Changes in society call for an entirely new
organizing principle in education
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The New Community College
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Dr. Seymour Eskow
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Reprinted with permission from New Directions for
Community Colleges,
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| A young couple wanting a good life for themselves and their children
choose a community and a neighborhood and build a house. As the years go on, the
neighborhood changes, the children no longer go to the neighborhood school, the children
leave home, the husband changes jobs, the wife begins to work, both begin to think of
retirement. Now they talk often of the neighborhood, of whether they should remain there
or leave the house, with all the pull of its history, a house that has done its work well.
The house, they decide meets some of their needs, particularly those of maintaining links
with the past, providing the psychic support that comes from roots and memory-but it no
longer offers the shelter and the way of life suited to their lives now. My parable, of course, is meant to suggest that we look at the colleges we have built over the years, at those who now come to them, and at the neighborhoods we now have to see if they work together as well as they should. It may be that we still find that those colleges, which we have built so lovingly and which have served so many so well for so many years, no longer fit the altered conditions of community life. The genius of the community college is its commitment to enlisting learning in the service of the local community, its harnessing of knowledge to the cultivation of a particular landscape, culture, and people. Since all of our communities are part of a modern society under unceasing pressure from the forces of science and technology, the landscape, culture, and people change almost as we pour the footings for the new buildings on campus. Yet, in spite of these changes, the forms of the college and the community can go on serving each other, perhaps even for a long time. At some point, however, too much history and too much change have occurred for good-natured accommodation. I think that now the time has come when we must think of seriously remodeling the community college of today-not with new cosmetic facing, or trendy furniture, or additional rooms, but with fundamental redesign and rebuilding; we have to invent the new community college. Return for a moment to the family home of our parable. Even an amateur anthropologist studying the size and arrangement of the house, examining its lot and neighborhood, and reviewing the history of demographic and physical changes in the neighborhood might make quite accurate deductions about the motives of the owners and the meaning of the house to those who lived in it. He or she might conclude without interviewing anyone that the house was built to house a large family rather than two people and that an elderly couple on a fixed income might find the maintenance and support of such a house burdensome. What might this anthropologist learn about our colleges by studying our buildings and budgets, reading our catalogues, and looking at our students? After looking at the size and location of our landholdings; the number and design of the buildings we place on the land; the size, use, and organization of the teaching force; the organization of curricula and the styles of pedagogy; and the nature of the auxiliary and supporting services, the anthropologist might conclude that these institutions were designed to be schools for adolescents-colleges modeled, consciously or no, on those great exemplars, the liberal arts colleges and universities. Many of our community colleges, he or she would find, have aspired to parallel the university, and, in departmental structure and style of work, they have shaped themselves in that image. The constituents of community colleges, one would conclude, were intended to be young; they would attend this total environment full time; the learning environment was designed to isolate or shield them from the workaday rhythms and concerns of the community life. Since adolescents are not yet workers, not yet parents, not yet citizens, the courses and curricula were designed to equip them to play these roles after they left. While all of the publications of the college spoke of lifelong learning, most of the formal programs of the colleges were required by law to end at the second year, so that lifelong students in search of the bachelor's degree were often forced to leave the community to achieve one-or to forgo that possibility if leaving was not practical. The key point here is that the organizing principle of today's community college is that it is a place designed to house, teach, counsel, and serve the young. This thesis is unaffected by the older students in our classrooms or by our divisions and programs of adult education, continuing education, community service, outreach, and the like, all of which are additions and extensions of the college that do not change at all the essential shape and direction of the institution. Suppose we could begin all over again. Suppose we were not pressured by tradition or rhetoric or external agencies to repeat the forms of the past. How would we now go about inventing and building a new college for all the community, a college of lifelong learning? Would we use the same planning methodologies that we used originally? If we did, would we reinvent today's college with small variations? If, for example, we studied the migration of high school graduating classes, if we administered preference surveys in the