ideas, especially those relat- ing to community, have deep roots in con- servation tradition. If we trace liberal and conservative ideologies historically, we can distinguish them by their opposing positions on the fundamental philosophical issues of equality, authority, and community. By these criteria, the students’ cultural revolution is liberal radical on equality and authority, but conservative on community. It is such novel juxtaposi- tions that make the student movement inter- 39