Had a fun session of our New School history ULEC today. The topic was adult education, a dull topic until you start to think about what it could mean, and we sparked discussion by giving students an outline of a curriculum for adults drafted by the inescapable Alvin Johnson in 1953. Mark it up, cross things out, update and supplement! we urged, but many found it promising as it stood. (It didn't come to pass.) While it goes on to include "Problems of the Citizen," "Our Economic Life" and "The Enrichment of Life: The arts and amateurism," what students were excited by was the first category, "On Personal Development."
The students who spoke up seemed to think that beginning with self-knowledge would be a boon to learning, and to your fellow students, too. "Take your own mask off before you put the mask on others." a student quipped approvingly, an idiom unfamiliar to me, which seems to combine self-awareness with a spin on the instructions for airline safety in the event of an emergency. The discussion was and was not about the "life experience" which some advocates of adult education (like Horace Kallen) thought sheltered college students of conventional age lack.
Our discussion touched also on the importance of "defeats" and "losses," things Johnson thought were part of adult self-knowledge... but I was reminded also of the time I was part of a delegation of New Schoolers at a conference on general education where we decided, not quite jokingly, that one of the hallmarks of a New School education should be "failure." I think that idea lives on, a little defanged, in the "Shared Capacity" goal of "resilience," but the defeats and losses Johnson is thinking of seem deeper. I guess I think the classroom should be a safe space in an unsafe world (like many other "human relations"), a space to name and process and engage that unsafety... adult?
The students who spoke up seemed to think that beginning with self-knowledge would be a boon to learning, and to your fellow students, too. "Take your own mask off before you put the mask on others." a student quipped approvingly, an idiom unfamiliar to me, which seems to combine self-awareness with a spin on the instructions for airline safety in the event of an emergency. The discussion was and was not about the "life experience" which some advocates of adult education (like Horace Kallen) thought sheltered college students of conventional age lack.Our discussion touched also on the importance of "defeats" and "losses," things Johnson thought were part of adult self-knowledge... but I was reminded also of the time I was part of a delegation of New Schoolers at a conference on general education where we decided, not quite jokingly, that one of the hallmarks of a New School education should be "failure." I think that idea lives on, a little defanged, in the "Shared Capacity" goal of "resilience," but the defeats and losses Johnson is thinking of seem deeper. I guess I think the classroom should be a safe space in an unsafe world (like many other "human relations"), a space to name and process and engage that unsafety... adult?
