TWELVE: Pedagogy

The moment something is in danger of being lost, like the art of formal gardening, or the kind of music that was played at that time, people rush to its assistance specifically with the purpose of saving it. We have societies for the ancient music of our cultures and others. There are people out there who live for nothing else. If some form of ancient art hasn’t been preserved, those people will say, “Oh, that gives me something to do.” The moment there would be any sign of music disappearing, the number of musicians would increase alarmingly. From the point of view of making a living, music is absolutely useless. The only way Americans make a living in music is by teaching.—Arnold Jay Smith (1977)

What consequences do you think this new situation in music will have for music education?

Conventional music education is something that can only infuriate anyone who is at all interested in living. No matter what aspect of it you think of, you get angry almost immediately. The idea that a small child should be put in front of a piano and be made to read notation which is the equivalent of Greek or Latin is ridiculous. Unless the child loves music inordinately, he will soon learn to hate it positively. The first thing that happens is that his eyes are engaged and his ears are shut. So that playing music in terms of music education has absolutely nothing to do with ears or the enjoyment of sound. It has only to do with reading, and reading something equivalent to Greek or Latin because the notation is no longer useful for the music of the twentieth century. It’s only useful for previous centuries. So for our young children to have the good fortune to be brought into the twentieth century, and to be immediately educated as though they were in a previous century, is some form of social insanity.—Lars Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson(1965)

I remember when I was in grammar school the people used to put the needle down on the record for just a few seconds and then pick it up and we all had to tell who had written it, and then when [the composer] died and so forth—things were getting confused because you couldn’t tell whether the sounds were men, or the men were sounds (we spoke in fact of those sounds—if we got a star for it, we said Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn instead of saying what the sounds…instead of listening to the sounds really). Then, after studying music, if you’re lucky you can come back to the direct hearing of sounds—hopefully.—Jack Behrens (1981)

Would you offer some of your scores as the basis of sound communication for children?

I don’t know. That is the problem of my music. In Germany, Gertrud Meyerdenkam has intelligently broached this aspect of my music by letting children create their own music. The children vary so greatly, and among them once was Mozart. If I worked with children, which I don’t, I would certainly find an answer to this question, along with some ideas. At the beginning of the 19405, the WPA invited me to work in the “recreation department.” At that time, I met children of every race and nationality living in San Francisco. I did not try to get them to play my music but to help them create their own.

Given your musical scores, don’t you think it would be conceivable not to have them play your music but a music that would become personal to them?

I mean that if I worked with children, I would not suggest processes to them, but sounds, allowing them to discover and awaken in them the pleasure of combining them.

Without any organization?

Not before they feel the need for it.

And then.

Whatever they would suggest themselves.

And if they ask you to suggest it to them?

They could certainly teach us something, don’t you think? Edwin Schlossberg, who developed the thinking of Buckminster Fuller, began in Brooklyn a museum for children. The conditions he gave the agencies who wanted it was that the children themselves should be responsible for running it.—Jean-Yves Bosseur (1973, in Dachy 2000)

In the field of music you mentioned it seemed impossible to get rid of harmony and, yet, once it was done, the whole field of music was changed. What would be the equivalent in the field of education?

Well, one would have to look at the educational system and try to see what its nature is, so to speak, essentially, when it does not have any of the structures which have been placed over it by means of social agreement or conventions. One of the first things that you would get rid of in education that has nothing to do, obviously, with education, is all the business of bureaucracy, which would include forms and the filling out of forms, certificates of degrees, prizes, anything that would indicate the manner in which the thing should be accomplished. Education should become a field in which it was uncertain either that anyone would become educated, or uncertain that they were not educated before they entered the experience of becoming educated. Buckminster Fuller, whom I visited recently, said that when a child is born he is, so to speak, completely educated. He has in his body all that is meant, ultimately, by the word “education.” He doesn’t need anything else than to be born.—Robert Filliou (1970)

When I was in school I learned very little. When I was thirty-five years old, I began to learn what school had not taught me, and I did it through my own efforts and through my own studying.

Could you have done it without school?

Yes. In fact, I’m a dropout you know. The question arises: Why didn’t I drop out sooner?

Is there an answer?

