BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
Bulletin 8
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, ITS AIMS AND METHODS
Black Mountain College is a coeducational liberal arts college with a student body of between seventy and a hundred and a faculty of twenty. It is also a functioning community. Several important features distinguish it from the conventional American college, while at the same time it pursues the essential aims of liberal arts institutions.
One main difference is that the fine arts are equated as a field of study with the sciences, languages and literatures, and the social sciences. Students are expected to qualify in all these four fields before they are permitted to specialize in one. Most colleges offering the B.A. or its equivalent require some work in a science, but few require experience in the arts. The arts offered at Black Mountain are music, painting, drama and dancing, work with material, architecture, and weaving. These are studied in their theoretical and historical aspects as well as from the point of view of craft. But their larger contribution to a student's education is that the arts, like literature, social studies, or the sciences when widely conceived, are treated as a focus for many aspects of life. Hence they become a discipline equal in scope and significance with the three conventional divisions of the curriculum. There are other media of communication than words or mathematical formulae, and other repositories of human experience than books. It is the function of the teacher of an art to enliven the student's understanding in his particular medium, to the end that he will not only see and appreciate but perhaps learn to use this medium to some small degree for his own communication and expression. The aim is not so much to produce artists as to develop an understanding of the worlds and the languages with which the various arts have to do.
Many American college students sing or play instruments, but they are not often encouraged to play the world's great music as a natural pastime or to enjoy it in informal concerts as a normal form of entertainment. Acting, writing, and even painting are not unknown to the American undergraduate, but usually these activities have a marginal position in collegiate life; they are extra-curricular, or are studied in courses attended primarily by the special student, or they are cultivated by cliques of self-conscious individuals who flatter their own egos and are mildly contemned by the more virile, sociable, and intellectual. Under these circumstances the arts as a subject for serious and general study do not flourish in most colleges. At Black Mountain, however, they take their more proper place as one of the primary means of expression. Faculty and students, many of whom have no special training in the arts, participate in community plays, concerts, drawing and designing classes, and building. There is constant artistic activity of various kinds which is a normal part of the community life and in which almost everyone participates in one way or another.
A second divergence from conventional college life is the inclusion of a work program as a part of education. All take part in this, irrespective of the tuition fee they pay (the college fee is based on a sliding seale, the individual paying according to his financial resources).
The college is unendowed and hence forced to live frugally on its income from student fees and occasional gifts. Out of this necessity rose certain educational possibilities which have developed into principles. Everyone is expected to help with the work of the community: building the necessary college buildings under the supervision of an architect, landscaping the grounds, helping run a farm which produces a considerable amount of the food of the community, maintaining roads and buildings, constructing stage sets, helping in the college offices. In this work students learn to handle tools and simple machinery; they become acquainted with some of the basic routines of the world's work and with the life of the worker. By the end of their four years some may even become fairly competent craftsmen. But more important is the fact that they live in a simple yet representative American community which is engaged in a variety of the practical activities of daily modern life. In seeking to maintain a smoothly operating and productive plant, which they feel belongs to them and provides the means for their education, the students come to know real responsibility.
A third aspect of the college distinguishes it from most colleges, and like the first two mentioned may offer a suggestion for future developments in American institutions. I refer to real self-government.
The college is established on its own property and, being neither tax supported nor endowed, is independent of a board of trustees or other external controlling groups. It derives its income largely from student fees. Hence it is free to act according to its own decisions. The faculty as a body own and have the ultimate control of the college property and educational discipline. They elect from their membership a board of fellows which administers the finances and makes faculty appointments. The board is considered to be an executive committee of the faculty. This means real self-government for a college faculty.
Community Self-Government
The students participate in this community self-government. Their four officers attend faculty meetings dealing with the general affairs of the college. The chief student officer, the moderator, is a legal member of the board of fellows during his period of office. As such he has full voting power and an equal voice with the other eight members. Needless to say, this is a grave responsibility for a student, since his vote may have a decided weight in making an appointment to the faculty or in determining financial policy which affects the whole community.
Community problems are brought to the general community meetings for discussion and in so far as possible for settlement. These meetings, attended by all members of the staff, their families, and the students, are in character much like the New England town meeting. Anyone who feels he has something that should be said is expected to speak, and his words are weighed according to their worth, not according to the age or reputation of the speaker.
Decisions are based on a consensus of opinion.
Aims of Education
The foregoing remarks should give some idea of the meaning of the stated aim of the college: to educate a student as a person and as a citizen. There are certain broad areas in human experience: the intellectual, the esthetic, the practical, the social and political, the religious.
In most American colleges all but the first of these are generally ignored. Undoubtedly the intellectual education of a student is of major importance; and unfortunately even that takes longer than a brief four years, following a somewhat inadequate high school background, will permit. But a wider training is necessary today. In a college where the life approximates that of a normal community (in the variety of practical activities, and in the interdependence of associates of different ages and backgrounds, ranging from faculty children to elderly people and students from abroad, a student gets much basic social and political experience from the life itself, and this is of great importance in the education of citizens in these times.
