Perspective on ourselves

Things are stirring down deep. A fresh frame of reference is evolving. This is the impression I get listening to lectures and discussions about curriculum problems. Those who are struggling with the curriculum problem have experienced a failure in their older frames of reference. They are groping for a fresh way of taking hold. The older ways are felt to lead too easily and compellingly into the further manipulative and dehumanizing treatment of the persons involved, and to contribute, therefore, to the further paralysis of the human spirit into which our age seems, unnaturally, to be propelled. There is an underlying rebellion against the deathdealing and a complementary search for the lifegiving. The older ways took form in the course of America's trying to get herself organized into institutions. The wilderness frontier presented much ambiguity; so did the industrial revolution; so has the technological revolution; and so, now, does the cybernetic revolution. The ambiguity required, and requires, order; we have constantly been involved in organizing and reorganizing social structures to give the order needed. Creating institutions has been a primary effort. The leading social question has been that of how to place people within institutional frameworks so that the institutions can operate as effective systems. More unwittingly than wittingly, and contrary to the legendary respect Americans are said to have for the individual, persons have been taken as instrumental to institutions and institutions have been taken to have prime value. But now the realization is dawning that the institutions we have created may be taking us all in the direction of death. War escalates; so does mental illness; so does crime; so does racial strife; so does starvation and poverty for increasing millions in the world, etc. Conditions seem organized to get worse and worse, and we live in constant awareness of the possibility of death, not by the gradualisms of illness and starvation but, instantaneously, by the bombs. Vividly aware that, through our institutions, we have consciously and systematically built the bombing systems to deliver death to what could be the whole human species, we can understand how the institutions we have built could also be sources that could deliver death systematically in its less dramatic forms, as well. We are, therefore, wary of our institutional presumptions; we are lost in our basic social orientation; we are rebellious; and we are searching. Aware that we have consciously built systems to deliver death to mankind, we are becoming aware that we shall just-as-consciously

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