Abstract Introduction The History of Lifelong Learning The Lyceum Movement Danish Folk Schools Workers’ Education The Vermont Institute for Community Involvement Synthesis and Conclusion Epilogue Bibliography Appendix

Table of Content

Community-Based Lifelong Learning

By Christopher Scott Holme

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Abstract

This paper presents community-based lifelong learning as an approach capable of solving diverse social problems and supporting accelerated personal growth. By facilitating the connections between individuals in a local community for their common development in a meaningful context, both individuals and communities are supported in building their capacities and their strengths. Four adult educational organizations are explored as case studies of how people have worked towards similar goals in the past. These examples are integrated into a discussion of how a community-based lifelong learning organization might be implemented today.

"Not I but the city teaches."
–Socrates

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Introduction

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to encourage citizens to form their own community-based lifelong learning networks. The learning network would bring people together on the basis of shared enthusiasms and interests in a more deliberate and efficient way than through fortuitous and haphazard social contacts. This organization would be local in context, facilitating connections that benefit the whole self and the local community. The broad goals of such a lifelong learning network would be to foster a greater sense of belonging within the community and a greater sense of empowerment, through knowledge, for the individual.

Most institutions for learning provide a fairly rigid structure of classes and degrees, and they tend to provide specific training for a clearly defined vocational objective. The lifelong learning network that I am proposing would provide access to the resources of one's own community for every kind of personal development. By using the local community as the resource, the means of the organization supports the ends, which is to strengthen the connection between individual growth and community development. The lifelong learning organization would achieve these means and ends through a couple of simple tools: a searchable data base of each participating member's interests and expertise, a central location in which people can meet, and a voluntary, democratic group process.

Structure

This introduction addresses the "what" and the "why" of community-based lifelong learning. The "what" is addressed in the next section, where I describe the way I define meaning of certain key words for use in this paper. The following section explains what, exactly, the organization might look like. After that, I describe my own motivations for undertaking this project, and in the final part of the introduction, I attempt to show why this vision of community-based lifelong learning is important to us today.

In the body of the paper, I explore the "when" of this model of learning through the history of similar learning endeavors in the hope of providing, through these real stories, encouragement that the achievement of community-based lifelong learning organizations is a practical possibility. First, I provide a general background of the history of education, pointing out developments such as museums and libraries that, while understood to be essential to education in the adult education movement, are not commonly recognized as such. In addition to a general history, I will explore lifelong learning in detailed case studies of movements and schools. The first of these is the Lyceum, which was a town-based educational forum beginning in 1826 in Millbury, Massachusetts, spreading to 3000 towns generally east of the Mississippi by 1834, and declining with the approach of the Civil War, a generation later. The next, the Danish folk schools, were rural residential schools originally for young Danish peasants where common folk were invited to explore the culture of their small nation for three to six months. Danish folk schools continue to be an active and important force in Danish society today. Following this, I explore workers' education, which began in America with labor organizations around 1920, but grew slowly due to the straightjacket of academic methodology and, ironically, a top-down management approach which stifled creative thinking about the design of learning experiences. And finally, I will explore the recent history of community colleges, particularly the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement, which later became Burlington College. All of these organizations had a relationship with meaningful social change, and each story shows that this relationship between knowledge and power, theory and action was played out differently in different times. In particular, I will describe how these different forms addressed the following questions:

• How was power distributed in the relationships within the organization?
• How much money did the organization require, and what was the cost of participation?
• What motivated people to come together to learn?
• What methods were used for learning?
• How did the time spent learning fit in with participant's other daily activities?
• What was the vision, either implicit or explicit, for society?

Following this, I will compare and contrast these examples of learning organizations in relation to each one's strengths and weaknesses, and also in relation to the model of a lifelong learning community that I am proposing. At this point, the lessons of the past will be considered for use in the future.

The last section of the paper is set aside for the "how" of community-based lifelong learning: a practical discussion of the methods of implementing a community-based lifelong learning center and network locally, using Brattleboro, Vermont, as an example.

Definitions

I wish to be very clear about what lifelong learning is, and what I mean by community, and direct democracy. Community is a very amorphous word, and much scholarly effort has gone into defining this word. (Galbraith, 2) Community, in this paper, should be understood as that which includes common location, common interests, and social interaction. A healthy community would include all the people of a place and would strive to find and strengthen the common interests among the individuals of the community. Locality also has a wide range of meanings having to do with scale. Are we talking about a neighborhood, a city, or a state? I would suggest that the model of a community-based lifelong learning network that I am proposing would function optimally at the scale of towns, neighborhoods, or districts of five to ten thousand people, organized around existing geographic and historical boundaries. Size does matter. Too big a population, or too broad a region, and the individual's sense of control and worth as a member of an identifiable geographic community vanishes. The importance of maintaining this relatively small scale is documented by Alexander (1977), Kohr (1957), and Schumacher (1973).

Direct democracy means more than just one person, one vote; it also means that everyone voting has participated in the framing of the question which is being voted upon. Within the democratic spectrum, direct democracy is the opposite of representative democracy. In a direct democratic participatory process, policy is made by the people, and the carrying out (or administration) of that policy is delegated, if necessary, to a few individuals. In this model, the members of a group together hold the power, and officials and representatives of that group are its voluntary servants.

In a lifelong learning community, there would be no board of directors. A board of directors may be an effective, efficient way of staying on top of an organization's goals, objectives, and performance, but the lifelong learning community recognizes the policy-making process as a valuable opportunity for developing personal and community capacities. While a select group of "directors" is inconsistent with direct democracy, it would be possible for an organization to have a coordinating committee or board, with officers such as Secretary, Speaker, Treasurer, and Facilitator. A good example of direct democracy is the town meeting.

Lifelong learning should be understood as the expression and fulfillment of the naturally occurring curiosity that is found, in one form or another, in the normal and healthy experience of human life. Learning itself should be understood broadly, both in terms of its scope and its process. "[P]hysicist Fritjof Capra considers that to learn is to be alive."(Miller, 234) Even without a healthy curiosity, learning inevitably occurs, because it is the process by which past experiences are integrated in order to respond to the unfolding possibilities of the present. Howard Gardner developed a Theory of Multiple Intelligences in his book, Frames of Mind in 1983. Since then, the seven ways of knowing he identified have become eight:

• Linguistic-verbal (most widely accepted)
• Logical-mathematical (most widely accepted)
• Visual-spatial
• Bodily-kinesthetic
• Musical-rhythmic
• Interpersonal (most criticized)
• Intrapersonal (most criticized)
• Naturalist (newly recognized)

These are the kinds of learning; within these types, there are also different ways of learning. The learning process should be understood as broadly and as inclusively as possible. As David Kolb has described it in Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (1984), learning modes may involve any combination of sensing, feeling, observing, thinking, and doing:

Moreover, it is vitally important that this learning is self-directed. This is because both the quality and the content of what is actually learned arise in relation to the motivations that direct the learning. People learn best when they really want to. Learning can be self-directed at the group level through the direct democratic, participatory process described above.

A Vision of A Community-Based Lifelong Learning Center

The lifelong learning center's purpose is to help individuals in their natural efforts towards learning and growth, with methods that honor and develop the strengths of the local community. In an effort to bring this discussion down to earth, I will illustrate what this might look like, physically and socially. Of course, every lifelong learning center will be designed differently through the same grassroots process that defines its ongoing functions.

A lifelong learning center would provide resources for personal exploration of the widest range of interests, such as tools for research, creative, and technical work. The center would function partly as a library, and would certainly have strong connections with one; it would serve partly as a network and an internet site, where people could register their interests- both in learning and in teaching. It would be a meeting place with a room for childcare, maybe even a kitchen for potlucks. It would function as a center of empowerment for all its citizen-members, offering office equipment, financial information (or even cooperative banking), tools, career counseling, and community organizing resources. By offering support to all developing, learning individuals in a community, the lifelong learning center has the potential to become central to the life of the community as a whole.

The lifelong learning center should be located centrally within each neighborhood or town (of five to ten thousand people) that it serves. It should be close to a place where people normally walk in the community as they go about their daily tasks, so that it is convenient to just drop in. The importance of its location should not be underestimated. (See Alexander, A Pattern Language, "44. Local Town Hall" and "45. Necklace of Community Projects") It should be within walking distance of everyone in the area it serves. Ideally, it would be on a main street and part of a complex of buildings and adjoining outdoor rooms. ("Outdoor rooms" are spaces with a sense of enclosure usually provided, at least in part, by the adjacent buildings.) These places might consist of a local town hall, a library, an outdoor space that can serve as a public forum or picnic area in good weather, a museum or arts center, and more mundane services such as a café, a copy center, post office, playground, or laundromat. These mundane features encourage people to drop in during the normal course of the day. Citizens may even wish to establish smaller centers for the smaller geographic or cultural units that make up the larger communities of five to ten thousand people. A smaller center might simply be a rented room or a flat on the corner.

Anyone can offer a class, anyone can take a class. Payment is up to the agreements negotiated directly between teachers and learners. In addition to teachers and learners, there would be co-learners. I offer this term because a person doesn't need to be an expert in order to offer a "class" that is a study group, inviting mutual exploration of a subject. The classes can take place anywhere, in people's own homes, for instance. Since the purpose of this learning institution is to integrate learning with living, meeting in person would be preferred to other media of communication. For classes that involve special needs of space and/or tools, the lifelong learning organization would offer these facilities or help find the appropriate sites. Opportunities for apprenticeships would be expanded, since learning by doing is a greatly neglected need in today's educational environment. Prospective students would have access to any evaluations of teachers by students, as well as students by teachers. These evaluations would be open to the individual being evaluated as well. To discourage the commercialization of these community-based institutions, class sizes may be limited, and if necessary, a cap could be set on the fees arranged between teachers and students.

Decisions about the organization itself are made through open meetings of all participating members, democratically. Membership would be defined by current or past participation in classes or study groups. Consensus would be preferred to narrowly divided decisions. If the meetings become too unwieldy due to size, smaller neighborhood, village, or street divisions can be utilized. Representatives from these groups can meet to coordinate the policies that have been handed down to them. At these group networking meetings, no new policies will be formed- that is up to the autonomous grass roots groups. This organizational structure of confederated autonomous groups has a legacy of successful cooperation in the Paris Commune of 1871 and, on an inter-city level, the various city leagues throughout Europe's middle ages, such as the Hanseatic League (1241-1669). (Bookchin, 144) These historical examples show that this radical democratic form is also practical.

Such an organization would help make connections between previously isolated age groups in a community, as well as across racial, ethnic, and cultural barriers. High school students could have the opportunity to experience learning in a particular area of interest that would match the depth, complexity, and passionate commitment that is usually experienced only after the demands of an undergraduate degree are fulfilled. Senior citizens could have the opportunity to connect with younger people who might share a well-developed interest, and to form a true mentorship, which can only really exist voluntarily, for both the primary learner and the mentor-learner.

