Outcome Based Education


by Dr. William Coulson


Philosopher Robert Fuller specializes in religious studies at Bradley University and, a decade ago, published an insightful analysis of the "peculiarly American spirituality" discerned in the writings of psychologist Carl Rogers.(1) As Rogers' associate for approximately two decades--we co-edited Studies of the Person, a series of 17 humanistic education textbooks, and shared in the founding of a "growth center" named for the series--I believe this peculiarly American spirituality is to be seen in a series of educational experiments that began at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in the mid-1960s. After WBSI began to come apart at the seams and the Rogers team moved on to the Center for Studies of the Person, the experiments continued.

Included was Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz. In their book, The Perpetual Dream, sociologists Gerald Grant and David Riesman state that "If Kresge College could have adopted the name of its patron saint rather than its benefactor, it would have been called Carl Rogers College." Kresge students were organized into small "kin groups," each with a faculty facilitator to help them express their feelings. After two years, one of the organizers resigned with the complaint that nothing was getting done: every faculty meeting "begins with how do you feel about each other instead of the substance of the meeting." Things were no better in the classroom. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson called written work "generally deplorable. It was hard to get students to take seriously what was being said or for them to take themselves seriously when writing something.... Students spoke a horrible touchy-feely jargon." He said that "in actual behavior they were unusually kind, but that didn't help you learn very much in Latin grammar or any other serious subject"(2)

Another example is provided by journalist Terry Borton and concerns an experiment in the schools of Louisville, Kentucky. In one junior high, Borton observed "kids calling one another `crazy stupid nigger' and covering the walls with obscene graffiti." Of the facilitator training they'd received in Rogers' name the previous summer, a teacher said, "The impression we got was that we were free to do our own thing and that the kids should be free to do their own thing. When the kids heard that, they were off." There was "little progress in academic achievement .... At the same time community people, particularly blacks, were upset about plans to hold new training sessions during the coming summer, they feared that the program would result in teachers' `experimenting with our kids again'."(3)

What justification could there be for such an educational approach--college students learning to speak touchy-feely jargon, junior high students scribbling obscene graffiti? It was all in the name of "growth." However, Carl Rogers' earlier studies, which focused on technical issues in psychology and earned him numerous honors, were part of a different tradition than the personal growth which was John Dewey's theme. Michael Polanyi, teacher of two Nobel Prize winners and an occasional colleague of Rogers, described the standard (i.e., non-Deweyian) scientific tradition this way:

"There are no romantic scientists who demand the prerogative to express their individuality as such.... The revolutionary in science does not claim to be heard on the grounds of any right to assert his personality against outside compulsion.... While the whole progress of science is due to the force of individual impulses, these impulses are not respected in science as such but only insofar as they are dedicated to the tradition of science and are disciplined by the standards of science."(4)

Scientists strive less to prove or breed anything (like growth) than to find it. Rogers' psychotherapy studies were in this tradition. "What will work in therapy? What will be its effects?" These were his questions. He was an inquirer at the time (the 1940s and '50s), not yet primarily a reformer; and it was for his dedication to inquiry that in 1957 he received one of three Scientific Contribution Awards of the American Psychological Association, the first ever given. The award acknowledged studies by Rogers which were "dedicated to the tradition of science," as Polanyi put it, and "disciplined by the standards of science."

But another vision was at work in California when Rogers arrived in 1964 from the Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute. It didn't originate in California but found fertile ground for development there. It has since become the basis of OBE, Outcome-Based Education. In a sense, it simply reversed Polanyi's claim and said the scientist's right is "to assert his personality against outside compulsion." Everyone has this right, OBE says, including children. Let them work at their own pace: they're scientists, too.

One needs less discipline than chutzpah to be a scientist of this new sort. It is therefore a program particularly suited to young people.

To the extent that Carl Rogers, overstimulated in the company of too many such "scientists," found himself shifting in this direction after the move to California, he was following a path laid out earlier. Fuller's article on Rogers describes it as a variant on a peculiarly searching tradition of American religious practice. The New England transcendentalists had followed it. Other spokesmen included Ernest Renan and John Dewey, whom one writer has dubbed "Two Organizers of Divinity."

"Two Organizers of Divinity" is the title of an article in the journal Thought by R.M. Chadbourne (Sept. 1944, pp. 430-448). Less known than Dewey, Renan (as author Richard Chadbourne explains) was a disaffected Roman Catholic priest; his principal intellectual work was achieved in the mid- nineteenth century. Dewey who, like Renan, had earlier been conventionally religious, wrote with enthusiasm about Renan's view of science and religion in 1892 and '93 in the journal Open Court.(5) Both men claimed to have found a truer religion than the Protestantism and Catholicism of their respective upbringings. This new religion was to be based on "experience" rather than external authority. Again we see a parallel with OBE .

