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Finally, the end of the story must come. But I do not feel like a convergent ending will do justice to this story of part of my life. Particularly for this story as part of this division III. This ending must diverge rather than converge. And so it will - I will provide here a short historical description of this past year and a half, and I will also provide some thematic link between the material I have presented thus far and the other parts of this division III besides this story. But for the real effects of the ideas I have expressed in this story, you should read about the work I have done at Hampshire in the past year, in part II and in the Appendices. To go beyond the time I am writing and find out how these themes relate to the time in which you are reading, you will have to follow up by finding some of the ways these threads I am describing in this paper are still noticeable somehow in your own life today - whether you are a student at Hampshire College in 2025 (the year I turn 50) or whether perhaps you are reading in only 1998 and should find me and start a school with me. I hope you can find some of these threads in your life today, and in that process learn about how history is an important part of you.
I returned from visiting Laura in Washington at the beginning of August, 1995, and entered into one of the amazing periods of little sleep, much hope, and much pain. As Laura had written me a month earlier, I knew what I had to work on - what I thought were my most basic assumptions, my theories about helping other people to become free. In particular, I began to learn that often my approaches supposedly intended to make another person free were based on my ideas about what I would have them do, not on what they themselves would do. And what kind of freedom is that? (This is the source of the thinking described in part II as the confusion of an embodiment of an idea with the idea itself.)
In September, I began my official year of leave from Hampshire, but I still maintained contact with school - in fact, I even led an orientation group and started a student-led education class.
Come November, I hit the road in my blue tercel with 180,000 miles for a month of visiting intentional communities and alternative schools in the southeastern United States - and by the end had my mind set on bringing education into my division III and my life after Hampshire.
Together with several students from the education class I'd started at Hampshire, I held the first conference of the Alternative Higher Education Network, at Hampshire in January 1996, and finally at the end of January I began to write this division III. It started out as my responses to things I was reading and places I had visited. I wrote a lot - probably well over a hundred pages by May.
Then, around March, I decided I wanted to start working again on what was then still called the Radical Departure, the program to make at least a portion of Hampshire what I thought it could and should be. That work continued part-time through the summer, and by fall, in its new form (The Experimental Program in Education and Community) it was in existence.
But meanwhile, in about May, I had decided to completely redo everything I had written so far, and every single word you have read in this division III has been written since May (so much for actually writing it during the year of leave!). In this new, narrative form, as contrasted to the analytical form I left behind, I recorded my experiences, how these experiences formed my educational ideas, and how they informed my action. Two of the main threads I have traced here (and which come up explicitly in the theoretical section of part II) are the integration of thought and action, and the contradictory nature of freedom. Where in particular the ideas about freedom will end up, I am not sure. Writing now, over a year after the lessons I learned in Washington, they are still developing. In part II (recording my current thinking), my emphasis on freedom has become split into the two ideas of respecting other people (``respecting the learner'') and the importance of awareness. Freedom itself has ceased to be as helpful or comprehensible for me as it once was. Thus, in part II and in the Appendices, you can see how the themes from my personal life have become my educational philosophy, how I have implemented the philosophy, and how the philosophy and practice have evolved together.
My personal growth in the past year has been a growing awareness of my personal psychology, and the beginning of developing spirituality. These things, too, are fundamentally connected with my educational philosophy and practice, but I have not yet been able to articulate how. Truly, the integration of these things into a fulfulling life based in the present, and based on acceptance, is the revolution I ended the previous chapter by alluding to. Whether that revolution will end, or will have to continue forever in my life, I do not know.
I do know, however, that I am currently very interested in applying my ideas to the world beyond Hampshire. For the past few months, I have been discussing the idea of starting an alternative elementary school with a highly individualized program, staffed primarily by college interns. This seems a likely direction for my next project. In January, I am taking two weeks of a Hampshire janterm course on how to write a business plan (on the advice of Greg Prince). From there, I will fly with four other Hampshire students to the second conference of the Alternative Higher Education Network, at the Johnston Center in Redlands, California. After the conference, I am planning to spend a month visiting alternative schools on the west coast, before returning to Vermont to finish the preparation for the new school. I am applying for a fellowship from the echoing green foundation to start the new school - and perhaps I will even run into some philanthropist who is just dying to fund a new school! Please read the letter I have written about the kind of school I would like to have. Would you like to come join a movement of new schools with me? This is an open invitation, if you still feel like you need one.