This ease of communication between faculty and student is not an educational ideal imposed on principle. It is inherent in the life of the college community, where students and faculty eat together in a common dining room and share the work of serving themselves. According to their abilities they participate together in concerts, plays, and radio programs, in sawing wood for the community furnaces, entertaining college guests, interviewing prospective stu-dents, helping to raise money to meet deficits, and in the thousand and one tasks incidental to running the college. Living and studying are thus two aspects of one unified educational process.
I do not suggest — it would be too naive — that varied experiences in themselves educate in the higher sense. Life gives such opportunities to most people, and it is the business of a liberal arts college to render a student "expert beyond experience." As Roger Ascham said long ago: "Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty … he hazardeth sore that waxeth wise by experience." I am speaking rather of the cumulative effect of constant association between teacher and student at all levels of experience, in and out of the classroom, in situations where knowledge and wisdom furnish a ready answer, and in situations where they do not. Undergraduates are largely influenced by the personalities with whom they have the most immediate and prolonged association. Generally these are members of a fraternity or sorority. Most American students live in a world which is quite different from the normal adult world. They associate almost wholly for four years with people of their own age group, often only of their own sex, and very often only of their own interests. At graduation they are suddenly precipitated into a new kind of life, of business, conflict and competition, worry and responsibility, where the things they have studied seem to have little application. Black Mountain College tries to prepare students for life by carrying on learning in an environment of normal human activities. It offers something like adult education, in a community where the main emphasis is upon study but where the work of the world plays an active role.
The road to self-discipline, maturity, and competence is long and hard. The kind of education Black Mountain attempts is not an easy one. Of course the surest way to get efficiency in administering a community would be to establish a permanent bureaucracy of faculty members who knew the work and could dispatch it quickly. Effective routines would be set up and conflicts avoided.
This, however, does not lead to maturity of judgment and action, or to civic responsibility in a tangled world where established forms and values are vanishing. We need citizens who have toughness of mind, a capacity for meeting the unexpected with clear eyes, and a steadiness of purpose that is based on the sure knowledge derived from experience, understanding, and practical competence.
Academic Program
The aim of the college in the academic area is to give students a sound introduction to major subjects that lie in the four areas of the curriculum, and to develop sufficient grasp of a special field so that a student may be able to form independent judgments within it. Work is divided into the junior and the senior divisions, each usually taking two years of the student's time. Completion of work in each division is determined by means of comprehensive examinations and faculty consideration of the individual student's progress.
In the junior division a student studies central subjects in each of the four areas. These may vary somewhat according to his interests. He should gain sufficient knowledge in these areas so that he can choose intelligently that special field in which he is most interested and for which he has the most talent. There is no hierarchy of courses leading automatically to entrance into the senior division, and in this sense no courses are "required." However, the comprehensive examination for entrance into the senior division is a test of real knowledge, at an undergraduate level, in the four fields.
To prepare himself for this a student is encouraged to pursue his own reading as well as taking courses. The faculty assume the position of guides and advisers. The student is made to feel that it is his responsibility to prepare himself for the examination, which he may take whenever the faculty believe he is ready for it. A part of the duty of the faculty adviser is to help him to realize his accomplishments and his limitation in this respect. The examination consists of two parts: a comprehensive test of knowledge and understanding in the four areas of study, and a group of questions to which they may be no answers but which test a student's judgment, observation, imagination, appreciation, and capacity to reach decisions. The faculty as a body study these papers thoroughly and review the applicant's maturity of conduct within the community before passing him into the senior division and recommending a particular field for special study.
Work in the senior division corresponds to the usual "major" in American colleges, though it may be somewhat more intensive and is usually done under tutorial guidance rather than in course work.
A student is expected by the time he graduates to be capable of independent work in his special field: to be familiar with its main areas and to be able to use the chief sources of information available. He should also have his own method of working and be able to form independent judgments based on first-hand acquaintance with the material of the subject. In the senior division the student is given considerable freedom of action under the guidance of his major instructor and adviser. The comprehensive examinations for graduation, consisting of from five to seven three-hour papers and a public oral examination, are given by authorities in the field from outside the college. It is assumed that the work done will be at least equal to that required for graduation in particular field at the better American colleges and universities.
Black Mountain College aims to educate persons as well as minds. Life in a community, with its attendant work and the social awareness and competences derived therefrom, and the development of esthetic sensibilities that enrich individual living, are regarded as parts of that education. Direct experience of the democratic processes and of some of the common tasks of the world, in a context of intensive liberal arts study, seem to the faculty of this college to provide one significant way to educate American citizens.
KENNETH KURTZ
Reprinted from The Haverford Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter, 1944.