high schools, if we analyzed the job market and asked employers to predict their job opportunities in the years ahead, what new results might come out of such studies? Perhaps the employers would be more interested in word processing than in secretarial science--perhaps not. The odds are great that we would be thinking about data processing and computers, large and small, but it is probable that the college of today, with minor alterations, could accommodate what the employers need. We have looked at our communities in traditional ways that may no longer suffice. If we continue to look in those ways, we will reinvent the same types of colleges, which is not our goal. Kenneth Burke has reminded us that the ways in which we have seen our communities have also been ways of not seeing our communities. If we want to change our field of vision in order to see new possibilities, we have to change the lenses through which we look and use lenses of wider angle that take in more than the youth culture has shown to us by the lenses of the past. Young people and their search for identity, competence, and career will continue to engage much of our attention; we now have to see with equal clarity all of the other publics of our community. I propose that a new sociology and a new psychology can help us see our communities in ways that will allow us to create new institutional forms, curricula, and strategies of teaching and learning to serve what we see. Associations: The Community College and the American Community This sociology is new only in that we of the colleges have not customarily applied it to our studies of our communities. The perspective and the methodology themselves are quite old; they go back to 1835, when a thirty-year-old French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, published the first volume of his great Democracy in America. De Tocqueville (1959 [1840], p. 117) found one of the keys to American democracy and community strength in what he called association: "Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon each other. I have shown that these influences are almost entirely null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially created, and this can only be accomplished by association." In America, according to de Tocqueville (1959 [1840], p. 114), associations have become the engines of local and national progress:
This view of the nature of American society, in other hands and eyes, became the stuff of satire, describing Americans as mindless joiners, organization men, Babbitts. But to de Tocqueville, individualism, which dissolved the social nexus and taught people to value private pursuits over the common good, was the greater threat. "If men are to remain civilized, or to become so," he wrote, "the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased" (p. 118). Political associations, he said, are the "large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association" (p. 125). When we look at our communities through the lens of de Tocqueville's theory of associations, we no longer see disconnected human atoms to be polled, assessed, brought to campus for instruction, and discharged as educated. We see rather a rich, dense fabric of group life, much of it rooted in place and culture, all of it representing the concerns and the commitment of those who come together. If associations are the seedbed of American democracy, the "large free schools" where we go to learn the arts of conversation, the principles of sharing, and the strategies of democracy, the question now arises: What is the obligation of the community college to these groups? Suppose we inventory and classify the associations of our community. We find groups that are functions of place--neighborhoods with structures and styles that are distinct, often representing a unique heritage or subculture. We find ethnic and religious groups--Protestants, Catholics, Jews, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Sons of Italy, the Jewish Community Center. Some groups are age-related--Golden Age clubs, youth centers. Others are economic or political, and there is a rather long list of public and private associations concerned with culture--museums, galleries, theaters, orchestras, and the groups that voluntarily run and support them. If the new community college were to see its role as using learning to dignify and strengthen associated life in the community, how might it set about doing this? It might, for one, create neighborhood colleges on the model of educational settlement houses--colleges that would be of, for, and by the people of the neighborhood, reflecting in their curricula and services the neighborhood's issues and needs, so that the character and quality of each neighborhood's unit would be those of the neighborhood itself. the neighbors would, of course, be freee to go to the main campus for its libraries and rich academic bill of fare, but the neighborhood college would be there of offer something other than English 101--perhaps English as a Second Language or course in appliced sociology that allowed neighbors to examine and strengthen neighborhood institutions. If our communities include what Michael Novak (1972) has called "unmeltable ethnics," Americans who refuse to throw their ancestral cultures and group identities into the melting pot, could our colleges take on the role of guardian of the music, art, dance, and literature of these cultures, to help keep them vital and visible? Could we (should we) organize new lower-division liberal arts curricula in Irish studies, Italian studies, Puerto Rican studies-curricula, in other words, that encourage students to learn the history, culture, and language of their own (or someone