Of Dewey, Charbourne writes that "Henan's visions stirred him," to the point that:

"He cannot quote enough of this epic (the eighteenth century epic of Progress, essentially) of humanity progressing toward a goal of perfect earthly happiness, evolving ever-greater rational powers of which it becomes exhilaratingly more conscious."

Dewey offered readers of Open Court Renan's view of the man of science--"The man of science is the real `custodian of the sacred deposit'; `...science is a religion, it alone will henceforth make the creeds, for science alone can solve for men the eternal problems'"--and Dewey adopted this new religion as his own:

"Renan converted him [Chadbourne writes] to the faith that science can fully replace the "illusions" of Christianity with the realities of rationally controlled knowledge. Renan revealed to him that science need no longer oppose religion; it is religion, that scientists need no longer be the rivals of priests, they are priests."

The science that Dewey wanted taught in Renan's name was no self-denying search for truth--not science of the sort the American Psychological Association had in mind when honoring Carl Rogers for scientific achievement--but a kind of "comprehensive synthesis which will allow it to become a guide of conduct, a social motor." National Book Award winner Walker Percy, who trained as a physician and scientist, has written that such a synthesis is no real science but scientism:

"The distinction which must be kept in mind is that between science and what can only be called "scientism". It is one thing, in other words, to speak of the magnificent achievements of natural science and the technology derived therefrom--science, with which, it goes without saying, the Church not only has no quarrel but which it must surely applaud--because the Church is ever on the side of truth and the search for truth, and also because of the obvious benefits conferred on man by science and technology in such areas as the treatment of disease and the improvement of the material standards of life."

"Scientism is something else altogether. It needs to be mentioned in this context because it can be considered only as an ideology, a kind of quasi-religion--not as a valid method of investigation and theorizing which comprises science proper--a cast of mind all the more pervasive for not being recognized as such and, accordingly, one of the most potent forces which inform, almost automatically and unconsciously, the minds of most denizens of modern industrial societies like the United States."(6)

Scientism was a nineteenth-century creation. Under Renan's influence, it had become Dewey's own vision by 1893, and his program never essentially changed after that. In 1908, in an article titled "Religion and Our Schools," Dewey spelled out the implications for schools, calling for the "systematic denial of the supernatural." He expressed the wish that "the non-supernatural view" come "more completely in possession of the machinery of education." The schools, he said, must be "thoroughly reconstructed before they can be fit organs for nurturing types of religious feeling and thought which are consistent with modern democracy and modern science." He believed that this thing which Percy would later call "scientism," this "non-supernatural view" of the meaning of life, would be the only "guide of conduct" necessary in twentieth-century public schooling.(7)

We have arrived. We have metal detectors and armed security guards at the doors.

If the movement has had staying power, as Professor Fuller rightly claims in his article on Carl Rogers' spirituality, it is for being a form of belief. Dewey's own term of 1934, "religious humanism," bespeaks it. New York University psychologist Paul Vitz has identified the movement with self-worship.(8) A passage by a best-selling author in the Studies of the Person textbook series supports Vitz's interpretation. At the time of writing, the author was a high-ranking official of the U. S. Department of Education. Later he went to jail for sex crimes, a result that was not unrelated to his beliefs, for in 1974 he'd written of his own personal growth as a kind of religious imperative:

"I have grown to the place where I now have what might be called "a religion of the self." I believe that most of the answers are within myself and that learning to tap the love and beauty and strength within myself is really a worshipping of the inner self. In essence, I believe in God. God is within each of us. We are all God .... I now meditate to the God within my own inner self; and each time I meditate, I discover new resources of boundless love and beauty within myself."(9)

As to the connection between self-examination, worship and Rogerianism, Professor Fuller wrote that Rogers' writings give "psychological embodiment to the religious and ethical assumptions that have shaped the successive articulation of a peculiarly American spirituality." That is, the assumptions were not original. As Renan had expressed them in the 1800s, Dewey had reiterated them in his 1934 book, A Common Faith. Corliss Lamont re-examined A Common Faith in a 1961 article in the Journal of Philosophy, where he summarized it as being "a new faith for modern man" and as being "severely critical of traditional religion" for traditional religion's reliance on ancient texts and on authority which is external to the individual's personal experience.(10)

