A Brief History of Eduction
The following is from a piece written by Dr. Kent Lawson in January, 2006
Abbreviated Background of Kent Lawson’s Edux Program
It is difficult to identify a starting point and motivation for the Edux Program: every possible starting point has a precursor. We could begin with early years at Cornell, independent of the courses and programs there, continue to graduate work and involvement with the development of a course at Rensselaer, requests from Bennington College, Harvard, Princeton, Rensselaer and several other high-ranking colleges, and finally, pleas from two former friends in graduate school at Rensselaer for me to come to the State University College of Oneonta, NY for a few years to get its new physics program underway by attracting other physicists. Surprisingly, SUCO soon turned out to be highly suitable for conducting research projects that could involve students and faculty, for developing a unique physics course and for what became the Edux Program.
A Condensed History of the Development of the Edux Program
The closest precursor of the Edux Program is a physics course I developed at SUCO and called “Introduction to Creative Physical Thought.” Soon, faculty members teaching courses that my students were enrolled in, noticed how different and productive my students were in their courses and asked me if I would show them what I was doing. I offered a preliminary course one summer to a small number of people, to get an idea about what to do, and followed that, the next summer, with a course for several faculty members from SUCO and some from nearby colleges who had heard about it. At the end of the first session, someone exclaimed, “My God, he’s assigning homework!” These people were quite sharp and, to my delight, constantly besieged me with questions. The Graduate Dean sat in on as many classes as he could. At the end of the course, he said that in two weeks there would be schoolteachers coming from all over the state and would I offer a course for them. I agreed. A single wide video tape (later copied onto eight standard tapes) was made of the first parts of that course (what went on in the last two parts of the course each day is explained in the first video tape) by volunteers from the previous course.
The schoolteachers seemed shocked when I asked them not to take notes. They evidently were accustomed to sitting quietly and taking copious notes in their graduate education courses. Also, in contrast to the college faculty, I had an exceedingly difficult time in bringing them to ask questions, without asking them to ask questions, and to develop and pursue their curiosity about what the situation might be. The situation is reflected in the early video tapes. How it turned out, remains to be seen by watching the video tapes.
At the end of the course, several responded to my invitation to take Edux courses at their schools during the school year. The system worked like this: they would devise and use eductive measures in their classrooms, record them, and afterward discuss their thoughts and feelings on audio tapes. They mailed the tapes to us. Several people from the college faculty course, volunteered to listen to the tapes, make their own responses to the tapes, then send the tapes back to the teachers. Upon listening to the tapes, the volunteers were struck by the openness of the teachers. One, in fact, exclaimed, “Good Lord, they’re baring their very souls to us!” We visited some of the teachers in their classrooms, discussed their use of Edux after classes, and became good friends with some.
Soon, SUCO faculty members interacted with people in the town and lawyers, physicians, business people, clergy, faculty wives, and others asked for a course and we met evenings. Incidentally, every year until I retired about twenty years later, at least one faculty member, sometimes several, asked me to give a course for faculty. Unfortunately, as will be seen, by then I was too deeply involved with other aspects of the Edux Program to provide a course for them.
The Onset of Edux Courses for Students
Students heard about the course and one particularly enterprising student, Ira Baumgartner, unbeknownst to me, approached some administrators and determined what would be required for me to give a course to students. Ira asked me if I would give a course if he obtained thirty students, evidently the required. number to initiate a course. I agreed, he did, and the Edux Program was off to a start, although we didn’t know it at the time. Two faculty wives who had close contact with the earliest course for factuality members, agreed to respond to the assignments given at the end of each of three classes a week.
The History of Edux Courses for Students
After the first course for students, upon further requests by students, the Edux Program gradually developed. The Program consisted o fa first and basic course for students (who became known as 00’ers). That course became the fastest growing course in the history of the college (at least at that time) and soon filled IRC3. Video tapes oft he course in IRC3 were made for absentees to see. The tapes are presumed to have been recycled and probably do not exist. 1980 began a gradual decline in student enrollment. Whatever the reason, I removed any unintended mystery about the course by briefly stating, at the beginning of each class, what, how, and why that class would be about.
Edux classes consisted of experiences (as did assignments after each class), not information. The classes were designed, in part, to help overcome hyperrationalism and dehumanization .