else's) ethnic or religious heritage, and that include a semester or a summer in Ireland, Italy, or Puerto Rico as a part of the program? Similarly, should we have programs in Christian studies so that old and young can explore together their religion, its history, literature, rituals, and sociology, at college and in the community as well as at church? Or does the theory and practice of community education mean that we must keep out of the curriculum the great searchers for human meaning that are found in our religious and our racial and ethnic subcultures on the grounds that such curricula would lead to division and the loss of a common academic culture? If we are not to engage our citizens as Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, as Irish and Italians, then we are required to avoid these associations that engage the affections and energies of many of these citizens. There may seem to be little point in lingering over the role of the communitycollege in the economic realm, since we have been pledged to business and industry, to jobs and careers, since our inception. As we look closely at our ideolgy of career, however, and the curricula it has created, questions come quickly. Our theory commits us to preparing technicians, semiprofessionals, and paraprofessionals-what used to be called "middle-level manpower," since moving technicians further up the educational ladder is the role of the senior college and preparing students for the trades and crafts is usually the work of the secondary schools. How useful are these restraints and limits today? What, if anything, can we do about preparing people to create work rather than fill jobs? In many of our communities, there is simultaneously a shortage of jobs in existing businesses and industries and much work to be done that people will pay for but that has not yet been turned into a business. Can the community college develop entrepreneurs and help them launch small businesses? And can the community learn to work with the small businesses that now exist so that they might be helped to survive and grow, creating more jobs in the process? Our chambers of commerce, our trade associations, and our agencies of local government are struggling with the theory and practice of economic development. The questions they are looking at are central to the economic health of each community: What businesses and industry do we now have? How well are they doing? What do they need to maintain themselves and grow? What kind of help is it possible and proper to give them? What assets do we have that might attract new businesses and new jobs to our community? How do we present ourselves effectively to businesses around the country and the world so that they might consider coming here? What is the community college's role in the raising and the answering of such questions? Can the community college use its talents in social science and statistics to help our economic development agencies do the research on which their plans must rest? Can our business students and faculty members learn by participating in such studies and promotional activities? If, as de Tocqueville suggested, politics is the free school of democracy, might the community college become the large free school of politics? Can we allow and encourage our students and their teachers to engage in partisan politics without the institution itself being seen as partisan? Should there be action-oriented curricula in public service that offer students internships in practical politics at the local, state, or national levels? Our nurses learn to nurse by taking their theory to the hospital; why shouldn't students of sociology and political science test their learning in the streets, in city hall, in the state capitol? In all of our communities, those who want to learn or to practice an art or craft can find cultural agencies that offer facilities, apprenticeship, and an association of the like-minded. Often these agencies are marginal financially, are going under, or are curtailing programs and services. Can we join with them without absorbing them, without sapping the voluntarism of their efforts, without dominating? Would they allow their theaters to act as laboratory theaters for our colleges, much as our community hospitals serve our nursing students, in a relationship that would permit us to help them in exchange for their services to us? And if we have theaters and galleries of our own, should we not assign a good portion of their use to the artists in our communities and their organizations, so that they might develop their talents through exhibition and performance while they enrich the climate of our campuses? If we are to become new community colleges, we have to see our communities in new ways, and one such way is as an orchestra of associations. We have to meet these groups on their turf as well as ours, to exchange agendas and to search together for opportunities for mutual service. At least three educational strategies for connecting with the associated life of our communities are possible. The first is the familiar academic response of curriculum: We create programs in Irish studies, or Christian studies, or performing arts. The second practice is cosponsorship: The college and the association design and mount programs together in ways that allow both to be visible and to share credit. Another emerging practice of great promise is called brokering: The college sees itself at the center of a constellation of agencies, organizations, facilities, and places; it sees all of these as learning environments or community classrooms, and it links, or brokers, people wanting to learn to the appropriate community setting. At the same time, the college