426
used the academic freedom of the
place-few compulsory courses,
few tests, few requirements, few
rules-to pass far beyond an un–
dergraduate standard of work. In
some ways the faculty have a good
time of it too. You teach whatever
you wish, and you have in your
classes only students who chose
your course and who desperately
want to know what you have to
say (and who may even try to
have you fired if you're a bore).
Black Mountain has gone beyond
what are considered the functions
of a seat of learning. It has created
f
1. .
"
't "
a pattern o 1vmg- commum y
is the magic word-in which start–
ling things happen. In a day of
mass organization, a day of gigant–
ism and
m~chines,
it shows that
one may try to approach the in–
dividual as an individual, a thing
more often talked of than done.
At a time when one is tempted to
give up the fine dreams of the
liberal philosophers of educations,
Black Mountain affords glimpses
of possibilities.
In my opinion, however, the
possibilities will have to be realized
elsewhere or not at all, for Black
Mountain has defects which out–
weigh its merits. Though any brief
enumeration of these defects will
by its very brevity distort and
oversimplify the truth, I will avoid
the alternative of saying nothing
by specifying three schools of
thought and practice which have
prevented Black Mountain being
the most successful educational ex–
penment in America. They are:
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Progressivists, the Platonists,
and the Primitivists.
According to
Time,
Black Moun–
tain is "progressive education's
most famous outpost," but PR
readers should be warned, in case
they are out of contact with the
educational world, that Progres–
sivism is no longer Deweyism; by
this time it is about as far from
Dewey as the Pope is from Jesus.
In the form in which it cropped
up at Black Mountain Progressiv–
ism was a crude body of negative
and rather anarchistic doctrines
such as that good education results
from having no rules, no examina–
tions, no punctuality and the like.
Latterly this body of doctrine has
been more popular with the stu–
dent body than with the faculty,
for the latter, like all tired revolu–
tionaries, have been growing steadi–
ly more puritan and disciplinarian.
On both student body and faculty,
however, there did persist much
suspicion of learning (called "book
learning" or "mere learning")
based upon that old chestnut of a
doctrine that Education is for Life
and upon the assumption that
dilettantism or boy-scoutishness is
somehow more to be identified with
Life than "mere knowledge." When
students are discouraged from be–
ing studious and critical (in the in–
terest of the active and the crea–
tive) the result is sometimes a new
brand of philistinism, sometimes
just the old brand of intellectual
sloth, and always an abdication of
one of the main functions of higher
education, namely, the training of
the intellect to the point where a
man can reject what is bogus. Un-