Beginning about 1980, audio tapes were made of the classes. I arranged to have orchestral music played as students entered during the ten minutes before class began. It was often “The Enchanted Forest.” Two copies of the audio tapes were recycled back and forth from the IRC recording studio to the library for use by students who had been absent from class -very few were! An extra copy was made for use by me with students in my office. Thus, I have sets of audio tapes for each class from Spring 1980 through Spring 1991. Many sets were loaned out after the course, when students asked to copy them. Three sets are still on loan.
One former physics student who became a dentist in New Hampshire and who had not been in an Edux course, asked to borrow a set. He soon realized the importance of doing the assignment at the end of each tape before going on to the next tape. He told me that certain tapes, which he identified., made him laugh; certain others made him cry.
Students (known as 01’ers) in a second course made comments on 00’ers’ responses to assignments made at the end of each class. The 01’ers met separately in a course that consisted largely of discussion of the 00’ers assignment responses. The 01’ers transferred to me the best responses of the 00’ ers, on which the 01’ers had made marginal suggestions for excerpts that I might read in the 00 class for their benefit.
Ten minutes, or so, of the first class meeting were devoted to organizing seating of students in relation to people who would be responding to their assignments. A few classes had printed materials distributed infrequently.
As the course grew, there were so many 01’ers that people in a third course (02’ers) were required to carry out the discussions with groups of 01’ers. I met with the 02’ers, compared notes and ideas and worked out ways to improve the 01 and 02 processes.
Some students (03’ers) conducted projects in the college and community that would encourage people to become more eductive. One outstanding example was the creation of a store from a basement apartment that opened onto a hillside east of West Street (where the Damascene Bookstore is now located). The store was called, by the 03’er, “Oneonta Come-Unity Food Cooperative,” a membership-based not-for-profIt that served the community for 14 years after his departure. All this was accomplished by Tim Brock.
Another 03’er created a film showing people traveling in a car that had an unexpected difficulty and eventually came to a halt. The occupants then proceeded to try to resolve the situation by using normal methods. Nothing worked until they hit upon the idea of responding eductively. Soon, the car was under way again and the original chagrin changed to grins!
Enthusiastic responses to each of the several courses continue to pour in, some, as much as fifty years after one of the precursors to the Edux Program.
The Eduction Program ended in 1991. When students heard that the Program was ending, they were enraged and wanted to conduct a sit-in in the Administration Building. I managed to convince them not to.
The Edux Program After My Retirement in the Summer of 1991
I spent several years, perhaps five or six, trying to make the basic course available to everybody through the written word. I tried various schemes of first presenting a mental challenge, then encouraging the reader to respond immediately to that challenge by sequestering my next comment in such a way that it would not be read until after a response had been made to the challenge. After devising several different such approaches, it became increasingly evident that any scheme would not be suitable.
About that time, I began to use a computer and tried to work out a more suitable approach. Within two years, I had a rough idea how an Edux course might be presented without the drawbacks of previous ideas. With the help of a number of people,we worked out the details of a way that might well be suitable. One former student, Brian Foley, condensed, from audio tapes, ten unedited classes of the Spring 1990 basic course on one CD, and did the same for the Fall of 1988 classes, so that an Edux course of about forty-four sessions would need only five CDs. I then ‘Wrote a letter, a copy of which is included in the next section, to a number of former Edux students, asking if they would be interested in becoming an 01’er,using CDs and email. Almost all, whose addresses were still valid, replied positively and asked for a copy of a booklet that I had contrived (a copy of which accompanies this booklet) for possible future 01’ers. If, in response to the booklet and a question about their becoming 01’ers, they replied positively, I then sent them a copy of the Spring 1990 set of five CDs, with an expressed hope that they might find people who would become 00’ers and, eventually, possibly 01’ers, so that continuing and expanding chains of 00’ers and 01’ers might result. At present, I am trying to modify the system to make it easier for the 01’ers to operate and for the 00’ers to make steady progress.
An Abbreviated Statement of the Development of My Interest in Physics and of My Philosophy and of Some of Their Impact
I was asked to write a page for this booklet about “how I became interested in physics and what my philosophy is.” I had never given any thought to either topic and didn’t know how to go about developing a response to them. After much pondering, I decided to review my life back from the present until I reached a starting point for my interest in physics and some ideas about my philosophy.