A Common Faith held that the lessons and values of the past must be set aside in a changing world. Dewey's student, William Heard Kilpatrick, said virtually the same thing in the 1920s, and George Leonard, Rogers' interlocutor in a Look magazine interview published in 1966, had allied himself with it in 1961: "The tempo of history has been doubled and redoubled," Leonard said, "and social changes that once took decades are now happening overnight." So, too, have the authors of one manual of values clarification and another--Sidney Simon's name is best known--repeated the idea from the late-1960s into the present. The honor paid to this venerable doctrine is paradoxical, of course. It honors change and suggests that reliable answers in times of change will no longer be found among those who read and interpret ancient texts but with youth. But those who passionately espouse this doctrine are getting a little long in the tooth. William Heard Kilpatrick was a professor at Columbia University Teachers College and well along in years, for instance, when he published Education for a Changing Civilization in 1929:

"Up to recently the rate of change has been so slow that philosophy and morals could in essential degree affect to ignore change. That time seems, however, now to have passed. Change has become too obvious, too inclusive. Our young people face too clearly an unknown future. We dare not pretend that the old solutions will suffice for them. It appears that we must have a philosophy that not only takes positive recognition of the fact of change but one that includes within it change as an essential element.... The material advance in civilization threatens to outrun our social and moral ability to grapple with the problems so introduced. Already one significant result appears. Our youth no longer accept authoritarian morals. We must develop then a point of view and devise a correlative educational system which shall take adequate account of this fact of ever increasing change. Otherwise civilization itself seems threatened."(12)

And here is how Sidney Simon, Merrill Harmin, and Howard Kirschenbaum put their own version of the same argument, 44 years after Kilpatrick and 125 years after Renan:

"[An] increasing number of students are no longer willing to tolerate a curriculum that does not acknowledge their needs, interests, and concerns. Schools, as well as homes, must offer young people a way to develop a set of values upon which they can act and base their lives. How do young people acquire a set of values? Are we to tell them what to value and how to live, over and over and over again, in the hope that they will listen? No. None of us can be certain that our values are right for other people."(13)

What this sequence suggests is that change, which is a fundamental theme of, and preferred justification for, Outcome Based Education, has long been an invariant in the quasi-therapeutic or "religious" strand of American public-school education, the strand identified by historian Richard Hofstadter as anti-intellectual. In that sense, OBE is based on a contradiction. Today's OBE leaders may claim to be leading the way toward a future vastly different from the past; but in spite of frequent changes of name, the basis of the movement now called OBE hasn't varied in a hundred years.

In other words, the necessity of change is a questionable assertion. It all depends on what is said to need changing. Little has changed among the leaders of the affective education movement in this century except the brand names under which they market their curricula and philosophies. In 1972, Rogers permitted me to quote him concerning how to deal with the many critics of his own version of the movement. He said, "I'd change the name just as fast as needed to keep ahead of the critics."(14)

OBE seems to reflect that advice. In my opinion, it is just the latest label for what began as the child study movement, became the mental hygiene movement and progressive education; then life adjustment, classroom encounter and sensitivity training; humanistic education, values clarification, youth decision making, critical thinking, mastery learning and cooperative learning. There are brand-name differences between them, but all the approaches reflect Dewey's argument that the lessons and values of the past must be transcended.

Dewey built a revealing, early paper of his around that argument, a paper for which we continue to pay a price today. The price is functional illiteracy. Dewey's paper, published in 1898, argued that devotion to the teaching of reading and writing in the primary grades made little sense any more; the sufficient reason to abandon the practice, he said, was that it had always held sway. In times of change, the ancient practices must be first to go. It is in education if anywhere, he said, that the present has its own claims:

"It is some years since the educational world was more or less agitated by an attack upon the place occupied by Greek in the educational scheme. If, however, Greek occupies the place of a fetich, its worshippers are comparatively few in number, and its influence is relatively slight. There is, however, a false educational god whose idolators are legion, and whose cult influences the entire educational system. This is language-study--the study not of foreign language, but of English, not in higher, but in primary education. It is almost an unquestioned assumption of educational theory and practice both, that the first three years of a child's school-life shall be mainly taken up with learning to read and write his own language. If we add to this the learning of a certain amount of numerical combinations, we have the pivot about which primary education swings. Other subjects may be taught; but they are introduced in strict subordination."