Because true learning arises out of deep feeling, often the areas of learning would be broader and more active than what is normally called academic. A lifelong learning center would help promote and make known community events, such as local sports, cultural, and political events. Most, if not all, of the events within a community, from drumming classes to an animal tracking weekend, would be served by the postings and announcements of the lifelong learning center. As utilitarian as a bridge or a highway, a lifelong learning center would directly improve the quality of life in a community by facilitating the connections people need to make in order to explore and develop their interests, and their selves.

My Own Motivations

I am a lifelong learner because I find it exciting and enriching. I care deeply about the quality of life in my community, because the things that I value most are of a public nature- safety, freedom, relationships, and the aesthetics of the built and natural environments. (This is self-interest turned inside-out.) I want to feel greater belonging and empowerment within my community, and I wish the same for others. I believe that belonging and empowerment are key indicators of personal and collective health. I am excited about the possibilities that this vision of community-based lifelong learning holds for improving the quality of life in a community. In addition to the personal and community development aspect, I feel that it provides an optimal training ground for the practice of participatory democracy, because it offers a positive, progressive focus. This is an area of learning in which we are just beginning to see our potential as a society.

I have a professional interest in community-based planning, and am an advocate for direct democracy. I am interested in how to facilitate community participation in town planning and urban design. The main thing that facilitates this purpose, which may be changed and improved, is the environment in which this participation takes place. The formation of a lifelong learning organization would be an immediate, structural improvement to the environment of community dialogue.

I have come to this degree project with specific goals and questions already in mind. I sought historic examples that would confirm what I believe is possible. Rather than take an unbiased, "academic" approach, I see this paper as an example of action research. As such, I feel that it is necessary to involve my own judgments and values for the sake of both honesty and effectiveness. The reader is encouraged to respond authentically to these views, and to disagree, if that is the case. Disagreement makes for lively conversation and helps to develop a dialectic, which leads to greater understanding.

Why Community-Based Lifelong Learning?

Certainly, lifelong learning has happened in the past, and will continue to occur without assistance from purposeful social organization. But reading occurred in the past, before there were libraries. Now we take libraries for granted. No one would argue that libraries don't assist in very tangible, important ways in making reading more accessible and directed. Just as a library facilitates reading, a lifelong learning center would facilitate the continuing development of all learners.

According to Greeks of Periklean Athens, this continual self-development is essential to the formation of responsible, truly free-thinking citizens.

Paideia is normally translated into English as education, a term that is notable for its sparseness and limitations. To the Greeks, particularly the Athenians, the word meant considerably more. The education of a young man involved a deeply formative and life-long process whose end result made him an asset to the polis, to his friends and family, and induced him to live up to the community's highest ethical ideals. The German word, bildung, with its combined meanings of character development, growth, enculturation, and a well-rounded education in knowledge and skills, more appropriately denotes what the Greeks meant by paideia than any word we have in English. It expresses a creative integration of the individual into his environment, a balance that demands a critical mind with a wide-ranging sense of duty…The polis was not treasured as an end in itself; it was the "school" in which the citizen's highest virtues were formed and found expression. (Bookchin, 64)

A highly participatory democracy is the only true democracy. For all persons to truly represent themselves, they must speak for themselves, have a say in the setting of the agenda, and have the opportunity to bring forth new perspectives and new information. For a democracy to be, as Frances Moore Lappe calls it, a living democracy, participation needs to be direct, and fully empowered. For this empowerment to be consistently claimed and utilized effectively by the citizenry, lifelong learning must be an ongoing, passionate force within society.

Lifelong learning is its own reward, and the nature of the satisfactions depend upon whether the learning is exploratory, applying new knowledge, or refining practice. At the exploratory level, it is inherently fulfilling to satisfy curiosity. As knowledge accumulates, it is deeply satisfying to exercise that knowledge in practice. This practice, in turn, leads to the process of learning how to exercise knowledge most effectively in the constantly changing circumstances of real life. This refinement of practice is the development of a non-oppressive, authentic personal power- the power to achieve a vision. The interplay between the challenges of refining a practice and the satisfactions of developing an authentic personal power can become the work, and the on-going learning, of a lifetime. This achievement and power are self-rewarding. Moreover, every one of us is learning in many areas at once, so we have the potential to experience this process of exploration, accumulation of experience, practice, and refinement at a variety of developmental levels, and in a myriad of learning contexts. Examples of areas in which each of us is invited to learn daily, even hourly are: intra-personal (about ourselves), inter-personal, kinesthetic (ways of moving), musical, and environmental (that is, awareness of our surroundings). Clearly, we are learning, or failing to learn, in many areas at once- this is our potential as human beings.

We cannot afford to shy away from this challenge, the challenge of achieving our potential as human beings. Now that our society has developed to the extent that the idea of equality is unquestioned but unrealized, we have the cultural foundations for this greater striving. First of all, we deserve to realize our potential as human beings. We deserve health and happiness. True wealth lies in emotional well-being, in happiness. John Ruskin, a social critic of nineteenth century England said, "There is no wealth but life." Surely, becoming ever more fully ourselves must be a key element of this wealth. There is joy in a life that abides by these deeper understandings of health and wealth. This then, is the carrot, the goal leading us further on: true lifelong learning means exploring our curiosities and satisfying our desires to love, to excel, to serve, and to grow.

The stick is that we must each grow or we may all die. As our environmental and social problems mount in complexity and scale worldwide, our ability to solve these interwoven, often life-threatening problems calls for the best and broadest of our abilities, and not just from the experts, the occasional shining star, or the lonely hero. We all need to develop, to fulfill a more responsive, responsible role in our communities- both leadership and heroism need to become more common. This model of collective lifelong learning can help redefine growth, from its common use as a force of economic expansion and environmental destruction in which "development" really means "destruction of the land." Lifelong learning can promote the growth of experiential, rather than material wealth- something that integrates means with ends, process with product. This is a more accurate and complete understanding of growth and development, one that we know is possible because we once had it in our cultural past. Gary Snyder addressed this subject during an interview with Peter Chowka in New York City in April of 1977. The interview was conducted in a free-range style, in Allen Ginsberg's apartment, on the subway, while walking the streets.

The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension. The literalness of that other dimension is indeed going to have to be taught to us by some of these other ways. There are wonderfully pure, straightforward, simple, Amish, won't-have-anything-to-do-with-the-government, plain folk schools of spiritual practice that are already in our own background. The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that which I recognize more clearly now. Nobody can move from Right View to Right Occupation in a vacuum as a solitary individual with any ease at all. The three treasures are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. In a way, the one that we pay least attention to and have least understanding of is sangha – community. What have to be built are community networks – not necessarily communes or anything fancy. When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings a commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature. ([my italics] from The Real Work, an interview between Barry Chowka and Gary Snyder, New York, 1977)

The Foxfire books began with a high school teacher transplanted from the North to the Appalachian South, and his students, natives of Georgia's highlands. This story of Eliot Wigginton and the Rabun Gap high school students offers an inspiring example of how education, through honoring the need for meaningfulness in restless young hearts, can become learning, and of how this learning can transform both the individuals involved, and society as a whole. They pioneered, in this modern United States, what cultural growth can be. But this kind of growth is far more vast than just learning from poor rural old-timers. It involves preserving and honoring the wisdom of all of our traditions, rural and urban, oral and literate, with all of our ethnic diversity, and moreover, in developing our culture in a way that is consistent with this value. Part of our learning, and our "mutual employment," involves learning the cultural ways in which we were raised, the ways in which our communities sustained each other in mutual employment in the recent past. This knowledge is important as we seek out ways of mutual benefit, or at least, non-harm, between our society and the ecologies of which we humans are a part. Wes Jackson speaks of the " 'Mill-Around Theory of Civilization': if we can simply mill around and not expend too many resources, then we won't do much harm to ourselves or the planet. The problem is, how do we learn to quit doing in a manner that uses up the earth's capital?" (Hannum, ed., 155) Furthermore, how can this new (or old, or new-old hybrid) form of doing out-compete, in Western culture as a whole, the standard capitalist rat-race takeover form of doing?

Community-based lifelong learning is in a position to do just this by offering a unique way of accessing and actualizing deeply meaningful, satisfying experiences. These experiences contribute to a sense of wealth that is emotional and experiential rather than material. Experience of, and witness to this kind of wealth is likely to be persuasive for new ways of doing.

On a less dramatic, but more intimate note, it is painful to be bored. Boredom, too, is a stick that beats us out of stuck, reclusive corners. Lifelong learning occurs naturally because we are fundamentally emotionally motivated to seek out meaningful challenges in which we will learn. We cannot control the feeling of boredom. It has a primal power. We can only mute its call with drugs, TV, or some other medium, or we can heed its call to action, drawing us back into an appropriate, meaningful relationship with the world.

This meaningful relationship includes daily work. Psychological distress can result when daily life fails to include meaningful work. This is why the richest, most powerful members of our society are sometimes among the most unhappy. Their financial position has placed them outside of the world of meaningful work, service, and community. In this way, people who never needed to work, and particularly those who haven't found a voluntary substitute for paid work, have some of the same issues as those who are unable to find work. Finding work based on our most genuine interestsand remaining interested in learning how to further develop our own skills is the basis for true, enduring productivity. Hence, the degree to which lifelong learning is present in a community is likely to be a measure of its economic well-being.

A lifelong learning organization can fulfill social needs. Learning always has a social component. While the solitary learner may only seek others for motivation and reflection, the group-oriented learner might be involved in an on-going social process in a highly social team environment. Since self-directed learning depends on the motivation arising within a person in their own freely chosen environment (given what environment is available), the social environment must serve the person, not the other way around. Community-based lifelong learning is dedicated to this proposition.

It is possible for one particular social environment, say, that of a small group that meets for an hour twice a week, to meet the true motivational needs of several different kinds of people, without sacrifice or coercion on anyone's part. Some people are there, perhaps, for service and praxis, the practicing of one's powers, while others are there for curiosity fulfillment and a widening of knowledge, skills, and experience. Meanwhile, all those so engaged are also benefiting from the fulfillment of the social needs identified by Abraham Maslow, as illustrated in his "hierarchy of needs," namely self-esteem, esteem by others, belonging, love, affection, and acceptance. These social needs cannot be fulfilled in the context of a large group or a one-way lecture. These social needs are also frustrated in the context of communication through intermediate forms of technology, be they the interactive television, the telephone, the internet, or the mail. All of these above forms offer valuable opportunities for learning, but none are fulfilling of the genuine social needs of the individual. Community-based lifelong learning offers the individual access to, and membership in, small learning groups that have the potential to combine the fulfillment of social needs with both the material needs that form the base of Maslow's hierarchy and with the moral, or "self-actualization" needs that form the top of the hierarchy- needs such as truth, service, justice, aesthetics, and meaningfulness.