I think there may be one. I’ve never tried to find it. But there was something about the things that I did in high school that seemed to me to be challenging. They filled up my life, and I was able to expend my energy on them with interest. In high school, I studied Greek and geometry (I didn’t get as far as calculus) and literature and botany. In addition to which I won a cup for the school in oratory—giving speeches. After hours in high school, I conducted the Boy Scout radio program which I arranged each week.—William Duckworth (1985)

We have made our government and our educational system such that…we have made people bad. We’ve forced them to be bad. The whole thing of competition in schools, where it begins, and how it stands in society, the competition enforces dishonesty. Mao Tse-tung says that we must firmly believe that the great masses of humanity are good. I’m perfectly willing to agree with that, provided we don’t educate them to be bad.

The same [grammar school] teacher, who thought she was teaching me music appreciation, also told me that I had no voice. I had wanted to join the glee club, and when she tested my voice she said, “You don’t have a voice.” It wasn’t until I was thirty-five years old that I sang. Our whole education has been to stop singing and to inspire cheating. If you don’t know what the music is and who the composer is, you can peek over your neighbor’s shoulder. You learn very quickly, and if you cheat sufficiently, you’ll be rewarded with a silver star, and you might even get into the regional contests.

My early relation to the educational system was when I recognized that it wasn’t doing what I needed. I simply dropped out of school. I left. Thoreau, too, stopped teaching. He went to Harvard University to learn to teach, and he came back to Concord and they required that he dress in a particular way to teach. They were more strict then than now. They also required that he punish students who didn’t do what they were supposed to do. He refused to do either of those things, and so he stopped teaching. —Ellsworth Snyder (1975)

The entire social structure must change, just as the structures in the arts have changed. We believe, I think, since this has been accomplished in the arts in this century, that it is an indication, at least in the minds of the artists, that there is a need for it to happen in the other fields of society, particularly in terms of political and economic structures and all the things that go beside, like educational structures.

I think, first of all, we need a situation in which nothing is being transmitted: no one is learning anything that was known before. They must be learning things that were, until this situation arose, so to speak, unknown or unknowable—that was due to the fact of the person coming together with other people or, so to speak, coming together with himself that this new knowledge which had not been known before could become known.

Now I don’t think we need do anything else other than make an empty canvas upon which this education can be painted. We don’t need anything more than an empty space of time in which this music could be performed, if education were music. And when we have now an empty canvas or an empty space of time, we know in the areas of art that we don’t need to do anything to those in order to have the esthetic experience—they already are that. So, we could say of the educational experience that we do not have to consciously learn anything in order to learn something.

This story occurs over and over again in the annals of Zen Buddhism— the student who comes to the teacher and begs him for instruction. The teacher says nothing—he’s just sweeping up leaves. The student goes off into another part of the forest and builds his own house; and when he is finally educated, what does he do? He doesn’t thank himself; he goes back to the teacher who said nothing and thanks him. It’s this spirit of not teaching that has been completely lost in our educational system.

More service with less input of human labor?

It will happen in all sorts of ways. One way is this: speaking of education, changes in education and how they will come about—people will notice more and more, as they already do, that within five years after you get a Ph.D. from a given American university in a particular field, all the things that you learned in the course of your education are no longer of any use to you. This is due to the fact that changes are happening more rapidly than they happened earlier, that the techniques involved, the information useful, et cetera, are not the ones which you were taught. So, one will become skeptical about what the function of education is, and ultimately, what one will have to do is to give each individual, from childhood, a variety of experiences in which his mind is put to use, not as a memorizer of a transmitted body of information, but rather as a person who is in dialogue: A, with himself and B, with others as though they were him too.—Robert Filliou (1970)

You should know Buckminster Fuller’s book, Education Automation, in which he suggests a space that is without partitions, in which a variety of activities is going on and the attention of the student could be at one place or another—rather than being forced to focus on a single thing that often isn’t even of his choice. I think this is a good principle which can be stated in many ways. One is: where you see a boundary, remove it (or partition, to remove it). And if you must have them, then have them movable; and where you have—as Fuller says—a choice between fixity and flexibility, choose flexibility. This is a very good rule.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

Now, there is near Chicago at the present moment a school without partitions. There are a large number of classes where, in the study of one subject you would at least be hearing, since there are no partitions, not only the information in your subject, but the information in the adjacent subject. Now it is conceivable that there would occur at this point, even if you didn’t change your seat, what McLuhan refers to as the brushing of information against information. Now, when you see this that is being transmitted to you as being nothing but information and when you see a different kind of information on the other side of the table, and when in your mind these two things come together, very often a third thing, or even a larger number of things occur in your mind. Your mind invents or creates, so to speak, from this brushing; and it is there that we need to be if we are going to be learning something that we did not yet know—where the learning process now takes place outside of us, obliging us to imitate it, the new knowledge only comes into existence in our heads.—Robert Filliou (1970)

There’s a very curious thing about the United States that hasn’t yet been mentioned that makes it different from the rest of the world. It is that we have these schools with the young people in them, and these schools continue, for the most part, up through the universities. Let’s say that many, many people get a college education.