"The very fact that this procedure, as part of the natural and established course of education, is assumed as inevitable-opposition being regarded as captious and revolutionary--indicates that, historically, there are good reasons for the position assigned to these studies. It does not follow, however, that because this course was once wise it is so any longer. On the contrary, the fact that this mode of education was adapted to past conditions, is in itself a reason why it should no longer hold supreme sway. The present has its claims. It is in education, it any where, that the claims of the present should be controlling..."(15)

Dewey's experimentalism--the idea that the fund of accumulated knowledge should no longer control education--has turned out to exact a terrible price from American schools and their patrons. A research proposal submitted to the U. S. Department of Education illustrates. It was submitted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Common Faith. The proposal originated with the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, a quasi-governmental agency. It requested tax dollars to assess and promote "exemplary programs of Outcome-Based Education" and was submitted in 1984. OBE has been sweeping the country since. From state to state and community to community, the goals of OBE proposals are remarkably similar to the 1984 solicitation. And much of the motive force behind them is "spiritual"--in the sense that Fuller saw Rogers' work and Dewey saw his own. In a sense, OBE moves us a step closer an established religion, and it uses the public schools to get it across.

Goal One of the 1984 Far West proposal exemplifies. It calls for affirming the worth of all children. All persons are worthy, of course, for being children of the Creator, acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence; but the courts have been interpreted to hold that it is no longer permissible to speak of this in school. But there is no other obvious way in which all are worthy. Enter the state religion.

So it is with OBE.

Abraham H. Maslow saw the problem coming. He saw modern American education--including at Brandeis University, where in 1951 he had founded the psychology department--falling on its face for ignoring the distinction between who should teach and who should learn. He thought the growth orientation contributed to the confusion. At one point in his journals he wrote about an interview he'd recently granted to a writer from Time magazine. The session had focused on Maslow's views on encounter groups; they were then very much the rage among adults, much as they have since become the rage for school children. Going back over what he'd said in the interview, he noted what he thought was the greatest danger associated with encounter groups. They had, he said,

"...no theory of evil, of how to handle bastards, mean and nasty people. The implicit theory in Eupsychian ethics, T-group, Rogers, et al., is that if you trust people, give them freedom, affection, dignity, etc., then their higher nature will unfold and appear. Certainly true much of the time, certainly when there's good will and eagerness to grow and improve. But when there is not good will, but viciousness and hatred instead, then you must be ready to counterattack, to get angry, to fight back--or else you let evil, wrong, nastiness win."(16)

The next day he continued to write about the theme of evil, having found his thinking stimulated overnight in reading an article by philosopher Sidney Hook. Hook called for an end to the tolerance of academic disruption which then prevailed on college campuses. Agreeing with Hook, Maslow observed that the problem of the college faculties of the day--it was 1969, a particularly bad time in American education--was that they were

"...so weak and have no fight in them because they lack a theory of right and wrong, of evil and so don't know what to do in the face of viciousness. This nontheory of evil, it occurred to me, is one peculiar version of the "value-free" disease (which is the same as ethical relativism, of Rousseauistic optimism, of amorality, i.e., no thing is wrong or bad enough to fight against).... What kind of educational philosophy is it that is unprepared for ill will, for bastards, for mean and vicious kids? It's a philosophy in which nothing is bad or sick or wrong or evil."(17)

So it is, again, with OBE. Goal Three of the Far West proposal is an example of the impossibility of achieving the overall OBE schema. It calls for "expecting that all students perform at high levels of learning." If learning refers to academics (as it should), it would represent an extraordinary turnaround to achieve Goal Three, given a nearly unbroken record of decline in national test scores in America over the last 20 years. The wording of the next goal makes the achievement of "high levels of learning" by all students all the less likely. It calls for "ensuring that all students experience opportunities for personal success."

If it's impossible to achieve Goal Three under an OBE regimen, it's easy to achieve the next one, the "personal success" goal. It requires only two things. One is that academic standards be lowered to the point that nobody fails. The other is to arrange that academics become a matter of peripheral interest throughout the school and community. Everybody will "experience personal success," that is, when the class room and school are transformed into centers of what we can call amateur group therapy--in which all that's required for success is that people be sincere and say what's in their heart. When the overriding assignment of the school becomes for people to share their feelings and experiences (faculty as well as students) nobody will fail--unless they simply refuse to participate. It's easy to get an A+ in group therapy. Who can say that you don't feel or experience what you say you do? Everyone can become an honors student when the only norm is personal openness. Rogers called it "congruence." As a technical psychotherapeutic term, it means the matching of inner feelings, personal awareness, and verbal report. It doesn't require going to the library or even reading a book. All one need do is search one's heart and report what one finds.