This model of lifelong learning is a sustainable social system because it offers multiple benefits from a few richly interwoven interactions. While it is true that an individual can go to a lecture and then discuss the contents of that lecture with others around him who may not have heard the lecture, it is more desirable if the people he is speaking with also attended the lecture, read some of the same books, and were interested in discussing their own reactions to these experiences at length. A study group achieves these ends like no other arrangement, formal or informal.

Small groups offer the support and encouragement that allows personal transformation to take place, as well as social change. Erich Fromm, in his book, A Revolution of Hope, says that small groups are best able to satisfy

…the need of the individual to work actively with others, to talk, to plan, and act together, to do something which is meaningful beyond the money-making activities of everyday life. To relate in a less alienated fashion than is customary in most relations to others, to make sacrifices…to be open and 'vulnerable,' to be imaginative, to rely on one's own judgment and decision.

(Gross, 112)

Benjamin Franklin, "an example par excellence of what we today call the 'self-educated intellectual,' " and "a patron saint of adult education" established a small discussion group first known as the Leather Apron, and later renamed the Junto, to "further refine his educational competence." (Grattan, 140). This group was limited to twelve members, met weekly on Friday evenings, and mixed social, intellectual, and local political interests. The Junto was the base from which Franklin developed new educational forms: the subscription library, which is explained shortly, the American Philosophical Society (" 'an intercolonial Junto' "), and an academy "…for the education of boys eight to sixteen to be run on fairly novel principles. It got under way in 1749 and lived to become the ancestor of the University of Pennsylvania." (Grattan, 144) It is in the context of small group experiences that I have been most politically and socially active, and have found the strongest sense of direction in my life. Consult your own experience, as I have myself, to determine if small groups are crucial factors in bringing about powerful changes.

Lifelong learning can provide an environment which nourishes the informal, friendly contacts that are the lifeblood of any community. In partnership for the sake of learning a particular skill or area of interest, people may find themselves in close contact with others they might not ordinarily seek out as friends or acquaintances. This kind of contact is the building material of our society, and the soundness of our social structure may be measured in terms of "social capital," as Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone argues. In the United States in the 1970's, a poll showed that two-thirds of Americans "trusted their neighbors," while a similar poll in 1995 showed that only one-third trusted their neighbors. Trust doesn't occur in a vacuum, and a vacuum is exactly what we have more of, these days, in our society. More people are going to the bowling alleys alone, and the time between the strike or the spare and the setting up of the new pins is no longer filled with amicable banter. Moreover, fear is rising, even though

…America is actually safer now than it was twenty-five years ago. I cited the latest FBI violent-crime statistics…Facts didn't matter: people clung to their fear as if clinging to an electric fence. The entire country seemed to be suffering from a kind of patriphobia. What happens, I wondered, when we become afraid of our own country? So that became one thread of the journey: hitchhiking as a metaphor for vulnerability. By standing unarmed by the nation's roads I was using myself as a barometer of goodwill.

(Tim Brookes, "Thumbing Across America"
Vermont Quarterly, Summer 2000)

Ecopsychology insists that we cannot understand the individual separately from his or her environment. Given a context of isolated travel in separate metal boxes (our cars) on a regular and ever more frequent basis, it is understandable that many people today cannot conceive of safety and hitchhiking in the same breath, even people who hitchhiked in the 1970's. This unease is evidence of a social disease, and this model of lifelong learning has the potential to become an important cure.

Social capital is a capacity for meaningful interaction that is built from a broad base of less meaningful interactions. Jane Jacobs speaks knowingly of this in her discussion of the uses of the sidewalk: "Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow…"(Jacobs, 72)

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the tow boys drinking pop on the stoop…(Jacobs, 56)

While Jacobs speaks with distrust of socially engineered "togetherness," the kind of togetherness suggested here is one in which people voluntarily consociate, and personal boundaries are left to custom, propriety, intuition, or the collective experience and judgment of the group. Lifelong learning groups, however they are formed, will undoubtedly further the ongoing process of sustaining the lifeblood of our communities of place, and our "social capital."

The strong presence of a lifelong learning organization can provide an understanding of the community as being a community of learners. This vision of the community, as one of co-learners, encourages a sense of togetherness, in that each person is fundamentally fulfilling the same drive towards satisfaction, meaningfulness, excellence, and service. It also promotes a sense of tolerance, as we must acknowledge that each of us is on a path of development characterized by different stages and cycles.

With the primary, general reasons for lifelong learning clearly in mind, this paper will continue by showing lifelong learning in a historical context, followed by some in-depth examples of life-long learning.

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The History of Lifelong Learning

Understanding the history of a social movement is essential to understanding the movement itself. It is putting a vision into context, knowing that our struggles and our efforts are part of a larger whole. For example, an African-American phrase I used to hear on the street, "What time is it?" expresses this understanding in an integrated cultural shorthand. While there is no authority on exactly what this saying means, in my mind it calls up the relationship of the present to the recent and more distant past for the African-American people as a whole. It brings to mind Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, long years of slavery, the slave ships, Africa, and the world situation, all in a compressed check-in. A historical perspective allows access to a deeper reality, one that is invisible to us in the present. Access to this reality is essential to making sense of the world in the present, especially when the world in the present doesn't always make sense on its own.

In addition, history can be a kind of storytelling that can encourage social change by reminding us of what is possible. The vision of community-based lifelong learning proposed by this paper is possible because elements of it have been achieved in the past, sometimes on a very grand scale. By understanding, believing, and, finally, knowing that history is real, and by learning stories of the past that are useful to us in the present, we are better able to project and initiate a future of our own choosing. Additionally, knowing what didn't work and examining the circumstances of a movement's failure can be instructive towards creating future success, if we know what to look for.

Because lifelong learning is something that happens automatically, in every person's life, all the time (with greater or lesser degrees of success), it is necessary to focus on the history of collective efforts to improve our learning capacities. Within this, I will be focusing primarily on the history of the United States. Following a general overview of this history, I will return to investigate four specific organizations: the Lyceum, the Danish Folk School, the Labor movement's efforts towards worker's education, and the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement, which later became Burlington College.

Let us begin at the beginning. Generalized lifelong learning is as old as the human race itself, and probably older than that, as even animals can be observed in the process of learning. For the hunter or gatherer, living by his or her wits in an uncontrollable environment, being able to absorb relevant new information and integrate that into new forms of behavior was a life-sustaining skill.

The history of the institutionalization, or group facilitation, of self-directed learning goes back at least as far as the tradition, in Greece, of teachers holding long, rambling outdoor gatherings. Their followers, or students, all attended without the structure of degrees, accreditation, and the like. The gatherings held by Pythagoras and the legendary Socrates are notable examples of this form of learning. In fact, Socrates held that walking was essential to his thinking and communicating abilities, and his was called a peripatetic school. In Paris, France, students studying the classics, Greek, and Latin, formed, on their own initiative, a collective system of sharing their teachers with each other, which they called "all of us," or "universitas." This cooperative, student-led effort was the origin of the first university.

In the United States, free public schooling for all children was a hard-fought battle in the not very distant past. During the emergence of this new idea, "[t]here are in American magazines and newspapers from 1815 to 1830 plenty of horrified outcries over the revolutionary, poisonous idea…" Those crying out against it had the most to lose, since, "…if everybody is allowed to get an education, possibly everybody, even the educated, will have to work." (Fisher, 6,7) The "education" referred to by Fisher is reading, writing, and arithmetic. While there are many forms of learning, reading, writing and arithmetic do open up worlds that would otherwise be totally unavailable to people, and they facilitate the ability to communicate and analyze ideas in ways that can be of benefit to ongoing learning in almost any topic.

John Taylor Gatto, an advocate for school choice today, argued in a lecture some years ago, that prior to compulsory schooling, the literacy rate in places like Massachusetts was actually higher than it is today. It is true that it was a widespread public value, especially in New England, to instruct the young in reading and writing. But concern over those young people failing to receive these benefits resulted in a Massachusetts law as early as 1642, which was elaborated further in 1647. Parents, masters (of apprentices) and towns of one hundred or more householders were subject to fines if they failed in their responsibilities. (Knowles, 12)

The advocates of free education for all in the early nineteenth century were concerned, first and foremost, with the rights of each young person to the fullest fruits of our civilization, and it was only after this has been safely achieved as a basic premise, that, over a century later, it has become reasonable for those such as Gatto to agitate for better, less factory-like forms of providing these rights of literacy. But the literacy provided to our children does not actually confer upon them the status of "Educated," as Dorothy Canfield Fisher points out so spiritedly in her book Why Stop Learning?, just as timely today as it was in 1927. Literacy merely provides the framework and some of the tools with which a person may begin to engage in the lifelong pursuit of an education. Hence, graduation ceremonies are called "Commencement Day"- the beginning day.

In 1732, Benjamin Franklin, in consort with a small group in Boston, began the first popularly available library, but it was not open to the public as a whole- it was a "subscription library." For a small annual membership fee, one had access to secular and non-academic books that would have been too costly for the average individual to purchase in any quantity. The churches and the temples of academia associated with them kept their dusty volumes in their catacombs, far from the reaches of the masses. In the course of two generations, subscription libraries were taken for granted, just as libraries are today.

In 1835, not long after the battle for literacy for all children was resolved, the concept of free libraries for all was first brought forth into action, and fell into the black hole of bureaucratic failure. It was attempted statewide in New York, with an abundance of money for the times, nearly a quarter of a million dollars. But it was administered by the schools, rather than the public at large, and the books never made it off the shelves. In 1847, a committee of the City of Boston, formed to "consider and report what acknowledgment and return should be made to the City of Paris for its gift of books, and to provide a place for same." (Fisher, 47) This gift of books, fifty in all, was made due to the public-spirited efforts of a Frenchman named Vattemare, who "advocated up and down Canada and the United States in a series of mass meetings, where he spoke with much windy Rights-of-Man rhetoric on the glorious possibilities of the human race if given half a chance." (Fisher, 46) He proposed an international exchange of books, and this small success between Paris and Boston set the boulder rolling. The Boston committee was cautious: "The Committee do not recommend that the City should make any appropriation for the purchase of books, or hold out any encouragement that it will be done hereafter. The Committee only propose that the City should receive and take care of any volumes which may be contributed for that purpose." In the following year, the Massachusetts Legislature took the bull by the horns, enabling Boston to tax itself for the maintenance of a free public library. A generation later, 1876 saw the first meeting of the American Library Association. In the next fifty years, libraries reached nearly every town and city, and became an unquestionable assumption in the public mind, their recent origins forgotten.