Now, as long as they are being educated, they have had access to art, theater, et cetera. They use it, take it seriously, and they believe in it.

Then, when they graduate from that school situation, they discover that they are in a society that has absolutely no serious use for art. Anything but art is important.

Now the proof of this is that if then you do go against society, as it were, and insist upon being an artist, and do some lively work, where is your audience? Your audience is back in the school from which you graduated. You can’t sustain yourself as a performing artist in this country without performing year after year on tours that don’t take you to the adult audiences, but rather take you to the school audiences.

Neither in Japan nor in Europe would the universities dream of having you perform for them because they’re busy studying.

Furthermore, they have a long tradition, not in the schools, but among the adults, of taking art seriously. We have a tradition of thinking that art is a good thing [for adults] to forget.—Stanley Kauffmann (1966)

We’re certainly going to have controls of one kind or another, but if we could put them, get them placed some place, where we wouldn’t notice them, that would be the goal of society, don’t you think? I don’t notice for instance all the control they put into making the telephone. And I don’t notice the whole history of plumbing and everything when I turn on the faucet, but it is there. What I don’t want is to get involved in it politically. The value judgment thing is the political idea. Like all the value judgment that runs through the university teaching, it’s political.

Since you place so much emphasis on youth, what do you think about their present incubators, the universities?

As they exist now, they are places where people go in order to get degrees in order to get jobs in order to enter this prison we’ve talked about. The university itself is modeled on the idea of the prison, so you get used to the idea of prison already while you’re being educated… “If you don’t do as we say you’ll do, we’ll fail you.” You know all about that. But, in that university, more and more things are changing, and freedom is creeping in. You hear such expressions as “the free university,” or you hear of students taking advantage of the university without being enrolled, and of deciding themselves when to leave. Or you hear of the university permitting people to choose their own studies and not bother with the curriculum or degrees, and more and more teachers are willing to teach without giving grades, et cetera, so that this change is entering into that very situation which was bolstering up the old, so that we have this overlap situation that we’re living in and that’s why we’re frequently confused by what’s happening around us. Sometimes it’s happening for old reasons which are dying, and sometimes it’s happening for new reasons which are coming into being.— Geneviere Marcus (1970)

The great trouble with the universities is that they limit hours, schedule classes, arranging things so that you run from one thing to the other like an idiot. The very first thing you should think of doing in a university is not to schedule things, because that isn’t the way people live. The only time you should do that in your living is when you have to make a train or an airplane or something; then you have to get there on time. But the rest of the time you don’t have to do that.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

From a positive, new society point of view, the university is gradually becoming like life. It is beginning to include in it all the things that are in life, so ultimately when there is nothing to do in the way of work, but, say, one hour’s work per year, then we could just spend our entire life in the university. But then we would have to make it into a nonpolice situation which we would enjoy being in, because we would never graduate. It would be in other words a place in a community abundantly implemented so that anything you thought of doing or studying could be done, and if you needed help to learn to use such and such a tool for something, there would be someone around who would be willing to help you. That would be a university. That could be life, and we have all kinds of signs like that, like community centers and so forth, where people can go freely and use materials and make things and do things—or the public library where people can go and read anything they want.

What about human relationships? The family structure may be disintegrating.

The reason it’s disintegrating is because we have separated all the generations. We put our children away from us with baby-sitters. When they get older, we send them off to school. When they graduate, we send them off to the army. When they get out of that, if they’re still alive, we give them jobs that nearly kill them. And then, when they lose their minds slightly, we send them off to insane asylums; and when they break our rules, we send them to prison; and when they get old enough, we send them to senior communities. We haven’t a moment in our society now when we don’t manage to get rid of us.—Geneviere Marcus (1970)

I want to add one more thing. More and more recently, to the benefit of the entire world, the ideas of Buckminster Fuller are being brought to our attention. He envisages a society that, by using its intelligence and the resources of the world, will bring about a global village in which each one of us to fulfill his responsibility to society will not have to do more than one hour’s work per year.

Then he makes curves, showing that the need for people in certain activities is going down remarkably. For instance, one of my second cousins in Buffalo who works for Union Carbide told me that they just introduced a computer that makes it possible to fire 955 out of 1,000 people.

