ODYSSEY PART 23 - IV: `Odyssey’ item on education – Part IV

While our schools in Plymouth and Sheboygan County and our post-secondary colleges and vocational institutions are all struggling to offer quality education, there is a huge national challenge facing America: we are losing our competitive edge in the global economy.

Q. What helpful ideas and models emerge from your experience that could offer value for us here and for this great national need?

A. My third example, although small scale, produced positive long-run outcomes. It grew out of the seminars held each summer at our High Wind intentional community located five miles southwest of Plymouth. We would invite about 20 participants from all over the country to live for a week or two at High Wind. Each morning we offered an intellectual experience with several speakers, in the larger context of transforming society. The rest of the day they would work with community residents in construction, gardening, and other projects. Underlying the experience was the challenge of preparing oneself to build a sustainable world.

In 1979 we also sponsored a two-month study trip to Findhorn, the world-famous intentional community in northern Scotland that was developing a real-world model for a sustainable lifestyle. We also had contact with other intentional communities, such as Sirius in Massachusetts and the Eourres group in the French Alps. Since virtually everyone who participated in the High Wind and Findhorn programs had positive experiences but complained that they were too short, the obvious answer was to create a longer, more comprehensive model – we labeled this the Three-Community Seminar. I got the university to approve a full semester three-month offering, providing full undergraduate or graduate credit. Participants would live for one month at High Wind, one month at Sirius or Eourres, and one month at Findhorn, followed by a few days back at High Wind to evaluate the whole experience. They would participate fully in the life and work of each community, with substantive discussions on major themes dealing with community life as well as the state of the world. They would create their own smaller community while living in the surrounding larger one, practicing the same approaches to personal interactions and decision-making they were observing in the larger context. There were no traditional exams, but each person would keep a daily log and by the end of the program write a comprehensive paper on what they learned.

When I had participated in various university commissions to reform higher education, certain planks regularly surfaced: “Students must be prepared to become global citizens; curricula must break out of narrow departmental confines to cross disciplines; learning must be experiential with real-world value beyond the claustrophobic classroom; values and societal concerns must be integrated into the cut-and-dried process of transmitting knowledge.” Our seminar attempted to incorporate all of these themes.

Our first project was in fall 1984, with 12 participants, including two from Sheboygan County, two others from Milwaukee, three from California, two from the East Coast, one from Kansas, and two from Canada. They were all in their 20s except for a married couple in their 30s. They wrote incredible papers on the experiences of their own group, of reflections on the three communities visited, on what it takes to build a sustainable world, and above all on their own learning to become more fulfilled human beings. Most had life-changing experiences.

A research project is now under way to seek what impact this experience had after looking back 25 years. We sponsored five more of these seminars, until travel costs proved prohibitive. I consider these programs among my most significant in 35 years of university teaching.

I've often thought that one or more schools or colleges in our Plymouth/Sheboygan region could make a significant contribution by organizing a School for Sustainable Living. This could build on some of these models and experiences to prepare our youth and creatively contribute to the great educational enterprise, sorely in need of help.