The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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to make sense of what was happening. But not thought only; perception, too, as I tried to see what was transpiring in nuances of gesture, tone, and silence, and to feel what was happening in me at subliminal levels. My will, too, was engaged as I wrestled with whether to speak, risk, act.
New possibilities demanded consideration. How, precisely, encounter groups might ameliorate education's weaknesses, I had no idea; but it was inconceivable to me that, operating powerfully in precisely the areas of those weaknesses, they would have nothing to offer. For encounter groups are:
1. Experimental. This remains the case even though they have been with us in various forms since World War II. The extent to which they have caught on suggests that they tend to be useful, but they are no panacea. Their utility is neither unvarying nor established by objective criteria.
2. Nonauthoritarian. It is part of their definition that leaders leave them largely unstructured, let them develop in their own ways, and use whatever transpires for leaving vehicles. Part of the fascination of such groups derives from seeing what does develop when 8 to 16 lives are closeted for appreciable time while deprived of task, agenda, and assigned hierarchy.
3. Activating. Where nothing happens save by the group's initiative, boredom, or anxiety, the will to power and the will to play see to it that initiative is taken.
4. Involving.
5. Personal. Attention is focused on the here and now, and in encounter groups, this means people. Again, remove tasks, to which lives tend to get subordinated, and lives change from means to ends.
I shall not try here to say what encounter groups are. Let me say only that since 1965, half of my pedagogical interest has been devoted to trying to discern the potential for higher education latent in what Rogers himself considers this “most rapidly spreading social invention of the century, and probably the most potent.” To the end of augmenting my understanding of group processes, and effectiveness in facilitating them, I have participated in training programs conducted by the National Training Laboratory, Tavistock Institute, and the Washington School of Psychiatry; and have led seminars and workshops each summer at Esalen Institute and other growth centers. To explore their relevance for formal education, I have in each of the past 12 semesters taught courses ranging in subject matter from “Introduction to Philosophy” to “Philosophical Anthropology” which combine encounter techniques with cognitive learning. Students are apprised of the intended mix during preregistration screening interviews; registration is closed at 16 students; and a balance of men and women is desirable. The course opens with an encounter weekend, which means that we spend 13 hours together before we open a book. My object is to get the Waring Blender of human interaction churning, then feed into it eye-dropper drips of cognitive content. After the opening weekend the class meets for a three-hour stretch each week. Typically, the first hour goes to student-directed discussion of the week's reading assignment; the second hour is mine to either lecture or continue the first hour's discussion under my direction; and the third hour continues the weekend encounter group. In mid-semester, we have a second weekend encounter, if possible off-campus and out of the city. When I can secure budget or prevail upon the good offices of my wife who works professionally with groups, I have an outside trainer conduct the weekends. This helps to reduce student-teacher distance and to get authority issues more openly onto the floor.
How has it gone? Roughly 85% of the 160 students who have been in these courses report on anonymous, postcourse checksheets that they were glad we used this approach and would recommend that it be continued. They report that compared with other humanities courses they enjoyed it more, were more interested in it, and learned more from it. I have no illusion that these statistics are clean, particularly the last one. If one esteems not only “learning that” but also “learning how” (i.e., learning how effectively to occupy a place in life as contrasted with merely knowing about life), Kierkegaard's truth as subjective transformation of oneself, and education as “the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself,” even the last statistic could be valid. I doubt, however, that students have acquired as much cerebral knowledge of subject matter in these courses as they do in others. Encounter aspects of the courses seem to fill such a vacuum in students’ lives and become thereby so seductive that I find I must constantly throw the weight of my office on the side of cognitive learning to keep the course from developing into encounter group only. Being unsettled in my mind as to how cognitive learning does fare in such courses, I do not recommend casting all education in their mold. I should think it might be ideal for each university undergraduate to carry one encounter course each term, but not more. As a side benefit, a college that instituted the policy of having them do so might, I suspect, find itself reducing its psychiatric and counselling staff appreciably.
With regard to the specifics of ways in which I have tried to link group process to cognitive learning, I would happily say nothing, for I am far from satisfied with my formulae and keep devising new ones constantly. But this is the nub of the matter, so lest my statement on T-group teaching, or peer-group learning as it might better be called, end up looking like a Taoist composition around the void, I list some samples of things I have tried.
1. Have students pair with partners they know least, look into one another's eyes for two minutes without speaking, then express nonverbally how they feel toward each other. For their next reading assign Martin Buber's (1970) I and Thou. Did the pairing exercise illumine experimentally what Buber means by an I-Thou relation?
2. Ask students to take 10 minutes to recall and write down their earliest childhood memory. Place the statements in the middle of the circle. Ask a student to select and read one of the statements at random. Can the group guess who wrote it? Does the discussion corroborate ontogenetic emphasis on the formative influence of early experiences as argued, say, in Erik Erikson's (1964) Childhood and Society?
3. Read Konrad Lorenz's (1966) On Aggression. Do its theses shed light on the competition and hostility that have come to light within the group's own experience?
4. Read Nietzsche's (1968) Will to Power. How much of the group's life—most obviously the struggles for leadership within it, but not these only—supports its central thesis?
5. The greatest anxiety I, personally, have felt in a group setting was in the initial meeting of 65 persons who were closeted for two and one-half hours with no agenda whatever. Watching every attempt to structure that chaos come to naught was an unnerving experience, but it was insightful too, for it showed me directly the way formlessness without produces formlessness within. Not knowing my place in the group, I didn't know where I stood in any context: who I was, how I should act, anything. Compare Heidegger's (1962) notion of angst in Being and Time as symptom of the collapse of “the worldhood of the world”; also Harry Stack-Sullivan's (1950) famous essay on “The Illusion of Personal Individuality.”
6. Read the first essay in Leonard Nelson's (1949) Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy, and ask if the goal of encounter education is to complete Nelson's approach to philosophy with two emendations: the Socratic method becomes the group Socratic method with the total group replacing a single individual as midwife, and feelings as well as thoughts are intentionally brought into the picture.
7. A “low” tends to settle in on groups the last few sessions before they terminate. The impending death of the group seems to awaken presentiments of individual, personal death. The experience provides concrete, shareable data relating to Heidegger's notion of being-unto-death as a criterion of authentic living.
I stress that I have not listed these projects in order to recommend them to others. I cite them only as instances of the kinds of bridges that can be thrown from group experience to cognitive learning. It appears to be of the essence of encounter teaching that no canned rubric will work for long. I wish I could report that I feel like a veteran architect of bridges of the kind described, but the fact is the opposite. I have come to suspect that how and where to throw such bridges will be my pedagogical koan (Zen meditational problem resolvable in life only, not in words or formulae) till I retire.
If I have neither solved the problem of relating group process to cognitive learning nor believe that it admits of standardized solutions, why do I make of