Now, at the same time that those people don’t have that work to do, notice what is happening to our universities all over the country. They are having to expand. More and more people are going into the universities. More and more unemployment is occurring in our adult situation.—Stanley Kauffmann (1966)

The ideas about the university that have struck me as most interesting are those of Ivan Illich and Buckminster Fuller. Illich speaks of “deschooling society,” and Fuller speaks of changing both the university and society so that no one ever graduates. In both cases, the idea is to keep the process of learning and the interest in learning going—not stopping it and not institutionalizing it.

On the “compartmentalization” of academic departments:

There’s a very interesting book by Edgar Anderson, who’s an economic botanist. It’s called Plants, Man, and Life, I think, and in it he shows… Well, as we know, our ways of growing plants are to grow only one plant; the result is that each plant is separate from the others. But when one mixes the plants up, and it looks almost as though it were not agriculture but was wild, then everything regenerates everything else and it becomes a healthy situation for the plant. I would say in life, too. The only kinds of ideas that really interest me in any of the arts are ideas that also work in our lives, or with plants—where, after all, our problem is that we’re individuals, that we’re members of society, and that society inhabits an environment—and that’s Nature. And these things have to work together. This business of organization which is so inherent in education has many, many dangers— and it has also many usefulnesses, as we know. For instance, if someone telephoned a number, dialed a number and got just anybody each time, and the person changed each time, the telephone system would be of little use to us. It’s there that we need some kind of order. And if I turned on the water, and not water but dust came out, or wine, or something else—there might be times when it would be pleasant, but other times it would be useless. We need to place organization where it is useful, and we need to place disorganization or unpredictability of interpenetrations elsewhere. And more and more, whether we place it or not, this is happening because of communications. You know what I mean.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

You want to know the basic thing I am interested in? The basic thing, I would say, is to do nothing. The second thing would be to do, so to speak, what enters one’s head. It should not be fixed in advance what that would be.

I think, as far as our lives and behavior are concerned, that we are on the search for clues as to how to proceed and how to behave in this very complicated historical moment of the old structures remaining and new structures becoming either evident or desired. You see it everywhere. And then, we determine our actions by those clues, once we’re convinced of their usefulness and validity, and try to apply them. The first one I’ve given you seems so little and so difficult, because it’s so basic—that idea that we’re being educated without being educated. Well, let’s see if we could add something. If we add something, it should be added in the spirit of that basic nothing and not be antagonistic to it. Because, if we got rid of this new basis, we would have gotten into what you spoke of—namely, a new structure that might be as bad as the old one eventually. So we must somehow keep free of replacing, filling up, that emptiness with a new structure. So we’re already close to a new principle that we can recognize, coming from many different directions. For instance, a man named Avner Hovne wrote an article in one of the UNESCO publications on the effect on society of automation—the sum of which, as far as I recall, is that we must substitute flexibility values for continuity values. Now, we know immediately when we think now of education that our educational structure, as we know it, is characterized by continuity values—it has always resisted even the most recent aspect of the continuity: namely, the avant-garde. But we don’t want that continuity value—we have no use for it. We need flexibility value. So, our education must be characterized by anything that leads toward change in flexibility. Therefore, coming back to the architecture of the school—a big, empty space in which the students are not obliged to sit on one chair, but are free to move from chair to chair.

And also from time to time, I suppose.

From time to time.

One of the big problems now is that we have schedules, hours…

This must be refused. Anything that represents a continuity from one day to the next should be changed to something that represents flexibility from one day to the next. Anything resembling an interruption, a distraction, should be welcomed. Why? Because we will realize that by these interruptions and distractions and flexibilities we enrich the brushing of information against information, et cetera.—Robert Filliou (1970)

There is a tendency because of the structure of universities to think that if you enter a building marked “Music” and go all the way through it, you’ll come out a musician. This isn’t true. Morton Feldman said it is a question of who is teaching. The matter of people meeting people is very important. Finally, the meeting has to be with yourself. The university doesn’t encourage meeting with yourself because it’s constantly offering the opportunity to do something other than meet yourself.