Such sessions are characteristic of what OBE specialist William Spady has called transformational schools, which are his ideal. What gets dropped in transformational schools is the traditional emphasis on subject matter--for there is no way all children can be "successful" with subject matter. This is true because of differences in native endowment, drive, family discipline, television viewing habits, and recreational reading.

I want to focus on an OBE goal expressed in one community in Ohio. I believe it adequately illustrates problems that will be generated for America if an OBE frame work is adopted nationally.

"Goal 3: To enable learners to make informed judgments and decisions; act in accordance with democratic processes and principles; and courteously consider differing views.

There are three parts to this goal. As to the second, namely, "dealing with democratic processes and principles," we can refer to Hofstadter and to the Cremin book mentioned below, as well as to C. A. Bowers' informative, and perhaps unintentionally frightening history, The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years.(18) OBE represents the political re-radicalization of American schooling following the all-too-brief flirtation with academics that came after Sputnik.

As to the first and third parts of Goal 3--to teach young people to make their own decisions and to teach them courteously to consider "differing views"--it can be pointed out that both elements have been found in packaged American drug education programs for a number of years--the so-called affective programs. Research shows that, mostly, they don't work. Nothing happens in terms of behavior change. When behavioral changes have turned up in the research, they have tended to be in the wrong direction.

What's necessary to teach about drugs and alcohol is that the prohibition against their use by children is absolute. But if Goal 3 is applied to drug education, it won't sound anything like a prohibition. Instead it will (1) teach the students that drugs and alcohol are their choice and (2) get them to listen respectfully to claims they ought really to disdain--I mean the claims of the drug users among their classmates. "Be careful of the friends you pick, for you are liable to become like them." That this is an old saying does not disqualify it as being a good saying. Well brought-up children ought to avoid sharing intimacies with poorly brought-up children. Instead, in the classroom discussion sessions that I have referred to elsewhere as faux psychotherapy (and that remain a key element in OBE), all children alike are obliged to "share."

I do not mean to suggest that naughty children must be shunned or that having been badly reared is their fault. I do mean to acknowledge the research findings. They reveal that the direction of influence in classroom discussion sessions is from the experienced children to the inexperienced children. This means that when the school blesses peer interaction by arraying children in circle-based sharing sessions, the influence runs from the drug users and sexually experienced of the class to the students who have previously been abstinent. Bad influences that would otherwise be avoided can no longer be avoided.

A predictable outcome is that students emerge from these discussions less afraid to try drugs than before. What was unthinkable before has now been thought, and spoken--not just within the peer group (which can happen anywhere) but in the presence of a classroom teacher who has been trained to respond nonjudgmentally. It's the presence of the nonjudgmental adult that makes the exercise so dangerous. To turn the chairs into a circle and invite the children to share while the teacher murmurs facilitisms is very poor social policy.

Consider decision making. The school doesn't teach students a method for deciding whether to attend school. It tells them they have no choice: "It's the law. You must attend. It's good for you. We are certain of this. There is nothing to discuss." They deserve no less to be exempted from decision making about drugs. There is no decision to make, none whatsoever. It is no more proper for children to be induced to make decisions about drugs in drug education classes than to make decisions about the proper side of the road in drivers education. The law has preempted any such "decisions."

The chaos that could be expected to follow from teaching that the proper side of the road on which to drive is a matter of choice can be expected to follow in other subject matter areas where choice is emphasized. Decision making lessons waste classroom time. In the case of drug education, it must be said that the essential task is to persuade children to recognize that they must never take drugs. The techniques of persuasion are well known. They, not decision making, ought be be applied. In matters of importance, even in a democratic society, we teach obedience--if we love children. For they compare what we insist upon--school attendance, stopping at the red light, wearing protective equipment in football--with what we seem to allow. In recent years we seem to have specialized in allowing them to choose whether or not to partake of sex and drugs. Making a comparison between what we command or condemn on the one hand and what we allow them to choose on the other, they draw the false conclusion that what we allow must not be important--or we wouldn't allow it; we would tell them the truth; we would be insistent, not permissive.

In other words, decision making is for adults. Loving parents and good schools have always tried to improve children's vision, in the sense that they have wanted them to become reliable in distinguishing right from wrong. Recognition or moral discernment--that's the key. They have to be taught what to perceive. It's a form of connosieurship. Decision making comes later, once the age of majority is reached.

This applies beyond drug and sex education to many additional fields of subject matter. Children deserve to be told what is the case. They deserve a factual education. Time is wasted teaching them to make decisions they shouldn't even begin to entertain.