The history of lifelong learning includes the quick rise of the correspondence schools, which originally developed around the turn of the century, the first such school opening in 1891 with 115 students. By 1927, there were 2 million students in such schools, "four times the number of all the students enrolled in all the colleges, universities, and professional schools in the United States." (Fisher, 32) And the tuitions paid, some 70 million dollars at that time, was equivalent to the combined school budgets of 14 states. This topsy-turvy field arose, at least initially, in order to help adults already involved with family and work commitments to learn how to make use of the changing technologies of the time, as industrialization meant that the workers had to understand greater measures of electrical and mechanical engineering than ever before. Quickly, this expanded into business training, as this world was also growing more complex and fast-paced. The correspondence schools soon became notorious, too, for giving very little good instruction and taking a lot of money instead- many of them were little more than corrupt con games. The universities responded, sluggishly, by developing extension programs, the most notable remnants of which are the agricultural extension services of universities.

Another significant development in the history of lifelong learning is the Women's Clubs movement, which grew out of the need for women to share in, and support, each other's human development. Isolated in the home, craving meaningful lives, these middle-class women sought out education not for personal profit or survival, but for fulfillment. Originating in the late nineteenth century, by the mid 1920's they were a group of three million. This movement is notable in that there were no leaders urging the group on- it was a spontaneous wildfire, jumping from one town to the next, across the country. In 1887, there was the first meeting of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, 21 years after the date of the first Women's Club. Fisher gives us a vivid mental picture of her estimation of the determined, unworldly delegate to that convention, a true citizen leader: "…Mother tremulous with excitement, repeating under her breath the newly learned Parliamentary rules of order, was on the railway train, all alone, leaving her family behind her for an eternity of three or four days, going to New York. …There were sixty-one delegates at this first meeting and it is a safe guess that few of them had ever been away from home before, except on a family errand." (Fisher, 98) These Clubs were learning for the satisfaction of self-improvement, and they learned not only history and literature, but music, drama, art, and geography. Each Club set its own agenda, and each Club furnished and maintained its own building, with rooms for meeting and performing, with its own funds.

Museums offer a kind of learning that supplements and parallels what libraries offer. The museum offers actual, physical experiences of artifacts, be they natural, historical, or artistic. As there are many different ways of learning, and at least seven different kinds of "intelligence," the museum fulfills many needs that the library cannot. Museums, like libraries, have gone through a popularization (beginning with the Hamburg Museum in 1885), and are now available to anyone interested, for free or a small fee.

Lifelong learning as a collective effort found new forms in the 1970's with the growth of free universities and networks of every kind, usually city-based. Now, with the other elements in place- widespread literacy, and free public libraries- people were taking the next step in empowered living and human/community development. This movement is documented in the book, The Lifelong Learner, by Ronald Gross (1977), at what may have been its high tide. Nearly every state in the nation had an "Everybody's School," (West Lebanon, New Hampshire), a "Skills Exchange," an "Experimental College," or a "Real University of the Streets," (these three from New York City). My present analysis of the development of this movement, which I hope to refine further, is that, as the cost of living relative to the average wage rose through the seventies (and continues to rise today: see America: What Went Wrong? by Bartlett and Steele for statistical validation) the breathing space necessary (Maslow's hierarchy of needs, again) for such a spirited way of living declined markedly for a critical percentage of the people who might have been drawn towards pursing lifelong learning as a deliberate, conscious, collectively supported endeavor. Just learning enough to stay competitive in the job market has become more than enough work for many potential lifelong learners.

In more recent times, community colleges have been on the rise, sometimes affiliated with traditional colleges and universities, but often, at least at first, not involving the disbursement of credits for satisfactory completion of courses. If someone wanted to teach a course, and enough people wanted to take that course, the course would be offered. Many of these community colleges have evolved to form a bridge between adult learners and continuing study involving accreditation and career development. While a very important niche to fill, this evolution has left the original purpose of lifelong learning for its own sake underserved.

The internet is a new and unprecedented occasion in human development and social organization. It presents us with a wealth of information and a vast potential for connectivity- one that surpasses, we are beginning to find, our abilities. We just don't have the time to maintain all these potential connections. Moreover, as efficient as the internet can be in helping us find information, it isn't an efficient use of our time, from a holistic point of view. We can only sit, view the screen, and type. This is why people who use the computer extensively, even to communicate with people, report feelings of loneliness. We are not getting a host of physical and emotional needs met in the environment of on-line computer use. The potential for lifelong learning with the internet is vast, but we are also physical, social beings. For lifelong learning to really serve the wholeness of human development, for it to be soft and broad, and not just like a laser beam in its intensity, we need a community of learners on our home grounds. In addition, learning needs to be embodied in praxis for its fulfillment. Learning for its own sake only goes so far. We need to have a social, tangible infrastructure that supports this practical use of our developing knowledge and power. Cyberspace must be grounded in physical space, just as "Thinking Globally" must be grounded in "Acting Locally."

This paper addresses the broad fields of adult education, popular education, and lifelong learning in an effort to show the social and historical context for the proposed community-based lifelong learning centers. The examples I've explored in this paper are far from an exhaustive listing. Much has happened in the past that I have not been able to document, and there are exciting efforts underway today (see Creating Learning Communities, edited by Ron Miller, particularly "Learning to Become: Creating Evolutionary Learning Community through Evolutionary Systems Design," Kathia C. and Alexander Laszlo, and "Carrying on Despite the Violent Twentieth Century: A Tenacious History of People's Education," Chris Spicer; also Galbraith, DeArrudah, and Heany) that have not been within the scope of this paper. In addition, while the persistent efforts of educational reformers, theorists, social critics, and philosophers provided much of the language, direction, and vision of this paper, they are not addressed directly here. Among these, some of the most influential are John Dewey, Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, and Ivan Illich.

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The Lyceum Movement

The Historical Foundations of the American Lyceum
In an article appearing in the October 1826 issue of the American Journal of Education, Josiah Holbrook proposed a "Society for Mutual Education." This initial article laid the groundwork of what was to become the lyceum movement, although the word "lyceum" only came into use later:

I take the liberty to submit for your consideration a few articles as regulations for associations for mutual instruction in the sciences, and in useful knowledge generally…It seems to me that if associations…could once be started in our villages, and upon a general plan, they would increase with great rapidity, and do more for the general diffusion of knowledge, and for raising the moral and intellectual taste of our countrymen, than any other expedient which can possibly be devised.

(Bode, 12)

Josiah Holbrook was able to take this role of promoting mutual education because of his own experiences and interests, the influence of the newly arising Mechanics' Institutes in Britain, and a social environment that was ready and welcoming of the idea, especially in New England at the time. The publisher of the American Journal of Education, William Russell, had just begun the journal at the beginning of that same year, with the goal of reaching not just teachers, but "to benefit the WHOLE COMMUNITY." Russell was born and raised, in fact, in Glasgow, Scotland, which is where the first Mechanic' Institute arose, in 1800, and founded as the independent Glasgow Mechanics' Institution in 1823. Russell was aware of the potential of the Mechanics' Institutes: "In this era of great and rapid revolutions in society," he wrote in his "Address" to the reader in the January 1826 issue, "nothing has yet appeared which seems likely to be attended with more extensive and lasting effects than the formation of mechanics' institutions…"(Bode, 11) British glassblowers, woodworkers, and blacksmiths made up the ranks of the mechanics' institutes, and they organized themselves to apply scientific knowledge to their crafts. In London in 1824, "1000 workmen were enrolled at twenty shillings a head" in courses on "mechanics, chemistry, geometry, hydrostatics…the application of chemistry to the arts, astronomy, electricity, and …the French language."(Bode, 6) This keen interest in practical knowledge was to overflow beyond scientific knowledge and include philosophy, history, and culture as well.

Josiah Holbrook grew up in a prosperous Connecticut farming household. He attended Yale College, at the age of eighteen, in 1806. Holbrook was remembered by his classmates for his intense interest in science; he was an assistant to the scientific luminary of the time, Benjamin Silliman. After graduating, Holbrook tried his hand at farming, but was dissatisfied. He was drawn instead to a study of the geology of his region of Connecticut. Holbrook seems to have been struggling for a way to communicate his love of science to his community. He began a "manual labor school, which he seems to have run badly, but he later founded another which- in its combination of labor and simple scientific learning- was a true ancestor of the lyceum seminary."(Bode, 8) He abandoned his relationship with this second school in the fall of 1825, in order to pursue his new career, the establishing of lyceums.

Josiah Holbrook had given lectures on various areas of science now and then throughout the New England towns and villages, and based on his experiences, he knew where to start with his evangelism for his "Society for Mutual Education." Worcester County had a strong yeomanry, based in agriculture and manufacturing, and these were the kind of people most likely to benefit from Holbrook's practical proposals. Holbrook introduced his idea to a gathering of about forty farmers and mechanics in Millbury, Massachusetts one evening in early November, 1826. These mechanics were skilled workers, coming that evening from small factories that produced guns, broadcloth, harness leather, ammunition, morocco linings, and iron plates and bars. The men responded to Holbrook's presentation by quickly organizing themselves as the first lyceum. By the 22nd of November, the Worcester County newspaper, the National Aegis, reports that Holbrook "has established in many of the towns in our county, associations for mutual instruction and information in the arts and sciences. One of these associations is to be established in each town." (Bode, 14)

Every town would have its own lyceum, and the purpose of the group was elaborated as follows:

[to] improve the conversation within the town…to introduce good topics into the daily intercourse of families, neighbors and friends; to direct the amusements of the community by making the weekly exercises of the Lyceum both instructive and enjoyable; to help young people save money by keeping them away from dancing masters and military exercises…to call into use neglected libraries and to give occasion for the establishing of new ones; to provide a seminary for teachers; to encourage and assist existing academies; to raise the character of existing district schools, to compile data for town histories, to make town maps, to make agricultural and geological surveys, to begin a state collection of minerals.

(Fisher, 152)

The lyceum described above sounds like an arts council, a board of education, a PTO, a town planning office, and a soils conservation office, except there was to be one in each town, and it was to be incorporated into the daily fabric of the community's life- in the conversations among "families, neighbors, and friends." While this at first sounds quaint, I believe it actually reflects wisdom, in that it is focusing on the ongoing process of the intellectual life of the community, ephemeral as these spoken words might be. The fact that most of the objectives outlined above are still pursued, though in fragmented, specialized (and sometimes highly developed) forms, merely brings to the fore the question of how to integrate the benefits of specialization in the interest of coherence. I discuss this further in a concluding section.

Analysis

With the roots of the lyceum clearly defined, I will now turn to examining this organization and movement in terms of the questions outlined in the introduction. These are questions about power, money, the reasons people come together to learn, the ways in which learning was facilitated, the relationship between time spent learning and other responsibilities, and the values implicit in the educational and social forms that transmit a vision of society, and the individual's place in it.