I don’t think that the arts can be taught. I think that the process of teaching should be a meeting between the teachers and the students and in that exchange it is not certain who is going to learn. It’s very possible that the teacher will learn more than the student—at least this is how Schoenberg’s book Harmonielebre begins. He says, “I learned this book from my students.” I’m reluctant to teach because I think that it would take too much time. I realize that teaching has a function in society, but I choose to fulfill that function not individually, but by means of continuing my work writing both words and music and giving in that way an example.—Works and Days (1969)

In traditional Asian art, structures of precise form are very important. Can the kind of opening of mind that chance operations aims for take place in traditional forms? Do they differ in their arising from your own work?

Where there is a dependence on precise art forms and esthetic principles, something like education (learning) is going on. I have been for many years now more involved in postgraduate experience. In fact, I discourage teaching. I want to go on studying.—Bill Womack (1979)

In Fuller’s never-ending university he suggests that we take down the walls between the various rooms so that when you go, say, to study music, you might hear a little bit from the next class over (because there wouldn’t be any wall between you) which might be on some other subject such as electrical engineering; I’m sure the mind is such that connections would be made and they might be very refreshing.

Once when I was at Wesleyan University I didn’t have to teach but I did now and then give a class. When I was asked to teach musical composition, I introduced the students to the work of Marcel Duchamp; and since that wasn’t about music but was about things that you could see rather than hear, what they read had different effects—it was received in an original way by each of the students—so that when the students brought compositions resulting from that information they were all different, whereas if the teaching had been more musical they would all have done more similar things. The fact that they were different was refreshing because it made it clear to the students that they weren’t in a state of competition with one another but were in a state of discovering something that they were unfamiliar with.—Jack Behrens (1981)

Can [students] experience things without having to value them is a blunt way of saying it, and I think they can. And I think they’ll be able to experience them more openly in a greater variety of ways if the notion of valuing them is removed. In education, at least when I went to school—you may be more liberated now—you weren’t allowed to value Shakespeare, for instance, in your own way. You had to value it in the jury’s way or the teachers way. And this is unfortunate. It has the effect for many people of removing any interest in Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare simply then becomes the subject of an examination, and not of an experience. He becomes a path to a degree or something like that, which isn’t Shakespeare at all. So I’d say get rid of examinations. I think that if things are going to be criticized and looked at, they should be looked at not by a jury but by all the people; and that one very good practice that’s developing now is not to hand in the papers to the teacher—one wants to lose the distinction of teacher and student and to simply develop the notion of a society which has young people, older people, inexperienced people, experienced people, all willing to help one another. They have now much to give to one another. The teachers can learn much from the students. Just as the students can on occasion learn something from the teachers. But mutual learning will take place better if the distinction is obscured. It can only be obscured if the students give their work to themselves as well as to the teacher. And then have surveys taken of what people’s reactions were today, if you wanted to know them, rather than making judgments. More and more one would get busy if the university permitted people to be busy not doing particular things, but doing many things. Then there will be less and less time for foolishness like evaluating and talking about something that is already done.

The example of this that I sometimes give are the anarchists in the Ohio farming community in the last century who were so busy working that they didn’t bother with any meetings to talk. They didn’t have anything to talk about because everything was being done. The example is from a beautiful book called Men Against the State, [J.J.Martin], and it’s a survey of American philosophical anarchism in the nineteenth century. With the conclusion— among the things that are concluded—of the fact that anarchism at the time the book was written was more or less defunct politically socially, but was still visible in the manifestos of individual artists in which the spirit, the anarchist spirit, is still alive. But you feel it in Thoreau’s essay on “Civil Disobedience” where he says the best government will be that which is no government at all. The best university will be that which is no university at all. And [Buckminster] Fuller says we want a university from which we never graduate. There is no question of graduating because the whole society has turned into a university—and what university is that? It’s a place where one is allowed to do research on one hand, invention, creation, et cetera, and/or all these things to affect one another and so make society lively And if it were a good university who would want to graduate from it?—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

[What about Black Mountain College, which seemed more “successful” at educating artists?]

The Black Mountain community seemed really marvelous and certainly marvelous in relation to any other school in the country. And since then the question that’s so frequently asked is, “What school now comes the closest to what Black Mountain was?” And many schools have tried to do that, but I don’t think have succeeded. The closest, for me, to an experience comparable to Black Mountain was the summer workshop at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan from the University of Saskatchewan, and which I have written a text about, “Emma Lake,” in A Year from Monday. In each case, the number of people was comparable, around a hundred people. And it may be that one of the great problems for other schools that would like to be like Black Mountain is that their numbers are different. When you have several thousand, you simply don’t have the possibilities that you have when you have one hundred.—Mary Emma Harris (1974)

In the case of Black Mountain College, the arts were very compatible with the university because that’s what was there. There was almost nothing else there [in 1952–53], though I think there was a class in mathematics or physics. Mostly, it was the arts. What was very enlightening about Black Mountain was that you didn’t have to come to an end of it; you didn’t graduate from it. You were just as much in it when you left as when you were there. That comes as close to anything in the American experience to Fuller’s notion that we should have a university from which we don’t graduate. If one did wish to graduate one could. But the Black Mountain faculty didn’t graduate him or examine him. They imported people from more structured places to give those examinations and to give grades.