My interest in physics developed gradually over the years. It began, at a early age, with my devising and constructing mechanical things. That interest was augmented in high school by physics and chemistry courses and by involvement in special laboratories that were set up for testing materials. During my first year at Cornell, I filled the side margins of my physics textbook with comments and new ideas, one of which, after I lost that book, just happened to be one that a Cornell physics professor later developed into a Nobel Prize-winning publication. Coincidence? Later, after I had left Cornell in the middle of the undergraduate program to work for about one and a half years as a chemist’s helper (but still graduated with my class), I had an idea about how supersonics might help in World War II and worked on it in a Cornell lab, but the War Department did not encourage my further work on it. At graduation time, in an invited interview at Columbia University, I was given a chance to work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, but declined because the interview was so mysterious and did not name Oak Ridge itself or what was taking place there. Of course, my interest in physics increased as I worked for a Master’s Degree at Rensselaer (which centered on a new physics course I was invited to create – years after I left Rensselaer, alumni called it the best course at Rensselaer) and a Ph.D. at Rensselaer and that interest continued to increase as I developed new kinds of physics courses at Bennington College and SUCO and conducted research projects at both places and, while at Bennington, commuted back to Rensselaer to help with a research project there.
The predominant aspect of my philosophy of life (an intense innate desire to help people to make more progress, to have better lives and to help others do the same – – which I did not realize until I was asked to write about my philosophy) was beginning to develop in grammar and junior high schools with appointments to leadership positions and in high school while on the stage crew and in a unique chemistry analytical lab. That philosophy broadened at Cornell after a deep religious experience there, and at Rensselaer, while I was an instructor taking graduate courses, as I graded homework papers and exams of undergraduates, trying to help them see where their thinking had gone astray, instead of merely marking their answers to problems as right or wrong, and when I had an opportunity to help develop the course at Rensselaer mentioned in the last paragraph.
My philosophy and its impact were broadened at Bennington College by opportunities to create new kinds of physics courses. Some of their impact on students and of my philosophy is demonstrated by three requests from Harvard to join them (after former students showed administrators some of the material I had distributed to classes at Bennington), by a request from the renowned physicist, John Wheeler, to visit his summer home, then to spend a term at Princeton (which I did, meeting Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and others, including Eric Rogers – who lived next door to Albert Einstein), by being chosen to attend the first National Science Foundation summer program at American University in Washington, by a request from ten physicists at high-ranking colleges who also attended that program or American Physical Society meetings in various states, to join their colleges, by a request to join a group of physicists for a summer at the University of Colorado in Boulder, by a request at one of the APS meetings by two friends who were in graduate school with me at Rensselaer (but had not gone beyond Master’s Degrees) for me to come to SUCO for a few years to attract other physics Ph.D.s, which I did in 1965, since it gave me an opportunity to write more physics books, such as “Introduction to Creative Physical Thought” – ICPT, and conduct five research projects simultaneously for the benefit of students.
A girl called from Italy recently and asked me to send a copy of ICPT since she couldn’t find hers. Faculty members in other fields soon noticed that my students were responding creatively and exceptionally well and asked me if I would provide a summer course for them to learn what I was doing and how they might apply it in the courses they were giving. I complied and they were shocked when I assigned homework (daily). I gave another course the next summer for more SUCO professors, but included faculty from nearby colleges. (I continued to receive requests for a course for faculty every semester until I retired, but could not comply since I spent at least a month in the summer and winter before each course, creating new experiences, improving former ones and changing their order.)
After the first course for college faculty, the Graduate Dean asked me to give an appropriately similar summer course to school teachers from around the state. I did so, for two years, and followed up with courses for them during the school year by mailing audio tapes back and forth, with an occasional visit to their classrooms. Soon, various categories of townspeople learned about the course, asked for one for them, and I complied with an evening course.
Finally, an undergraduate, Ira Baumgartner, approached and convinced the administration, then asked me if I would provide a course for undergraduates. I agreed and it soon became the fastest-growing course in the history of the college and the constant topic of discussion on and off campus. The course filled IRC3 (Instructional Resource Center #3 – a very large lecture hall) until about 1980, then gradually decreased in size when one person, after the Jim Jones-induced suicides in South America, tried to convince students that the Eduction Program was a cult. Even so, student responses to the courses in the Program continued to be universally exceedingly positive, as did all of the many letters written to me after the courses, probably most within ten years of the writers taking the course, but some, several decades later.
As an indication of the regard faculty and administrators had for my philosophy and its expression in the Edux Program, I was the first faculty member to become chairman of the Committee on Instruction; the first faculty member to conduct a faculty meeting; a member, at the same time, for a number of years, of twenty-one local, state, and national committees, and chairman of almost all; the first faculty member to receive the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the first to be designated Distinguished Teaching Professor (nominated for both by Charlotte Walker after she attended one of the summer courses for faculty); and later became the only faculty member to be recognized as an Outstanding Educator of America.