Power

Each town lyceum elected its own officers, which included a president, vice president, treasurer, and secretary, plus five curators. These curators ended up with considerable power over the educational direction of the organization, because in addition to caring for the educational materials of the lyceum, they were also assigned the task of choosing the lecturers. (Bode, 13) This basic format, proposed by Holbrook, seems to have been adopted generally by all the lyceums. I have not been able to determine from the available sources how often the officers were elected, or what decisions were made by this executive committee and which were left to the assembly as a whole. The town lyceums were fairly small; for instance, even Worcester, at the epicenter of the lyceum movement, had an average of around 200 members through its first decade. (Bode, 15) Membership was accessible at the rate of one dollar a year, or ten dollars for a lifetime membership- these were fees suggested by Holbrook in the early days. This was an affordable fee, " 'a trifling sum,' " and made it possible for members of "various classes" to attend. (Bode, 14) The small size and accessibility, combined with similar backgrounds and a shared purpose helped keep leaders and membership in a state of reciprocity.

Money

The annual dues of a dollar or two was the norm for the first decade (Bode, 186). As lectures became a more popular function of the lyceums, the dues were often considered as offering benefits outside the lecture series, in which case members and non-members alike paid 25 cents per lecture, generally, with seasons' tickets priced between one and two and a half dollars. Family tickets were also offered, ranging from $3 in Portland, Maine, to $8 in New Orleans, which offered an exceptional forty lectures for the 1850-51 season (Bode, 188).

The money was spent initially on purchasing a set of scientific instruments and educational apparatus that was sold, incidentally, by Holbrook himself. A complete set of educational tools included books, geological specimens, an "arithmometer with 144 balls" (an abacus?), a globe, and an orrery. An orrery was a clock-like mechanism that illustrated the tides, the change of seasons, eclipses, "cause of the earth being flattened at the poles," and the moon's orbit around the earth. Devices illustrating chemical properties, and mechanical engineering principles were also commonly purchased Since schools at the time were focused on the "three R's," opportunities to explore scientific principles were embraced by the townspeople. . The total set cost about $75, but small lyceums could buy a simpler package (which was also recommended for elementary schools) for just $10.

The other main cost to the town lyceum was providing the space for meetings and lectures. Hall rent was between 5 to 20 dollars a season, though it was sometimes much greater or free of charge. (Bode, 187) If a town lyceum became confident enough to build, a lyceum hall suited to the purpose would cost about a thousand dollars- far more feasible, financially, in those days than in these. One of the most famous lyceums, the Salem Lyceum, built its hall in 1831 at just over $3,000, with semicircular tiers of seating 700 people. Most lyceums, however, rented, and "…understandably, as cheaply as possible." (Bode, 188)

Lecturers became more of an expense to the lyceums as tastes began to favor the more notable intellectuals of the day over the local talent. Concord, for example, did not pay lecturers' fees in the 1830's, but provided compensation for the cost of travel ($33.88 in 1833), and only half of its lecturers were from outside the area. (Bode, 190) Concord though, was exceptional in the quality of its local talent, being able to call upon Emerson, Thoreau, and others. Salem, on the other hand, regularly paid fees to its lecturers, amounting to about $15 per lecturer in 1841. (Bode, 191) The Midwest, due to competition for distant New England and British lecturers, paid ever-higher fees, breaking all previous records with William Makepeace Thackeray's $200 per lecture fees in the latter half of the lyceum era. (Bode, 199)

Generally, the lyceums were affordable to most people in the community. If the lyceum was prosperous or ambitious, the group could pursue more costly options, such as more extensive scientific apparatus, a building of their own, or more frequent out-of-town lecturers, but these were choices that each lyceum dealt with differently. Some of the Midwestern lyceums felt compelled to hire out-of-town lecturers in order to maintain a large enough audience to cover costs, but generally these choices were voluntary and based on the ability of the local lyceum to take on added costs.

Motivation

Initially, people were motivated by curiosity and a desire for self-improvement. The self-improvement applied to one's ability to gather useful knowledge about the practical arts and sciences, and quickly also began to apply more generally to the formation of personal character and the development of virtue. But this self-improvement gradually gave way, over three decades, to the expectation of being entertained at lectures.

Methods

The primary method of the lyceum was mutual instruction, generally in the form of the lecture. The first lecture of a lyceum's season often introduced the concept of the lyceum itself, explaining the lyceum's purposes and methods generally. At the first meeting of the New Bedford Lyceum, on December 18, 1828, Thomas Greene spoke about the method of mutual instruction and its substantial advantages. This speech is summarized by Carl Bode, as follows:

A richly rewarding exchange of knowledge…Every member is an authority on something…the teaching facilities should be the community itself and so should lead to a better understanding of New Bedford…But the greatest advantages are moral and fraternal rather than intellectual… From all the divisions, ranks and classes of society, we are to meet…to instruct and be instructed. While we mingle together in these pursuits…we shall remove many of the prejudices which ignorance and partial acquaintance with each other fostered.

(Bode, 21)

Other methods were experimentation and observation, particularly with the scientific equipment that each lyceum provided, plus application of this knowledge in practice, in the workshop, the farm, or the quarry. Books and scholarly and trade journals supported academic, scientific, and trade experimentation and development.

Time

The lyceum, having originated in New England, functioned on a seasonal basis, with often one evening event each week throughout the winter, and very little activity in the busier summer months. It was well adapted to the available time and energy of the common person in those times.

Vision

The vision that the lyceum movement held for society was egalitarian and pro-active. The lyceum movement functioned on the basis of self-improvement and mutual education, so it was both self-help oriented and co-operative. It allied strongly with the simple, communal forms of towns and cities and sought to build on and improve what was already present, without great effort or expense. Its vision of equal opportunity for all to develop their moral and technical capacities was both simple and far-reaching.

The Evolution of the Lyceum

Holbrook outlined and elaborated his vision of the lyceum through several versions of a pamphlet, as well as several more articles. Each town lyceum was to send delegates twice a year to a county convention, which in turn appointed representatives to a state organization. The state representatives, in turn, were to appoint members to the National American Lyceum. Furthermore, Holbrook envisioned an International Lyceum with fifty-two vice-presidents distinguished in science, philosophy and public affairs, chosen from every country in the world. A simple organizational hierarchy, from the local to the global, was logically envisioned. The term hierarchy suggests domination from above, but this was a group "voluntarily united for study and social betterment." Moreover, as we look at the way the organization functioned, the upper tiers of structure acted only in coordinating roles, supporting but never directing the basic work of the local chapters.

The international lyceum never came to be, but the national lyceum came into being in 1831 and continued to meet for eight years. The national lyceum's purpose was to promote the movement generally, and to facilitate the diffusion of knowledge by providing "numerous cheap and practical tracts on the sciences, the arts, biography, history, etc. to be circulated by the branch lyceums, schools, academies, taverns, steamboats, and private families…" (Fisher, 153) The national lyceum ended up devoting its principal energies towards advocating for free elementary education, with considerable effect towards this cause. The state lyceums worked towards goals such as "the standardization of books and instruction in public schools, the fostering of 'Infant schools and Agricultural Seminaries so that there might be opportunities for a liberal, a practical and an economical education, by the aid of the plow, the hoe, the turning lathe, the plane and the saw.'"(Fisher, 153)

By 1828, nearly 100 other lyceums had organized themselves, and by 1832 nearly a thousand; by 1834 nearly 3000 scattered from Boston to Detroit, from Maine to Florida. The lyceums prospered best where roadways and rail afforded convenient travel for visiting lecturers, where populations were dense enough to facilitate weekly meetings, and where literacy and middle class populations were strongest. In areas such as the South and the Frontier, lack of sufficient roads, literacy, density, and social equity proved inhospitable to the spread of the lyceum movement; only in the larger towns of the South and Midwest did the lyceum last long. Although the lyceum ceased functioning at the national level in 1840, the town lyceums, especially in New England, continued to thrive.

The lyceums gradually began to shift in their emphasis away from the most literal and direct forms of mutual education and towards an ever-increasing reliance on outside intellectual expertise, in the form of hired lecturers. In the mid 1840's, lecturers included such intellectual luminaries as Lowell, Thoreau, Hale, Beecher, Holmes, Greeley, Dickens, Thackeray, and Emerson. Almost all of Emerson's essays were written for delivery on the lyceum platform. This relationship between intellectuals like Emerson and a tangible, active audience exerted considerable influence on the final written product, mostly for the better.

In fact, Carl Bode notes "…that the lyceum in the sense of a local, public, adult-education movement was finished by about 1840…the cabinet of curiosities, the interchange of information among neighbors, and the close connection with the public elementary-school movement were largely gone." (Bode, 250) While many see the lyceum movement as extending until the Civil War, through its often vibrant and well-attended lecture series, I hold that its value as an example to the purposes advanced here ends also around 1840, when the lectures dominated all other activity.

Why did this shift in emphasis drift away from the community itself to the intellectual hotshots of the times? What happened to Josiah Holbrook's visions of mutual education? It was so clearly expressed by Thomas Greene, above: "…Every member is an authority on something…the teaching facilities should be the community itself…But the greatest advantages are moral and fraternal…" Apparently, the people chose the challenge and stimulation of the better-known speakers over their home-grown talent. The excellence of specialization prevailed over the virtue of generalism and the integrative synchronicities of localism. I will discuss this further in a concluding section.

In addition, Hartley Grattan, author of In Quest of Knowledge, suggests that when the lyceum's cause for public education was largely won, the organization lost its vitality and its focus as a community based institution.

To finish the lyceum story, Fisher reports that, as the Civil war neared, the lyceums "…became political rather than literary in tone, but that was natural considering the temper of the times. At least they continued to reflect what their members really cared about." But even lecturing was losing its educational value, as lectures degenerated into propaganda and posturing in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. Instead of exploring and learning about an issue, people were forced to take a stand.

Following the Civil War, the lyceums were sometimes resurrected in name, and continued the form of the lecture at an open public meeting, on a winter schedule, but they did not maintain a continuous weekly town-based form of meeting. There is a general agreement that the lyceum movement ended with the Civil War. These new "lyceums" were lecture circuits organized by for-profit enterprises. They did not consider what a particular town thought most relevant to its issues, but rather packaged what was most likely to sell the most tickets in all of the venues as a whole. This was the unfortunate realization of a trend, which had begun long before the Civil War, of favoring entertainment over knowledge and self-development. The original town lyceum had strong elements of self-determination and self-education that these new lecture-circuit businesses lacked entirely.

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Danish Folk Schools

The Historical Foundations of the Danish Folk Schools

Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the founder of the Danish folk school, arrived at the idea through personal and transformative experience. "As a young man, Grundtvig suffered from horrible depressions, interrupted with manic writing sessions, where he would work for days almost without eating or sleeping." Grundtvig was a Christian theologian, and the writing he produced initially argued that life was inconsequential before the vast world of the after-life, which was a fairly traditional view at the time. His perspective was transformed by his discovery of a true learning community at Trinity College, in England, between 1829 and 1831. Working, eating, playing and debating with teachers and students put Grundtvig at ease in a way he had never before known. Respect between teachers and students was mutual. He visited Trinity College three times in those three years. He reversed his theological opinions, now holding that Christianity should not be about freeing people from this world, but about finding meaning in life itself through being in community with other people.