I was invited to Black Mountain to teach music composition, and I didn’t have any students [in 1952]; nobody wanted to study with me. This didn’t keep me from staying there, and it also didn’t keep the students from talking with me. I think what actually happened at Black Mountain was that many things were taught without there being any assigned times for that exchange to take place. It really took place when people were together, and they were together primarily when they were hungry. The food wasn’t particularly good, but everyone ate in the same place and looked out at the view across the lake. There were mountains in the distance and there was an island in the lake. The librarian said the tree on the island was in the wrong place.— Works and Days (1969)

What I think was so important at Black Mountain was that we all ate our meals together. For instance, I was teaching music composition, but no one was studying with me. I had no students. But I would sit at a table three times a day (laughs) and there would be conversations. And those meals were the classes. And ideas would come out, what McLuhan called the “brushing of information.” Just conversation.—John Held Jr. (1987)

[One student at Black Mountain] was averse to studying with anyone, since he would prefer to have taught. He was very bright. What was interesting about him, and the reason why I asked whether he’s still alive, is that he told me that he had very little time to live and that he was going to die in six months. Well, of course, he didn’t. I said, “That makes no difference whether you’re going to die in six months or six years or sixty years. I’m also going to die, and death isn’t part of our concern. Our concern is what we are going to do while we’re alive.” And so I refused to commiserate with him over the fact that he was going to die. I had a very good friend, Hazel Dreiss, a bookbinder in San Francisco, who had been told by doctors that she was going to die in six months, and she had lived— and as far as I know, she still lives—longer than anyone else. And I bet you a nickel that Jay Watt is still living. He also got involved, after he left Black Mountain, in a rather killing relation to drinking and perhaps even to dopes and things; I don’t know.—Mary Emma Harris (1974)

[How does one tell teachers from students without a program?]

I think one would have a file, available night and day—twenty-four-hour access—of ideas given both by the faculty and by the student body in the university situation. You might think of other files; I think especially of one. Things to do. Things that need to be done. As though the world were a house—which it is—that we’re all living in and it’s in a bad way—and it really is. I think it really needs “cleaning up,” you know; fixing up, so it works. And there are all kinds of other things to do. And if people jotted these down and then cross-referenced them—where a given thing to do crops up in several different fields so that you could happen upon it in this file, not just in one place, but in all the places that it really had reference to —that thought would become enormously stimulating to the whole community. And there could be things to do that went all the way from being practical to being impractical, which would involve—if they were accomplished—invention, et cetera.

You see, there are some obvious things that teachers have to learn from the students. And curiously enough they’re what the teachers used to be teaching the students: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Very few of the teachers any longer know how to do any of these three things in terms of the computer. Whereas many of the students do, because it’s their baby, so to speak. Whereas it came after we were grown up, so we don’t know anything about it; in fact, we’re a little bit frightened by it. We need help— and whose help? Very possibly the help of the students to do our programming. May be. Now what can we really give them? And when we ask ourselves that question we really wonder. Mostly, they don’t need anything from us and would like us to have something to do. Let us say for us to be students, too, which is what I think the subtitle of Fuller’s book is —“Returning the Teacher to His Studies.”

Don’t they need us just merely as a disguise or an excuse for being in a certain place?

Well, that’s the attitude that life consists of games, and that was necessary when there were boundaries. In fact you can’t play a game unless you do have boundaries and do have signs that this place is not this other place. That this university is not downtown. This university is not a TV set. Except on occasion when the program is “educational.” But it will be better if we stop playing that game. If, for instance, the religious spirit instead of taking place just because there are a bunch of priests around takes place as it did with Thoreau, walking naked, as he did, in a stream in the middle of Concord—did you know that? That was one of the things he did in Concord that made his “religious” neighbors a little upset.

But how far do you take this idea? Only into the arts? How does it fit in with social responsibility, as in training the doctor, training the engineer…?