provides for these groups' courses, conferences, workshops, and institutes, either on campus or in the community. where men and women come together to learn together. Discussion and dialogue-talk will be the way learning is carried on. There will be rooms, halls, and buildings designed to support and encourage many conversations. Surrounding these central buildings will be libraries, bookstores, and centers with radios, television sets, and computers, and men and women will move easily from the places of conversation to these stores and centers in created, questions come quickly. From a Psychology of Adolescence to a Psychology of the Adult If the anthropologist we invoked earlier returned to study our admissions offices and practices, our student personnel services and counseling styles, our student unions and student activities, our teacher-student relations, and our grading practices, he or she might conclude that these all rest upon a "psychology of the adolescent." The new psychology that will help us to see the changing life needs of the adults in our community is penetrating the literature, appearing on our lecture platforms, and making its way into our colleges. Perhaps the seminal figure in the movement is Erik Erikson, whose work on identity and the stages and crises of life has been moved into popular consciousness by Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976). Erikson (1975) distinguishes eight stages of life. K. Patricia Cross (1981), synthesizing the work of such investigators as Sheehy, Chickering, Havighurst, and Levinson, uses seven. Table 1 shows the seven stages as described by Cross. For each age-related stage or phase of life, there are "marker events" that symbolize, embody, and realize the "psychic tasks" that must be undertaken and accomplished so that the person can move on to the next phase of the journey. Also, for each phase there is a "characteristic stance"--that is, the perspective or the pervasive mood that animates the person. As we look at the marker events and psychic tasks in the first phase, ages eighteen to twenty-two, and the last phase, age sixty-five and beyond, it becomes clear that the colleges do much to help the first group with its psychic tasks and rites of passage and little or nothing to help the sixty-five-year-old in the community prepare for retirement, physical decline, financial pressures, loneliness, and death. The names and functions of key agencies in our colleges reveal our historic commitment to adolescents. We have an admissions office, and our officers talk and think a great deal about high school counselors and high school seniors. In the folders of applicants are secondary school transcripts, intelligence quotient (IQ) and other test scores, and data that have very little to do with changing one's work at fifty-five, with retirement at sixty-five, or with divorce or unemployment at any age. Table 1. Cross's Seven Stages of Life |
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Sources: Chickering and Havighurst, 1981; Gould, 1972; Lehman and Lester, 1978; Levinson and others, 1974; McCoy, Ryan, and Lictenberg, 1978; Neugarten, 1968; Sheehy, 1976; Weathersby, 1978. Source: Cross, 1981, pp. 174-175.
We are beginning to realize that retirement is not an unskilled occupation. The observation grows in meaning as one dwells upon it; being divorced, widowed, unemployed-none of life's crises and passages are unskilled occupations. Trained and available counselors familiar with adult development problems, books, and courses can help furnish us with the skills and insights we need to cope with life's demands, and the community college might become in each community the agency that can work in this way with all adults. One appealing notion is to replace the admissions office with a "life skills center." The life skills center would be staffed by adult counseling specialists of two kinds: Some would be expert in counseling with those of a particular age; others would be experienced in helping adults work with those crises that can afflict us at any age, such as joblessness, or bereavement, or divorce. Our sociology of associations and our psychology of the life cycle come together. To deal with our crises, many of us need the help of our fellows, the support of other men and women who have been through what we are enduring or undertaking or who have resources of insight and training that they will share with us. In almost every American community, there are associations that can help us with our drinking, our singleness, our searches for meaningful work, for expression, or transcendence. And, often, as we find the group that is organized around a life need, we find also a small community, a community that helps us overcome the feelings of isolation, loneliness, and despair that afflict so many of us in modern America. Shaping the New Community College The form the new community college will take after it learns the sociology of its community, incorporates the groups it finds, and designs new instruments serving men and women of all ages is open to speculation. The present buildings, removed as they may be from the vortex of community life, will continue to be the right learning environment for those who want to retreat from the maelstrom at times to wonder, reflect, and look quietly at their lives; for many in the community, the community college campus will continue to provide a secular monastery. The present curricular organization of small course packages-three hours a week for three credits- will continue to be useful to those adults who can only be, or want to be, part-time students, whose needs for association are met elsewhere, and who want only competence in a skill, a motive to