Grundtvig applied this discovery of the value of community to education, because, although a theologian by training, he had been contemplating the fate of the Danish people for several years. His diaries and publications show that from the beginning of the 19th century he had worked with the question of what could be done for the Danish people, especially the peasants, and especially in the area of education. The commoner, he felt, must have an opportunity of getting a meaningful education.

During the next several years, he produced several different versions of what his newly discovered conception of life might mean to the Danish people. The central underlying themes in these writings were equality, and the importance of "the living word," that is, the oral tradition above the written one. The living word equalizes people, it is accessible to all. What he proposed was a popular form of adult education:

Now I have my eye on something that unfortunately would be completely new among us, namely an institution of Enlightenment, where the People could gradually wake to self-awareness, and where the leaders would learn just as much from the youth as the youth from them, a kind of living interaction and mutual instruction, through which a bridge could be laid over the yawning abyss that hierarchy, aristocracy, latinery and social ambition have built for the people on the one side, and its leaders and teachers, with a handful of so-called educated and enlightened ones on the other side. If this yawning abyss is not bridged, then all of our middle class society and all possibilities for peaceful, progressive development must soon fall into its precipice.

(Danish Folk Schools, "Grundtvig and the Social Setting" page)

The first Danish folk school was opened in 1844. In the early days of the school, the oral tradition was so strong that students were forbidden to take notes while the teacher was speaking. These schools were a hearty, robust mix, with teachers and students learning, doing the chores of the place side by side, talking, and playing, celebrating together: "Think of talking easily and naturally with a group of normal, quiet-minded, self-supporting human beings, about literature, history, science, mathematics and art, at table, and in long intimate evenings before the fire, of winter evenings! Think of singing, in harmony, fine old folk songs, on your way to the skating pond!…How many months of such a life have you known, American reader?" (Fisher, 269) The Danish folk school has been a powerful and positive force in Danish society. A Danish institution describes it this way:

For a Dane, folkehøjskole (follka-hoy-skoale) [literally "folk high school"] signifies both a historical movement and a modern educational institution for life-long popular education and learning. The folkehøjskole enlightens people and trains for democracy, and it probably signifies the single most original contribution Denmark has made to international thinking about popular education.

(Danish Folk Schools, "Grundtvig and the Social Setting")

Analysis

Now that we have a general understanding of what the Danish folk school was and is (there are about 90 folk schools existing today in Denmark, and they attract young people from all over Europe), let us turn to the general questions of power, money, time, and purpose that we are asking of each of these examples of community-based lifelong learning. The analysis used here will apply to the original historic conception of the Danish folk school, though in many cases it appears that modern conditions remain true to the forms of the past.

Power

Other than making the initial choice of selecting a school, there is no indication that students had any control over the content of the curriculum. But without the threat of standardized examinations looming, students were free to focus on what interested them most in the subjects that were presented. They could engage in exploration and internalization of these subjects without having to show anyone a product or result. Though students were encouraged by the learning community to grow, students were accountable primarily to themselves alone. This freedom was a kind of power. In addition, the members of the local community, the town in which the school was located, were represented on the board of the school, facilitating community input into the school's affairs, and a call to accountability by the school for the town.

Money

Today, the folk schools are free adult boarding schools. In the recent past, the Danish folk schools were not publicly funded programs. The fact that working-class people would pay to attend these schools for three to six months at a time is evidence of their success. During the years the Danish folk schools weren't publicly funded, they were affordable. Sweden began copying the Danish example in the early 1900's, but "[t]he students were the cherished sons and daughters of well-to-do farmers, who were obliged to make neither effort nor sacrifice to give a year to the delightful folk-high-school life." (Fisher, 270) Consequently, the schools did not possess the same vitality and diversity of their Danish neighbors.

Because the students would work with the teachers on the daily tasks of food preparation, cleaning, and so on (often the work included farming chores as well), the expenses of the schools were kept to a minimum. This arrangement had the additional benefit of bringing students and teachers together for more informal and personal discussion, in which their feelings and ideas could more easily mix with the literature and the history that they were studying.

Motivation

In the first years, students were invited to the folk school to learn about their nation as an ethnic and cultural community, to establish the basis for deeper religious convictions (Grundtvig eventually became Bishop), and to develop agricultural and vocational skills. Within a decade of the founding of the first school, the emphasis had shifted away from the vocational practicalities and more fully on national history and literature, particularly poetry. Students came for self-improvement and for a chance to share with their fellow Danes a time of study, reflection, conversation, and celebration. Today, their reasons are much the same:

"The high school is a breathing-space in life. It is life-affirming to be here - you wake up and blossom. You get a lot of new ideas to work with, and you gain friends and experiences to build on."

"What is so impressive about the high schools is that people often come for a "negative" reason like unemployment, a sense of emptiness, uncertainty and the like - and then blossom and grow and develop."

(Danish Ministry of Education, web page)

Methods

The primary method of learning was interactive and oral. Students learned from discussion, from sharing their true perspectives and feelings on questions of national identity, social justice, and what makes for a meaningful life. Grundtvig was clear that the real and deepest truths do not come from rote study of classroom texts. According to him, "enlightenment of life," or "livsoplysning," which is the ultimate goal of this education, can only be taught by life itself. By blending living with learning in a communal setting, enlightenment, which enables people to "distinguish light from darkness, truth from lies, and the cause of death from that of life," is invited into the school setting (Danish Folk Schools, "Life Education" page).

Time

Students originally spent six months in the winter (for young men) or three months in the summer (for young women) at the school. As a residency, all of the student's time was available for learning, and this time was not in competition with other demands. Today, programs are more flexible, offering stays from one week to seven months.

Vision

The movement's vision for society was and is profoundly democratic and egalitarian. Grundtvig created the word 'folkelighed.' Translated literally, it means "peopleishness," and is used to convey an egalitarian spirit, an honoring of ethnic identity, and a sense of the uneducated commoner, the simple peasant, as the pure and true bearer of humanity and culture. This vision translated into cooperative business practices and agricultural excellence. Above and beyond the agricultural and business successes of the Danes, they have richer lives: "…a Danish working-man of my acquaintance…had recently gone back to Denmark for a visit to old friends. 'My gracious!' he said earnestly and wistfully, 'it seemed awful good to be where the folks talk.' " (Fisher, 270) This vision of the natural dignity of the ordinary person and their abilities has stood the test of time, and serves Denmark, Europe, and the world as a whole, through example and inspiration.

The Evolution of the Danish Folk School

Twenty years after the establishment of the first Danish folk schools, the war of 1864 brought defeat to the Danes, resulting in the loss of the fertile provinces of Schleswig and Holstein. The Danish people found that, without these rich farmlands, their greatest remaining assets were themselves. At this point, the Danish folk schools rose to the challenge and found a prominent place in the life of the country. In ten years almost 50 new folk schools were established. In every case, the local citizens organized these schools themselves, and the schools and the communities that founded them have maintained a close relationship through cultural events and local community membership on the schools' boards.

The loss of natural resources available to the Danish people due to the loss of territory to Prussia is a situation now faced by all of humanity, though not through loss of territory. Rather, there is less room and there are less resources available per person, and so we are in the same situation, though one that is evolving gradually, that the Danes found themselves in rather abruptly. The academic community left their desks and addressed themselves to the problems at hand. How could agriculture take place on the remaining sandy soil of the Danish heath-lands? How could agricultural organization and cooperative business methods be improved? These efforts led to a wider realization: that for long-term success, the Danish people themselves needed a higher level of knowledge and social skill, and the confidence these engender.

By the 1920's, writes Fisher, "The Danes…are now quite universally acknowledged to be 'the most widely cultured nation of Europe'; the nation where the highest level of scientific agriculture exists; certainly the people who have developed to the highest degree the difficult ability to act together harmoniously. Their famous system of cooperative action in farming and selling has been mystifyingly successful to their rivals, who with infinitely better climate and soil have seen themselves left far behind…" The Danish folk schools were an important part of the Danes' solutions to their challenges.

A third of the rural population of Denmark attended such schools in the 1920's. According to the Danish government today, one percent of the population, or 50,000 Danes, attend the schools each year. (Danish Folk Schools, "The Courses" page) The folk high school in recent times has been challenged by demands from many quarters, but it has chosen a course that has allowed it to maintain its identity. According to The Danish Ministry of Education:

In the times of crisis and during the creation of the Danish welfare state after the Second World War…and in the new crises of the past twenty years, attitudes to the folk high school have pulled in two different directions. Some have wanted the folk high schools to provide more information and proper education - qualifying education, so that the unemployed and socially disadvantaged, with diplomas in their hands, can carve themselves a place in society after their stay at the high school. Others have wanted the folk high schools to function in these times as social institutions along the lines of treatment centres with therapy, alcohol detoxification and crisis aid of all kinds.

(Danish Ministry of Education)

Today, with Europeans gradually moving toward unification, some in the Danish folk school movement have shown concern for a Europe that appears as if it will be run by corporate executives and remote political elites, because, as one participant at a folk-school initiated conference said, "The problem with Europe…is that there [are] no Europeans." Europeans identify first with their own ethnicity and nationality, and secondly, if at all, with Europe as a whole. This leaves a vacuum in which the politicians and others with economic stakes in the unification process are able to proceed with little accountability. Rather than isolate themselves from this looming problem, Danish folk school supporters have joined forces with students from other nations who have participated in the Danish folk schools. These non-Danish students have formed an Association for Community Colleges, to promote the Danish folk school model and its value in education for citizenship in their own countries.

The folk school model of the Danes was adopted by just two schools in the United States, both of which were founded within seven years of each other in the 1920's and 30's. The John C. Campbell Folk School was founded in 1925 in Brasstown, North Carolina by Olive Campbell, named after her departed husband. Olive traveled to Denmark after hearing about Danish folk schools from an associate in the education field. She was interested in uniting what she felt was a fragmented Appalachian culture. Through the folk school, Campbell sought to "enrich the content of rural life, to build up an enlightened and enlivened citizenship, which will realize of its own initiative, a full and satisfactory rural life and then inspire a community life...satisfying to the young people of the county." (Whisnant, 139) Campbell sought, and received, some financial assistance from the local community. In return, she organized a cooperative creamery that survived the Depression and lasted into the 1940's. The school also promoted experimentation in agriculture, and honored and protected the native Appalachian crafts of wood carving, basketry, and weaving. But the economy tightened, and the school failed to adapt in keeping with its original purpose. While still a school focusing on the traditional arts and crafts of its Appalachian region, the school no longer directly serves the true keepers of these traditions, because its costs have become affordable only to the middle and upper classes, far beyond the reach of natives living simply on the land.