Next, consider another idea expressed in Goal 3, that children should "courteously consider differing views." That ought to apply only when all views are equally feasible, i.e., when the right answer isn't yet known. To teach children to listen to answers we know are wrong, as if these answers might be right, does nothing for their maturity or their morale. It makes them feel insecure. It also confuses unqualified opinion with established fact. For example, Outcome 5 under Goal 3 in this particular Ohio community calls for students to "advocate a choice (using evidence-based decision making) and act accordingly." But these are two of the elements of the faux therapeutic method called values clarification. To mix the elements of values clarification into academic instruction sows confusion throughout the school.

An inadvertence by Howard Kirschenbaum illustrates what's wrong with Outcome 5. Kirschenbaum is one of the most energetic popularizers of affective education. In his Advanced Value Clarification, he makes it clear that the aims of his approach are much like OBE: to make children autonomous. Unfortunately, this goal is realized in practice not only over against the peer group (which does not have the best interests of children at heart) but over against the reasonable authorities who do. In the classroom discussion groups favored in OBE no less than in its predecessors, children learn to resist the proper authorities along with the improper. Kirschenbaum writes:

"In discussing value-rich areas, such as those mentioned at the beginning of this article,(15) the teacher accepts all answers and does not try to impose his or her own views on the students ... Responses are not judged as better or worse; each student's views are treated with equal respect ... Choosing freely is considered better than simply yielding to authority or peer pressure ... If we uphold free choice, then we value autonomy...(15a)

It's certainly correct to treat all students with equal respect. But to treat their views with equal respect, right or wrong? Their views on drugs and sex? That's disabling.

Abraham Maslow was ahead of his time in experimenting with what has come to be called OBE. He wrote that he tried the approach in his Brandeis University course on Utopias in 1967, employing some of the same feelings oriented classroom techniques that have since become popular in public schools.

They didn't work. Feelings orientation subverted the learning of subject matter.

In his journals, he described how he'd tried to relate to the students of the Utopia course as a proper Outcome-Based professor. No longer their teacher, he became a "facilitator of learning." He called the role "consultant":

"I became a consultant and shut up, so they didn't "learn" content about Utopias. What they did learn and got enthusiastic about was T-group style intimacy."(16)

The experience got him to thinking, and he asked himself, "Who should teach whom? Youngsters teach the elders, or vice versa? It got me in a conflict about my education theory. I've been in continuous conflict for a long time over this, over Esalen-type, orgiastic, Dionysian-type education."(17)

A year earlier he'd written about self-actualization theory, one of countless entries on this subject in the journals toward the end of his life--"SA stuff" is what he'd somewhat disdainfully started to call it. Today we might call it "OBE stuff":

" 'SA stuff' I'd rather leave it behind me. Just too sloppy and too easily criticizable. Going thru my notes brought this unease to consciousness. It's been with me for years. Meant to write and publish a self-actualization critique but somehow never did."(18)

It's significant that his unease about "SA stuff" had been "with me for years" and that his conflict over "my education theory" had been "continuous" when some of his followers have yet to even begin to be bothered by these concepts. The published journals make it evident that, finally, he couldn't delay any longer in giving them up.

Why? Because, for one thing, his students had failed to learn the subject matter of his course. And if they hadn't learned, surely one reason had to be that he hadn't permitted himself to teach. Instead he'd played psychotherapist. The Rogerian listening and sensitivity techniques he applied to the class (instead of teaching) had failed to produce learning. Maybe the students felt better about themselves after the pseudo-intimacy he'd provided. But it wan't a kindness. They hadn't learned.

Another name Maslow gave to what he felt constrained to relinquish was the "theory of universal benevolence."(19) He'd embraced that theory as long as he could. Obviously, it was not to the benefit of his students that he'd been "nice"" to them so long. Universal benevolence had allowed them to drift into self-satisfied ignorance in the name of shaping their learning to their own self-assessed needs. Some of the students had benefited, yes. But hardly all. The journals yield a note from April 8, 1964; he'd just finished reading a preview chapter of Carl Rogers' Freedom to Learn, the book that became a best seller and was later called the Bible of humanistic education. He wrote:

"I feel total freedom and trust for worthy students are compatible with stern, authoritarian orders for nonworthy students. Better write out my rebuttal to Rogers point by point."