But then we have our heads to use, and we should use them. I gave the illustration of the telephone and the water faucet and there will be areas that require another attitude than the one I’m suggesting, but certainly all this will have to do with mind, and changing it—which is, say: philosophy, religion, mythology, arts, and then psychology; I suppose sociology, the enjoying of nature through the sciences. But then science is at that point of the naming of things. Taxonomy in botany is something like the telephone, organization has to take place; otherwise, the telephone is of no use to us. If we give names to all the various mushrooms, then we ought to find some way of knowing which mushroom is which, and this is the thing people are working on now with the computer. The previous taxonomies have been hopelessly inefficient at being useful, so we’re trying to get useful ones. And where that kind of practicality is of the essence—and is otherwise foolishness —there we need organized ways of doing things. But in all the rest of human activity I think that the E.E.Cummings title might be an inspiration—two plus two Is Five. It’s at that point where all the rationality is precisely a nuisance and it is of no service to us and ought to be put down under, as Norman O.Brown says, as though in a sewer, where we don’t have to even think about it.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

And the first thing I announced was that everyone in the class would get an A because I am opposed to the grading in schools. Well, when this news got around the campus the size of the class increased to 120 people who all wanted to have As. Gradually, it settled down to about 80 people who came to the class all the time. But even those who just came and registered got an A. My first talk to them explained my point of view. And that included the fact that we didn’t know what we were studying. That this was a class in we didn’t know what. And in order to make that clear that we would subject the entire University Library to chance operations, to the I Ching, and each person in the class would read, say, five books or parts of five books, if the books were too long, and the I Ching could tell them which part to read. And in that way we would all have, I thought and they agreed, something to talk about, something to give one another. Whereas if we did as other classes do and all read the same book and knew what we were doing, then we could only be in the position of competing with one another to see which one understood the most. Whereas in this other class we all became generous to one another, and the conversations were unpredictable.—Hans G.Helms (1972)

I think the various conventional forms that afflict the university at the present time should be bypassed, or steps should be taken to remove them. For instance, I was once talking with Varèse on the subject of harmony, which now takes a year to be taught in a university. We both agreed that anything useful about harmony could be taught in one half hour.

I would suggest that instead of there being required studies, they should simply be made available, in an environment which is conducive to people becoming interested. The interest in such general questions should arise in the student, rather than being forced upon him. The reason I dropped out of college was because I was absolutely horrified by being in a class which had, say, two hundred members, and an assignment being given to have all two hundred people read the same book. I thought that if everyone read the same book, it was a waste of people. It was sufficient for one person to read the book and then somehow through that person, if the book had anything in it, everyone could get it, by talking with the person who had read the book. But to look at those desks with everybody reading the same book, that struck me with horror, so I marched away and went into the stacks of the library. I read books as irrelevant to the subject as I could find; and when the questions were given for the examination, I got an A. I thought there was something wrong with that system, so I dropped out of college.

I think this notion of a curriculum and practices such as having people read the same standard text are based on the conviction that at the basis of learning is language, which is understood by each person; and that people would not be able to communicate unless they had the same information. Now in the arts at the present time, this is not what obtains. Today, all through the world which uses modern art, what we have are intermedia. It is extremely common practice that many things go on at once. In a theatrical or musical or any such situation, the center of interest is nowhere to be observed; it is interesting all over.

This means that the basic notion of an agreed-upon language is being given up. The characteristic of one of our events, that includes music, and action, and film, and slides, and so forth, and which is present in what we call serious art, and in rock and roll performances with films and stroboscopic lights, with dark light and all these things—the characteristic thing is that after two people have experienced it they would be able to converse and exchange their experiences, which have been different. I don’t think syntax or language in a conventional sense took place; it is something far more all-pervasive which took place. Two people in such a situation, with the activity surrounding the audience, might have their backs to one another and literally see different complicated things, though they were present at the same event. And that is our life experience. Why are these arts the way they are? They are not that way in order to simply break the laws of art; they are, rather, that way in order to introduce us to the life we are living, so that we can, as you say, participate in it.