Myles Horton established the Highlander Folk School out of a concern for social justice. He learned about the Danish folk school from two Danish ministers in Chicago, and traveled to Denmark to see the schools for himself. While there, he was inspired by the democratic aspects of the social style of learning, particularly by the respect and equality between teachers and students. He retuned to the States and founded the Highlander Folk School in the mountains of Tennessee in 1932. In 1934, the school had eighteen residential students, but they were all union members from distant places. While the school became an important training center for workers' education, it lacked the relationship with the local community and the celebration of common folk culture that the Danish schools achieved so well. Gradually, partly due to labor infighting, the school changed its focus to civil rights for African-Americans. The school was an important force in bringing about the Civil Rights movement; its story is told in the book, Unearthing Seeds of Fire. More recently, the school, now a "Research and Training Center," has brought its focus to bear more on local problems, such as strip mining, public school reform, land ownership, and toxic waste.

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Workers' Education

I firmly believe in the dignity of manual work, having practiced masonry and carpentry for the past five years, and I see the essential value of continual career development in any occupation, working-class included. However, that is not the type of workers' education I will be exploring here. Instead, I will be studying the history of what has been called "class education," which is the efforts of the labor movement and other radical reformers to give certain social and analytical tools to the people who might be the most motivated to use them.

History, they say, is told by the winners. Public schooling, and especially private and higher education, all have the insidious potential to teach only the history of upper class and middle class people. And of these, only men were well represented (at least until feminist scholars began uncovering the achievements of women). This history is also taught in the English classroom, the Science classroom, and so on. Each of these fields has a set of assumptions about who the achievers are, were, and might be. Economics would quite naturally be taught one way by and for an upper class population, and quite another way, if it were taught by and for the workers. Since the traditional educational institutions haven't been willing or able to teach what the workers wanted to know, the workers have had to cooperate amongst themselves to achieve this knowledge. This is self-determination, probably the most important step in learning, and a powerful thing to learn in itself.

Labor unions were supportive allies in the fight for public education, libraries, and the advancement of mechanic's libraries, mechanic's institutes, and lyceums, but workers' education as a distinct effort of its own arose first outside of the main stream of the labor movement, around the turn of the century. Some of the first experiments in workers' education were Ruskin College, originally named Avalon College, founded in 1895 in Trenton, Missouri; the Bread Winners' College in New York City, founded in 1898; and the Rand School of Social Science, also in New York City, founded in 1906. These were residential labor schools, and they appealed to only a small percentage of the population.

Three notable examples of the residential labor school developed later in the twentieth century. Though they were never influential through sheer numbers, the quality of their efforts made them memorable. Brookwood was a small educational program for labor leaders. The school taught the usual subjects, but from the wage-earners point of view. Labor history and administration were also included in the studies to help prepare these people for their future roles as leaders in the labor movement. Bryn Mawr offered a Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. It offered an eight week term to one hundred motivated female students. "One of the instructors, who is a member of the faculty of a well-known women's college, says of his summer's work at Bryn Mawr, 'After standing up for eight months before the somnolent daughters of the plutocracy, it is like a breath of fresh air to come here and be challenged on economic theory by a garment worker.'"(Fisher, 211) The Highlander Folk School, of Monteagle, Tennessee, was a rural residential school that combined ideals of the Danish folk school with the crusade for social justice in the United States. This school, including elements from two histories traced in this paper, was described more fully in the previous section.

The workers themselves began to take control of their own education in the 1920's. The Workers' Education Bureau, founded in 1921, and later supported by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), registered 30,000 students in at least one class in 1924. The Works Progress Administration demonstrated to labor the possibility of, and need for, a program of continuing education for workers. Following the depression, organized labor began to respond to the potential for workers' education. The People's Institute of New York City became well known for the large lectures it hosted on radical social theories of the organization of industrial society. When the AFL and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) joined forces in 1955, the merger of their educational departments "brought new strength and integration to the labor education program at the national level, and made possible the appointment of a number of full-time education directors at the local level…" (Knowles, 108) Still, in spite of the advantages of this new unified labor movement, Knowles identifies "…the multimillion membership of the organized labor movement…" in 1961 as "…the single most underdeveloped constituency of adult education in the United States." (Knowles, 111) This is not to belittle the achievements up to that point, but rather to point out the potential for so much more to be done.

Analysis

Power

Paradoxically, the kinds of learning opportunities available to the worker were in many ways the most one-way (from teacher to learner) and most hierarchical of all the examples of this paper. A class or a lecture was offered, and the worker could choose to attend or not. If the choice was to attend, the individual had little control over where the program would take them. Decisions about course content were made by the (hopefully) benign dictatorship of the unions' leaders.

Money

Because union members paid dues, classes and lectures were generally free or very affordably priced.

Motivation

Workers attended workers' education to learn about their environment, politically and socially, and to learn how to work towards improving their position, as well as the position of workers in general.

Methods

Early forms of workers' education borrowed unreflectively from the academic modes of instruction found in higher education. But gradually, the programs developed to include debates, role playing, open forums, panel discussions, conferences, and informal seminars. In addition, audio-visual departments of several international unions "produced and distributed some of the most creative educational materials in the field of adult education" at the time of Knowles' research, in 1961. Labor's education departments were beginning to work with the realities of different kinds of intelligence, and differing ways of learning, and some even found they were on the cutting edge of this exploration.

Time

Some forms of workers' education, such as those for the labor leaders and organizers, were residential, and were a time-out from the demands of normal life. On the other end of the spectrum, classes and events for "rank-and-file" members generally took the form of weekly evening classes or lectures, a modest demand of time and energy.

Vision

Workers' education resisted elitism and encouraged a vision of society where the dignity of all people was a reality, where skilled and unskilled labor were recognized as essential to the functioning and maintenance of society, and deserving of a wage befitting their value to society. Workers' education, as the idealistic arm of the labor movement, imagined a future of "brotherhood," where people really understood each other to be part of a human family.

Although a meeting of the classes was quite unusual in the rarified atmosphere of the university, Dorothy Fisher imagines the beneficial effect of such a meeting, particularly for the cloistered academic: "The mature working-man who listens for a lecture or two to a college professor talking about economics and then, rising, leaves the room energetically, casting over his shoulder earnestly, 'Oh, hell, I can't stand this!' may do more to electrify a perfectly good professor into real teaching than generations of educational conventions asking themselves what is the matter with our theories of pedagogy." (Fisher, 216) She muses more about the division between real work and theory, fertility and futility: "Perhaps our science and art have been so largely barren of deeply human results because their practitioners have heretofore lived in an unreal world, created for them by the labor of others, and have suffered the inevitable sterility which comes with unreality."(217) And she finds encouragement in the workers' educational movement,"…these new educational experiments, whose intention is to break down this tragic old division by opening the world of thinking to people who work."(217) She

…wonder[s] if perhaps the virtue has not gone out of 'work' in the old sense of meaningful contact with reality, because the infinitely subdivided work of any one industrial worker is no longer visibly creative. Perhaps working people may not be able to contribute to our collective culture that traditional grasp on reality which has been the priceless quality of their class, because little by little they are themselves losing it. Perhaps workers are turning to abstract ideas and 'education' in an attempt to get back from books that deep hold on life and understanding of it which they can no longer get from life itself; and so are simply no better off than the rest of us who have not made a very good job of getting from education what we no longer can get from life."

(Fisher, 218)

These comments and concerns speak to bedrock issues in our society that continue to be of primary importance and have lasting and far reaching effects.

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The Vermont Institute of Community Involvement/Burlington College

Origins

Steward LaCasce founded the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement out of public vision and personal need. In the midst of the Vietnam War, having already stretched the limits of his colleagues' patience at Boston University by establishing a draft counseling center at the school, he was denied tenure as a professor of English literature. There was a glut, at the time, of English teachers, so Stew LaCasce used the situation as an opportunity to step beyond the cozy confines of the ivory tower. He joined a research project that had a contract with the Federally funded "University Year for Action," also known as the "Action Agency," which had been established by the Nixon administration in 1971. The purpose of the organization was to provide support to volunteer groups that were cooperating with learning organizations in experiential learning. Stew LaCasce worked as a writer, interviewing people around the country in order to pull together examples of what had been done, and later he worked on a manual on how to get academic credit for volunteering. In the course of his travels, he came into contact with many people exploring the "University without Walls" concept. This was a school that based itself in the community and in life experience, and encouraged people to combine learning with meaningful community action.

Adding fuel to the revolutionary fire, the Newman report validated the discontent felt by many young people in higher education, who were frustrated by schools' lack of relevance to the real-life problems that were so clearly present in the turbulent years of the late '60's and early '70's. This study, funded by the Carnegie Commission, surveyed the entire educational system of the United States with a critical eye; its author was the first to coin the phrase, "lock-step education." The study revealed the problems of rigidly tracking children and young adults through formulaic and impersonal systems that denied individual strengths and preferences. Steward LaCasce and many others in the alternative education movement were encouraged by this report. Marcia Vance, who knew Stew from Boston University's English department, shared Steward's interest in developing more meaningful alternatives to higher education. She, as well as many others, were involved in supporting one another, in word and deed, towards the vision that they shared. Although Steward was the point man in this attempt to create a new kind of learning organization, he was not the lonely hero on the mountaintop.

A family connection brought Steward LaCasce to Burlington- his sister was an administrator at the newly founded Pine Ridge School. Pine Ridge was an alternative high school designed for students with "learning disabilities." These young people, while clearly intelligent, had trouble coding and decoding visual symbols- that is, reading and writing. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences had not yet developed, but Pine Ridge was already experimenting with ways to integrate students' strengths with their desires to function in a text-intensive society.

Initially, the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement (VICI) planned to affiliate with Pine Ridge, offering the new school as a next step in higher education. But while this connection was of some benefit, it became clear that VICI's goals were broader than teaching learning-disabled adults, and so the schools grew independently. In any case, some Pine Ridge students did take advantage of the ideological harmonies between the two schools.

VICI was envisioned as a school whose campus was the whole community; it would not have a campus of its own- this was seen as redundancy, as a duplication of services. Learning by doing would be combined with seminar-type classes emphasizing thoughtful discussion. Previous life experience would be honored and given academic credit; learning programs would develop from what students already knew. The school originally conceived of itself as an alternative college for young people of the traditional age and background, fresh out of high school and pursuing a course of studies that would culminate in a degree.

Steward LaCasce wrote a "white paper" explaining his vision for the school to prospective investors, gathered together a board of trustees, and incorporated the school. VICI opened its doors in the fall of 1972. Due to a quirk in Vermont law, the school was not able to call itself a college, so it settled for "Institute," in all ways but name a college, though one with a distinctive focus on the needs and potentials of both the students and the community. Because the school honored the life experiences of students through both its flexible curriculum and its accreditation of life experiences, the school attracted, within a couple of years, a large number of experienced adult learners pursuing an "upside-down degree," in which a large portion of the student's learning (towards a degree) had already occurred.