"Nonworthy," he continued, included not just students with "low IQ" or "psychopathy" but students who showed "avoidance of papers, reports, etc." when left to their own devices; those who displayed "the union-card mentality"; and those who had "bad Oedipal and authority problems (except for women and foreigners)."(17)

Unlike "SA stuff," which had been his baby, Maslow had not invented the concept of universal benevolence. It can be traced back to Dewey in this country and to Rousseau before him in Europe. Educator Harold Taylor had been Dewey's student at Columbia. He didn't come away from graduate school with a very benign view of the master's nonjudgmentalism:

"I had the feeling that, whether it was a deliberate refusal to be discriminating about graduate students or the young people he was encouraging, it appeared to me that no matter who said what, he [Dewey] encouraged the student. I was a little bewildered when I was asked to sit and listen to letters or asked to read papers that people had sent to him. Some of the damnedest things that I wouldn't spend the time on, but he would read them all and write back. He seemed to pay no attention to whether they were bad or good. There were some very dreary things written by education students about him and his views, which I didn't think a man of his quality should waste his time on. John would tire himself out responding and reading and thinking about what had been sent, and say, "Well, this fellow has something."

Here is how Sidney Hook, arguably the most famous student of Dewey, expressed a similar protest: "There is no doubt that Dewey encouraged too many... Dewey's attitude was that one genuine insight or fruitful vision was worth the risk of many errors...What he prized above all was the quality of becoming in human beings."(18)

As we have learned only too often of late, some of the errors made by youth in the name of "becoming" can be fatal. In light of today's epidemic levels of sexually transmitted diseases, for Hook's "the quality of becoming," one might read, "becoming ill." The business of "encouraging too many" now comes at an increasingly terrible price.

A point to insist upon is that OBE is really nothing new. American schools have had it for a long time under other names. Like Dewey's progressive education, OBE is turning out to encourage "some of the damnedest things." San Marcos, Texas, exemplifies. The public schools there were once top-rated. OBE was introduced and academic achievement began to slide. Recently the district was notified that its comparative scores on statewide tests had gotten bad enough that its accreditation might be in jeopardy.

For a compendium of other examples, dating back to the 1950's and before, I suggest Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life; especially important in light of our concern with OBE is chapter 13, "The Road to Life Adjustment." Lawrence Cremin's survey of American educational history, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957, is also important; pages 215-20 offer several descriptions of progressive education that can be applied with equal accuracy to values clarification, to Maslow's regretted early work on classroom reform, and to OBE. Consider the rationale for progressive education summarized on page 215 of Cremin. It will sound familiar to anyone who's read the OBE literature:

"...social change had so accelerated under the conditions of industrialism that teachers could no longer be certain of the problems their students would ultimately confront, and hence... they could best serve the cause of reform by teaching a method of thinking generally applicable to all social problems."(19)

That's Cremin summary of progressive education, the approach which owed its existence to the seminal writings of John Dewey. But it is also identical (a hundred years later) with the latest thinking on OBE.

It must be said that the progressive approach has long been causing America to lose the capacity to learn--which may be why Maslow put the word "learn" in quotes in his journals. To repeat the entry of May 5, 1968: "I became a consultant and shut up, so they didn't `learn' content about Utopias. What they did learn and got enthusiastic about was T-group style intimacy."

We are sending children into a competitive world. They deserve better than to be sent with full hearts but empty heads. That there is precedent for saying the idea behind OBE is dangerous can be seen in what's repeatedly gone wrong before. Consider Rogers' Freedom to Learn. Starting with an article in 1972 and later a textbook, Jerrold Greenberg adapted it to drug prevention and sex education in the lower schools. The Greenberg text was Student-Centered Health Instruction: A Humanistic Approach, and an article he published in the journal Health Education in 1978 summarized the viewpoint taken in the text. It also suggested what would later attract cigarette manufacturers to the concept of affective education.(20)

Greenberg had borrowed his conceptual key from Rogers' chapter on student-centered teaching in Client-Centered Therapy(21) and from his Freedom to Learn. He styled students as the school's "clients" and wrote that

"...health educators must not be concerned with the particular behavior of their clients, but rather with the process used by their clients to arrive at that behavior. For example, if a client (student in a school, adult in a nursing home program, etc.) chooses to smoke cigarettes but has made that decision freely, the health educator has been successful..."(22)

The idea that it is more important for children to choose (and having chosen, to feel good about themselves) than to do what is right--for example, that it is better to smoke if that is their choice than to abstain from smoking if they have been taught to abstain--this is so contrary to common sense and the protective instincts of parents that it demanded cosmic justification. Enter the New Age movement. Enter also an educational system roundly condemned by Carl Rogers. It has been called "Rogerianism." He said, "When I write it up, at least I try to make it clear it is tentative; it's only the best I can do at this point. But when it gets into a textbook, it sounds like it came down on tablets from Mt. Sinai: awful, simply awful. And I can't help but feel that nothing but bad can come from that."