read and reflect, or a certificate or degree. But there are as many or more adults who would welcome the opportunity to become part of an intellectul community on campus, and the present mode of organizing the mass community college simply does not offer such a community to students in the arts and sciences. (There is often genuine community in the nursing and technology departemtns, on the other hand, where masters and spprentices, united in their quest for skill and serviec, become an association rather than simply an auidence for their theachers.) The community college movement, the, must revive and take seriously the idea of the cluster college, the notion that he mass instiution can be scaled to the size and needs of human beings by dividiing it inot small learning companies or colleges. Under this plan, colleges would be created around a learning style a set of themes, a vocation, or a cause, and the teachers and sutdent woul select themselves into the colleges that interest them. In every community there are men and women, young and old, who define themselves as writers--as poets, dramatists, novelists, journalists. Our theory and practice of curriculum allows our nursing students to join a community of nurses immediately, while our poets are counseled to take two years of general and liberal education-perhaps with a course or two in poetry-and to "major" in poetry in the senior college. Such an education thwarts the deepest needs of these students and pushes their search for identity and for mastery of their craft to the outskirts of their lives- or at least to their after-college hours. If we were to bring together our writer-teachers and our writer-students in a curriculum that makes writing the organizing center and major field of study, we should have more and better poets in our colleges and our land and more joy in learning. Other possibilities crowd in. Why could there not be a small St. John's Community College on campus, for those who want a rigorous, prescribed, Socratic curriculum grounded on the great books? Or a Northeastern Community College for those who want to marry theory and practice, to work and study, to serve and learn? Or an International Community College, for those interested in culture, language, and overseas work and study? The promise of cluster colleges is that they would bring de Tocqueville to the campus: The community college could become a college of colleges, of associations of men and women in search of learning who also find communion and community. The Community College and Distance Learning The term pedagogy refers to the instruction of children, as pediatrics refers to their doctoring. It has been suggested that we use the new coinage andragogy to refer to the institution of adults. Perhaps we are uncomfortable with the word, but it makes the point: We must not assume that ways of teaching the young are necessarily apt for teaching their elders. If the community college prides itself on its single-minded devotion to teaching and if the new community college increasingly teaches adults, then the community college must become a leader in the development of the new andragogy. Since the life needs of adults include obligations other than formal study and require their presence regularly at places far from campus, the new andragogy will have to liberate learning from the tyrannies of time and place. The campus-bound, schedule-dominated, teacher-centered pedagogies of today will have to make way for other ways of learning that can happen in other places, at other times, and with no teachers or with those who are not primarily teachers but are willing to share what they know. Recent efforts to revive and update the old British tradition of the external degree have resulted in credit-by-examination and degree-by-examination programs that allow adult students to travel, work, or care for children while reading, writing, and preparing to demonstrate competence. The Council on Accreditation of Experiential Learning (CAEL) has developed a set of tough-minded, practical strategies for assessing learning acquired by experience, and the CAEL body of practice is available to any community college that chooses to use it. The British Open University has sparked the development of a worldwide theory and practice of "distance learning." Distance learning uses carefully designed home study materials, augmented by well-produced radio and television programs; it uses the computer as well as tutors for the marking of papers and examinations submitted by students; and it incorporates regional centers (for those who want human tutoring) and yearly seminars to bring students together with teachers. Many adults cannot leave home easily-mothers with infants, for example, or the ill-and others are in hospitals or prisons. Unless we design programs that can be sent to the home or institution, we deny such adults the instruction and the competence they want and need. Furthermore, the newer technologies of cable television and the microcomputer suggest that we can use the home or institution as learning centers, with access through these and other technologies to live teachers and counselors. Many American educators are examining the Scandinavian study circle movement as they look for styles of learning that adults find congenial. We hear that in Norway five hundred thousand people of a population of four million are enrolled in study circles. A study circle is a small group of adults-members of a social circle, a church, a union, or a work group-who choose to meet together regularly to study, to read, and to discuss. The regional study circle authority, in the Norwegian scheme, underwrites most of the cost of reading materials and of a