The school struggled for a decade to establish itself as a fully accredited school. The state first gave the school authority to grant degrees, after which the New England Association of Schools and Colleges gave the school "Candidacy for Accreditation" status, which gave the school access to federal funding. Successful completion of these steps was important to making the school both more affordable to students and more financially viable as an institution. The accreditation process was basically a peer review by the administrators of the accredited schools in the region. Conservative members of this group were concerned with some of the essential practices of the school, particularly the model of experiential learning, which they considered "flakey," and the concept of a school without a campus, especially without a library of its own. The school was fully accredited in 1982 by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, resolving a long fight for financial and social standing.

VICI addressed these concerns by focusing intensely on effectively documenting and evaluating students' learning, and this was perhaps the school's most important contribution to the community and to the future, according to LaCasce. A committee of students, faculty, administration, alumni and community members polished and refined the written evaluation process. The process grew to include both the student and the teacher in evaluating the student's development. The written evaluation was more costly and time consuming than the traditional grading method, and it still ran the risk of being formulaic, but it helped transform the relationship between the teacher and the student to one based more securely on respect, as opposed to the traditional method, which is fraught with inequity and haunted by the paradigm of domination.

Analysis

The school's more alternative elements were more clearly present in its past (the 1970's) than in its present (or recent past). Therefore, for the sake of simplicity, the questions below will be evaluated according to the school as it was in the 1970's unless otherwise noted. Ways in which the school changed and stayed the same will follow in a section on the evolution of VICI / Burlington College.

Power

A board of trustees "owns" the school. The board includes two students, two faculty, 2 alumni, and community members. New members are voted in by the board only, so the board is self-perpetuating. Because the school is tax-exempt, and therefore supported by the public through this exemption, the broad base of membership on the board is appropriate. The mission statement of the school describes a "shared responsibility" in both learning and governance between students and teachers. This was reflected in not only the board, but in the membership of all the working committees of the school, which include students, teachers, administrators, trustees, and local community members. All the committees are comprised of volunteers only. The school also has a relationship with the higher education "community" of the region, in which it has been underdog of sorts, struggling to maintain its right to grant degrees to students and the federal funding that goes with this status. This inter-institutional relationship very clearly has played out on an uneven playing field.

Money

The school worked hard in its early days to meet the conditions required to make the school eligible for federal financial assistance through the GI Bill and benefits for disabled veterans. The GI Bill actually paid veterans to go to school, by providing a stipend to veterans who enrolled in an eligible program. The school's alternative methods and granting of life experience credit made the school an attractive place for Vietnam veterans, and at one time as much as half, or more, of the student body were veterans. In addition, the fact that federal funding was tied in with accreditation brought the school into direct contact with the unsupportive elements of the higher education "community," which was a continual challenge.

Because the school had not invested in any property, and all professors were "adjunct" professors, meaning that they served the school on a per-student basis, the school was able to keep its costs and its debt to a minimum. In fact, the only debt incurred by the school, until the school actually did buy a building to house the school in 1983, was the deferred salaries of the founder and another administrator. The school rented and received donations of spaces for classes and public meetings, and this worked out well until the oil crisis pushed up the costs of heating. Also, public perceptions of safety gradually eroded, and the owners of these buildings responded by locking doors and restricting access, which made it difficult to accommodate students. The school managed to continue using community resources for its library, investing several thousand dollars into more professional, academic, and specialized books at the Fletcher Free Library, which is the public library of Burlington. Later, this relationship was transferred to a similar one with Trinity College, and most recently it is being developed with the University of Vermont. The school achieved not only financial viability but also community connectivity through resolving, early on, not to duplicate services already offered by the community.

Motivation

Generally speaking, most students came to the school to get a degree. However, from the 1970's to the early 1990's, there was a substantial minority that was interested more in the learning experience than in the degree. Some students acquired as much as twice as many credits necessary for graduation. The school encouraged high school seniors and senior citizens to audit classes by offering audits free of charge to these groups. These kinds of students served the school by enriching the classroom with a greater variety of perspectives. Also, some students came to the school for continuing education in professional fields, paying fully for credit but not in the context of pursuing a degree. However, the majority of the students who were motivated by the goal of the degree chose the school for its alternative approach and for its recognition of the value of experiential learning in the course of living meaningful lives. These students in particular, as opposed to the students auditing or taking individual classes, were motivated by the goal of service to the community through personal career development.

Methods

The principal method of the school was, and still is, the seminar-type class, in which students studied common texts and developed their ideas and understandings through discussion, interweaving of their own and others' experiences and ideas. This form was supported by the written evaluation process, which created a context of mutuality rather than domination between the teacher and the student. In addition, the school supported learning by doing by encouraging students to integrate their academic work with community service, although many students didn't have the time to take advantage of this opportunity (see "Time," below).

Time

The school demanded a lot of effort from its students, who were generally not in economic classes conducive to study uninterrupted by work. Work was not necessarily a learning environment that could be dovetailed to the student's program of study, though this was certainly a goal. This pressure to make ends meet worked against both the goals and the methods of the school. Students were reluctant to participate on committees, even to be a member of the board of trustees, due to their busy schedules. In addition, students missed opportunities to better integrate their studies with the realities of the communities of the Burlington area because of their overworked lives.

Vision

The society implicitly envisioned by the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement / Burlington College differs from the present one in that it is more respectful of individuals' backgrounds, unique strengths, and ways of knowing. The seminar method encouraged attitudes of participation and teamwork. In addition, its evaluation method supports a vision of a more egalitarian society, where individuals are accountable equally, to each other and to themselves.

The Evolution of the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement/ Burlington College When the school bought a building for its offices and classrooms in 1983, it became less of a college of the community, and more like standard community college.

The school has gradually accepted lower levels of student involvement in governance, and no longer places a priority on mixing the roles of faculty and administration. However, the school still uses adjunct faculty, which generally means that teachers are involved in practicing what they are teaching within the community. This maintains a healthy connection with practice in the midst of the theories and discussions of teaching.

The school is far more expensive today than it was in the 1970's, though this increase in cost is on par with increased tuitions in other colleges and universities. While most colleges receive a large share of their funds from alumni and other sources, Burlington College still receives the vast majority of its funding from tuition.

The students today are closer to traditional college aged students than in the late 1970's, when the average age was closer to 35. This is probably due to the fact that other institutions of higher education began to catch on to the value of serving adults in their programs as well. The students of the '70's were more interested in a broad kind of personal development, while students today are sharpening academic capacities. Experiential methods of learning in the past are more traditionally academic in the present incarnation of the school.

But in spite of all of these changes, the school still encourages an empowering, responsible approach to understanding the individual's place in society. This implicit vision is represented through the seminar, where people are encouraged to say what they think, and the evaluation, which encourages a sense of mutual accountability, rather than authoritarian judgment.

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Synthesis and Conclusion

In this section, I compare and contrast the foregoing examples with each other, and with the model that I am proposing. Of course, all of these examples have much in common, because I chose them both to illustrate the feasibility of a community-based lifelong learning organization and to gain insight into what works and what doesn't. To illustrate more simply the way these organizations compare, I have placed them on a spectrum between two columns, with the left hand column representing a quality that is desirable, in my opinion, for community-based lifelong learning. I have done this for each of the areas of inquiry that have been explored throughout this paper.

Power

Democratic

Authoritarian

Lyceum

Folk Schools

Workers' Ed

VICI

The lyceum spread power fairly evenly, electing officers for each local lyceum. While this is a town-scale version of republicanism, it doesn't appear to have been a problem for lyceum members. The Danish folk school the teachers held the power over the curriculum; the students were mere visitors. But there was sufficient diversity in the curriculum for students to take their own angles and tangents. Power was a problem in the labor movement generally, because leaders did in fact concentrate power and actually make important decisions. This resulted in instability and a lack of growth, especially when compared to the potential for growth. The arrangement at Burlington College is similar to that of the Danish folk school in that classes offer students a chance to take individually defined directions and perspectives.

All but workers' education were egalitarian in their structure. Workers' education was egalitarian in its ideology but not in its structure: for instance, the teacher still "taught" the class. The model of a learning community that I am proposing would challenge people to learn about democratic processes and the development of new or improved ways of being in community. The opportunity for learning about how groups can attain health as groups, and how groups can relate with and support other groups and cooperate on wider scales is closest at hand with the model that I am proposing.

Money

Cheap

Expensive

Lyceum

Folk Schools

Workers' Ed

VICI

One of the greatest challenges, financially, for an organization is finding or building, and maintaining, a place for its activities. And if anyone is working as staff for the organization, this also is a considerable expense. Some organizations described in this paper, such as the smaller town lyceums, the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement, and many of the projects associated with the workers' education movement avoided the cost of a building by borrowing spaces from existing organizations. The Danish folk schools occupied farms, which perhaps were not as difficult to purchase as buildings in a more settled landscape, where property values have risen. The Danish folk schools were generally founded through grass roots effort and local support, so this too, greatly lessened the burden on the schools. In the Danish example, the initial investments were Grundtvig's passionate campaign for rural schools of folkelighed, and this was bolstered by the accruing "interest" of more than a decade between the vision and the first manifestation of a school, in 1844.

Schools with paid staff function very differently than organizations, such as the lyceum, with little or no professional service. With the presence of paid staff, a relationship of teacher and learner, or professional and client, tends to develop. These relationships run the risk of inducing further passivity in the learner-client, when the struggle to claim active power and creativity is an essential learning process in itself. While passivity can also develop in relationships not involving paid services, relationships are more able to be fluid when money is not a built-in factor.

Initiators of community-based lifelong learning organizations will need to raise money for the provision of publicly available space for offices, meetings, and the like. In addition, equipment and staffing are likely to become at least modest expenses. The common strategies from these examples, of dues and creative use of low cost alternatives wherever possible, suggest the probable future of community-based lifelong learning. However, just as education for children and libraries for all have become publicly funded resources, community-based lifelong learning should not be ashamed to demand the public support it deserves, especially after it has been able to demonstrate its value.

Motivation

Love of Learning

Lyceum

Folk Schools

Workers' Ed

VICI

 

Personal with Community Development

Personal Development

Lyceum

Folk Schools

Workers' Ed

VICI

With the lyceum, as with the Danish folk school, students' primary motivations were self-development, curiosity, and fellowship. Workers, in contrast, were motivated to gain knowledge for empowerment for themselves and their comrades. The majority of Burlington College students went to the school for a degree, which was to benefit the individual student in their future or continued career. This career can be assumed to be of benefit to the community, directly or indirectly.

The community-based lifelong learning center would encourage learners to explore, on an open-ended basis, what it might be that motivates one to learn. Love of learning may, if followed faithfully and purely, serve the community better in the long run than a more direct commitment to the community from the start. It may, however, lead into thickets of irrelevance, and inner confusion. A desire for a better community might lead to fruitful individual learning and satisfying outcomes for both the individual and the community. However, this too may blind an individual to the richness of learning opportunities to be found throughout life, regardless of their immediate utility.

Methods

Mutual instruction

Teacher to Student

Lyceum

Folk Schools

Workers' Ed

VICI

 

Self-directed learning

Guided Learning

Lyceum