And so it has come to pass.


Endnotes

1. Robert C. Fuller, "Carl Rogers, Religion, and the Role of Psychology in American Culture." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 22 (4), Fall 1982, pp. 21-32.

2. Gerald Grant and David Riesman, The Perpetual Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp 77, 103, 109, and 121.

3. Terry Borton, "Reform without Politics in Louisville," The Saturday Review, February 5, 1972, pp- 51-55

4. Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 40.

5. Published in Open Court in 1892 and 1893, Dewey's reviews of Renan's writings are reprinted in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898, Volumes 3 and 4. The reference is in footnote 15 below.

6. Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land (NY: Farrar, Straus and Girout, 1991), p. 297.

7. John Dewey, "The Schools and Religions," in Joseph Ratner (ed.), Intelligence in the Modem World: John Dewey's Philosophy (NY: Modern Library, 1939), pp. 702-715. Dewey's essay originally appeared in The Hibbert Journal, July 1908, under the title "Religion and Our Schools.'

8. See Paul C. Vitz, Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).

9. For what this educator (who is best allowed to remain anonymous) later realized can follow from devotion to the self, see Raven, the Tim Reiterman-John Jacobs biography of Jim Jones, leader of San Francisco's Peoples Temple and Guyana's Jonestown, where 900 died in a mass suicide. He was tape recorded in 1971, in an impassioned sermon on behalf of the religion of the self:

"You can become your own God .... I came to show you that the only God you need is within you....Say what you feel. Tap all the resources of energy within you .... I want you to realize that you must be the Scripture, that any other Scripture than you and the word that I am now imparting is idolatry."

(Excerpted from Raven in "Hellbent, Part Two: Jim Jones in the Pulpit of Peoples Temple," San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, October 17, 1981.)

10. Corliss Lamont, "New Light on Dewey's Common Faith." Journal of Philosophy, 58, 1961, pp. 21-28.

11. George Leonard, "The Explosive Generation," Look, January 3, 1961, p. 17.

12. NY: Macmillan, 1929, pp. 41, 49-50.

13. Merrill Harmin, Howard Kirschenbaum, and Sidney Simon, Clarifying Values Through Subject Matter: Applications for the Classroom (Minneapolis: Hart, 1973), p. 31.

14. In W. R. Coulson, Groups, Gimmicks and Instant Gurus (NY: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 155.

15. From "The Primary Education Fetich." In Dewey's collected works the spelling is modernized to "fetish." See Jo Ann Boydston, general editor, John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898 (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971). The article was originally published in The Forum, 25 (May, 1898), pp. 315-328. This excerpt is from page 315 of the original.

16. In Richard J. Lowry (ed.), The Journals of A. H. Maslow (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979), entry of April 14, 1969, p. 957.

17. Ibid., pp. 957-58.

18. NY: Random House, 1969.

15. "Sex" and "personal habits" are included on his list.

15a. Howard Kirschenbaum, Advanced Value Clarification (La Jolla, CA: University Associates, 1977) pp. 12-13.

16. The Journals of A. H. Maslow, entry of May 5, 1968, p. 919.

17. Ibid., emphasis in original.

18. Ibid., May 28, 1967, p. 794, emphasis in original.

19. Journals, October 29, 1968, p. 936.

17. Ibid., pp. 361-62.

18. See Sidney Hook, "John Dewey-Philosopher of Growth" in Sidney Morgenbesser (ed.), Dewey and his Critics (New York: Journal of Philosophy Pub. Co., 19771), pp. 9-17; and see Harold Taylor's observations as transcribed in Corliss Lamont (ed.), Dialogue on John Dewey (New York: Horizon Publishing Company, 1959), p. 22.

19. NY: Random House, 1961.

20. See W. R. Coulson, "Helping Youth Decide: `When the Fox Preaches, Beware the Geese.'" New York State Journal of Medicine, 85 (7), July 1985, pp. 357-58.

21. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.

22. Jerrold Greenberg, "Health Education as Freeing." Health Education, March-April, 1978, pp. 20-21

Dr. William Coulson, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist. He was a colleague of Third Force psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, leaders in the attempt to bring psychology into the classroom, in what is frequently referred to as "affective education". He currently speaks and writes on the dangers of such approaches.



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