Now, the situation we have here right now, the discussion in this room, is an excellent one for education; and it also occurs, doesn’t it, at the graduate level. Ought it not to sweep down through and penetrate the whole university? That is to say, people coming together and exchanging their information; and then, through the brushing of their information together, one with the other, stimulating further perhaps unwritten information— people acting together synergistically, rather than each one as in a factory doing exactly the same thing as the others.—C.H. Waddington (1972)

I have no formal contact with the students at all, and I stay quite a bit away from the University [of Illinois] and don’t even present myself. It was controversial whether to invite me there in the first place, and the faculty in the music school was divided, as you can imagine; some thought that if I came it would be a disaster, and others thought it would be very good. And I think in the end I disappointed everyone. Although I’m not pushing myself forward, some students make their way over here, and one of them, I recall, last year even expressed a kind of gratitude to me for not teaching. He said, “I hear you’re going to teach next year,” and there were some people who said, “Why should he be here if he’s not doing anything in the way of teaching?” And I said, “Well, I don’t think I’ll do it.” Then he said, “I think that it’s very good not to.” They know that I’m here and if they wish to see me, they can; and if they don’t need to, they don’t have to. And I put up a sign saying, “Anyone who wants to see me, may.” Which they didn’t read. People read less and less of those notices, you know.

Except one day I got a note from a student saying he would like to meet me any time that I wished—you know, that I was free. So I replied and said that he could call and that I was free most any time, and he hasn’t called. Peculiar, isn’t it?—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

John, you said you had spent a year, or more than a year, studying Oriental thought and philosophy. This is not just reading one book about it. You went quite deeply into it. Now, possibly because of where it comes in most people’s lifetime, the university conventionally is a place where people tend to want to go fairly deeply into something or another. They should be able to select what they go deeply into, and it might be a mixture of Oriental philosophy and bacterial genetics, or some other eccentric combination of disparate subjects; but it seems to me, there is an advantage in going deeply into something.

I think that society, in one way or another, should recognize the value of doing this, but to have a large number of people going deeply into the same thing, not of their own will, but because it was considered good for them, is not going to accomplish that goal. When you said that a poet and artists and so forth should be in university communities, I think the advantage from that would be that by their activities the students would see that these people were devoted to what they were doing. I think that we study, we teach, throughout our lives, whether we hold classes or not; and we do it by this effective means of example.—C.H.Waddington (1972)

I don’t teach. I give lectures, or I… I asked David Tudor years ago how I should behave in these university situations. And he said, “Think of yourself as a hit-and-run driver.” Well, David Tudor is an altogether marvelous person, but he also has a very shocking mind, and that was a shocking statement. But it’s also very perceptive. I can, I think, teach well, but I don’t teach because it requires too much time from my point of view. For instance, I do not think that a teacher should teach something to the student. I think the teacher should discover what it is that the student knows —and that’s not easy to find out—and then, of course, encourage the student to be courageous with respect to his knowledge, courageous and practical and so forth—in other words, to bring his knowledge to fruition. Don’t you think?—Ev Grimes (1984)

Would you say anything to young people about discipline and training?

No, I don’t think we could say anything that will actually help because if someone says something and then someone else does what they are told to do, it doesn’t work out right. It has to be original. It has to come from all the calls that come to that individual, whether from inside or from outside. Don’t you think?

In painting, for instance, there are people whose work is representational to begin with and it become abstract later in their lives, and vice versa. I think what we have done with our lives is not something to be imitated. Each person’s life is original. It could go from A to B, or it could go backwards from B to A, or it might go to a completely other letter, or to a series of different letters or in circles. I think the important thing is—I don’t know if you would agree, but I think you might, though maybe you won’t —that it must begin by a conscious decision to give yourself up, to devote yourself. Whatever direction, whatever path, it comes through the decision to devote yourself, to pay attention to all the things outside of yourself, to give yourself up.—Rose Slivka (1978)

People complained who knew Thoreau; he was a controversial figure and he was adverse to schools, you know—he was a teacher for a little bit, but he left the educational system quickly. His neighbors complained that he did nothing, and even Emerson complains that all he was worth was as captain of the Huckleberry Party, but history has proved otherwise. Three instances: India—through Gandhi, through Thoreau—changed a whole political structure; the Danes—through the essay on “Civil Disobedience”— successfully fooled Hitler’s occupation; and Martin Luther King. There you see: all that’s needed is re-examination, really, of our value system with regard to what people do. Poets down through the ages, and saints and so forth, have advised inactivity. And we haven’t listened—at least the universities haven’t listened. Yet they’re willing to teach the poetry. It’s a very strange situation.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

We want to see the world as a university from which we never graduate. This trend is already showing. In the Midwest, and I am sure in many other places, they have what they call a Midwestern complex of universities, and a student can take advantage of the services of any of those places and still be effectively in his own university or his Alma Mater. In other words, I think the notion of Alma Mater ought to give way to just “world.”—C.H. Waddington (1972)