leader, who is often not a trained teacher. The group meets regularly at the homes of members or at a convenient meeting place to talk, study, and, importantly, to socialize: Study becomes part of an adult sharing of good talk and good times, organically connected to other needs of those who want to be with each other. While Scandinavia is receiving much attention now for its public support of the study circle idea, it should be noted that study circles have a long and unbroken history in the United States. The Chautauqua movement, under the leadership of William Rainey Harper, created a national network of literary circles toward the end of the last century, and a number of these are still in existence; the Great Books Foundation has study circles in hundreds of communities in the country; a number of churches and synagogues have elaborate machinery for the creation of materials to support study circle networks; and such groups as the League of Women Voters are sophisticated users of the study circle for their purposes. Many adults like to study this way. Can the community college become the center of the study circle movement in each community, providing training for leaders, helping to find and develop materials, attaching the study circle idea to existing groups, and creating new study circles when there is an evident need? Perhaps the most imaginative device of the new andragogy is not the camera or the computer but the "learning contract," which borrows the ancient notion of the don or preceptor, renames him or her "mentor," and uses a written bilateral agreement between mentor and student to record the goals, learning experiences, and methods of evaluating a program of study designed by the mentor and student. The contract tells the student what he or she agrees to accomplish, what to read and write, where to work (if work is part of the agreement), and what evidence of learning-in the form of papers, records, pictures, artifacts, or studies-he or she is to transmit to the mentor for judgment and credit. Armed with such a contract, some books and papers, and perhaps some letters of introduction, the student can study at home, in a neighboring state, or make India or England the classroom. The idea of the contract acknowledges that adults can learn while not under the direct tutelage of the teacher, that the teacher can be a shaping influence even if he or she is not regularly before the student, and that the adult can learn from the places, the things, the agencies, and the cultures of the world. When colleges believed that a map or two, some books in the library, and perhaps a chemistry laboratory were essential to higher learning, one could imagine assembling under one roof (or a series of roofs on some acres of land) all of the instruments of learning and all of the teachers one might need. Over the years, impelled by this ideal of the campus as a self-contained city of learning, we have built more buildings, created more laboratories, and purchased larger pieces of equipment, always trying to create a total environment for learning. In recent years, most of us have seen the impossibility of that dream: The latest equipment is sometimes too large, often too expensive, and is usually obsolete even as it is installed. And, more importantly, it now seems sensible to us to have adults preparing for life and career in the community, using the equipment and the environments of the community itself as their laboratories and the practitioners in those environments as their teachers. Why simulate the hospital on campus for our nursing students when there are real hospitals in the community? And why not use for other students real banks, real offices, or real computer centers? Increasingly, then, the community itself is becoming the teacher. Conclusion This chapter includes only one of two themes that might animate educational discourse in the immediate future and might inform the new community colleges we shall be building. Our theme here has been that of community--the renewal of local community life in America and the part that education can play in that renewal. The other theme is world--the need to include in the agenda of every community college ways in which adults can become open to the new global order that is emerging and ways in which to prepare them for work and citizenship in that global community. There are those who think that an education that celebrates community--the small, the local, the neighborly--will breed provincials and parochials rather than the world citizens we now need, and there are those who believe that bringing the world into the college curricululm will deracinate our students, make them aliens in their home towns, and indifferent to the claims of the community. but , as John Dewey wrote, we cannot love the neghbor we have not seen if we do not love the neighbor we see every day; that compasiion, like charity, begins at home and then overflows the borders of home to embrace the strangers outside our door. The new community collge will find itself inevitable becoming a world college and finally, and "world commmunity" college.
References Cross, K. P. Adults as Learners: Increasing Participation and Facilitating Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981. Dewey, J. The Public and Its Problems. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954. Erikson, E. H. Life History and the Historical Moment. New York: Norton, 1975. Novak, M. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. New York: MacMillan, 1972. Sheehy, G. Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. New York: Dutton, 1976. Tocqueville, A. de. Democracy in America. vol. 2. New York: Vantage Books, 1959 (originally published 1840). |