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Invitation

In learning to write about education through this division III, both myself and the division III have gone through several incarnations. I wrote the first incarnation in a very analytical, academic style. It was a ``thesis,'' after all. There were sections on philosophy, history, and practice. I wrote using scholarly books. Everything was organized properly, divided up and put back together. I made an effort to treat subjects independently, and it read as if I was putting together many theories to form one model for education. But something was wrong. It wasn't ``coming together'' at all. My reductionist methodology was reducing everything to meaninglessness.

Then I found the book I was trying to write! It was called Freedom to Learn for the 80s, by Carl Rogers. I had only read about a third of it when I realized that I could stop writing. He had written about the ideas I had been searching for, and he had even done it by including himself in the material, rather than excluding himself. I decided that what was needed was not my version of his book, but rather enactments of our shared ideas in communities all over the world. After that realization, I restarted my work on the Experimental Program in Education and Community at Hampshire College (at that time called the Radical Departure).

Since then, I rethought the prospect of this paper, and decided to give it another shot. For one thing, I discovered that it was missing two important things: me, and you. In addition, I discovered that my theories about education were based on experience - and if my experiences were the sources of my theories, then sharing the experiences and how they have influenced my thinking might be the best way to communicate what education means to me. So I have decided to write down my story for you.

Sometimes I question how valuable you will find the specific things I have learned, because so many important lessons come in such personal forms. Still, I believe that there will probably be some value in sharing these experiences because the experience of others is really also part of one's own experience.

Something I have become more conscious of in the past year which feels like a very valuable discovery to me now is my awareness of a split in most people between what they would be doing if they trusted themselves, and what they are doing in the context of some external structure. In fact, it makes most of us nervous to think about what we would each be doing if we stopped heeding the external structures. It is my experience that the level of actual operation - ie what we would be doing without the external structures - can grow, if trusted, and allowed to make mistakes. In fact, it can become far more socially constructive than just the externally-motivated version of the same person. But it takes trusting mistakes and desires that seem so infantile compared to what can be achieved under external motivation.

I have not felt enough attention given to this trusting one another at this unimpressive level; nor do real people often write about how these unimpressive mistakes were the groundwork for the more impressive work later. This is the need I hope to meet with this division III - to tell some of my stories about how I have trusted myself, and how I have been trusted by others, and how these were completely necessary for who I am today.

The one thing, then, that I want to share with each of you - and this is the clearest ``contribution'' I think am making now - is the value I have found in activities which seem important to a learner but unimportant to most everyone else. It pains me now to see the ways in which people (including myself) are afraid to believe in things and try to achieve them. It seems that we inevitably have to choose how to use external and internal structure in education. And it may be that sometimes we will have more of the one, sometimes more of the other, and sometimes they will be combined. My main goal here is to build awareness of how trusting oneself works so that you can take this into account as you decide what to do in your own life and how to influence others. To learn the most important lessons, we do not need gurus, books, or professionals (except perhaps to see that we do not need them!). We need go no further than our own perception and community.

				Amherst, Massachusetts
				September 1996