Ch.31 National and media response to WSC-2033
Serializing on Substack.com Awakening the Inner Teacher, how Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts college curriculum and teaching methods to produce graduates capable of redeeming-restoring SpaceShip Earth.
In Chapter 31, after close to 10,000 mostly women attended Women’s Summer Conference 2033, New Colleges became real in the public imagination. Debates began.
After the successful five-day Insight-like seminar attended by thousands two significant developments occurred. The Writers Room Debrief, covered in a recent Chapter; and, as New Colleges “became a thing” in the public imagination, a national debate began around water coolers and in social media . Let’s unpack this.
Response to Summer Conference partner exercises
Positive response to Women’s Summer Conference 2033 took several forms:
- Mass media coverage
- Grassroots orgs starting parallel live broadcasts and re-broadcasts of prior year’s Conferences
- Regional Conferences featuring new, original material, and
- Parent and teacher groups organizing to support and lobby New Colleges for their special interests.
National TV coverage
Late-nite comics made jokes about WSC-2033. Short pieces appears in national network prime time news shows. Leaders of Women In Congress did not ask C-SPAN to televise Women’s Summer Conferences. Women simply didn’t object to a request to do so. WSC-2033 was among the most-watched C-SPAN broadcasts ever.
WSC-2033 was titled “Making and re-making your own personal myth.” Journalists understood WSC-2033 was in part, a pilot program for what New Colleges would be, a trial run of some content and some methods.
Re-making liberal arts colleges would affect people in all 51 states. If successful, as graduates trickled into all levels of the work force, it could change people’s thinking on a variety of cultural topics. So far, the public caught the hopeful flavor of the Project. The public remained hungry for news of developments.
Women told public audiences, “We must explore where no society has gone within historical memory. There is no way to go backwards, no way to stand still; the only way is forward.”
Privately many women feared re-making college could be their Waterloo, their first big failure; still, they were willing to show up five days a week and take each little step forward, as best they could. The Manhattan Project, making the world’s biggest destructive bomb, was a famous, favorite male project. Re-making colleges became women’s Manhattan Project. An international audience of women attended progress.
So far journalists and pundits were neither for nor against New Colleges. Journalists covered the topics, methods, successes and mis-steps of the five-day Insight-like seminar in great detail. By Christmas 2033, a dozen or more papers were published in academic journals of psychology and group process on various aspects of WSC-2033.
Many voters and pundits applauded how political progress 2025–2075 was accomplished not in dry, boring House and Senate meetings. Rather, legislative proposals and groundwork emerged from celebratory, lively, Summer Conferences, held in huge tents. Later in the Fall, when House and Senate re-convened, the creative ferment of each summer conferences was sifted thru, gems polished into proposals, proposals finalized into bills, and bills passed as laws in the House, Senate and White House. This pipeline came to characterize how Women In Congress preferred to work the political process. Many celebrated how it was almost 180 degrees different from the stuffy, boring political process males subjected each other to, 1950–2022.
Looking back on the Paid Year of National service; and, Regen Agriculture Colleges, journalists and pundits understood WinC’s summer conferences were an effective public “pipeline” for grassroots proposals; which then, could be made into legislative bills, and passed into law. Both of these successes improved quality of life for the working class. Both efforts were effective education for millions of voters who who had never seen the federal government work to benefit the lives of working people. Journalists and pundits understood if momentum for New Colleges continued to build among the public, this project too would likely become reality.
Summer Conferences in more cities
With strong attendance at Summer Conferences, other cities were inspired to either simul-cast; or, organize their own separate, parallel Conferences. The first unaffiliated parallel Conference in a foreign nation, Canada, began in 2026. By 2034, parallel Women’s Summer Conferences were held in five foreign nations. The topics, material and scripts of some past Conferences was possible to re-purpose into conferences in new nations and into new languages. Replicating Conferences in additional cities, combined repurposing “greatest hits” presentations, sessions and exercise sequences; and, trying out new exercise sequences; and, new facilitators.
National discussion: Who are New Colleges for?
After WSC-2033 and its five day Insight Seminar like training, many more Women In Congress; and, the general public, was excited about the New Colleges Project. Now renamed “Experiential Insight Colleges,” not surprisingly, the simpler name “New Colleges” persisted wherever useful-easier.
Clearly, the “cake was baking in the oven.” The delicious smell was discussed at many levels of public discourse. Journalists were naturally attracted. They started interviewing college-age students, “What do you think Insight Experiential Colleges will be like?” and, “What would you like them to be?” and, “Would you enroll?”
These nationally broadcast “student in the street” interviews alerted the War Room and Writers Room to a great vagueness in the public mind about the goals and methods of the program.
New College principals knew the answer for this was local town hall presentations with live Q&A sessions. They simply were not planning to do these so quickly!
Principals also knew multiple town hall meetings would need to be produced and staffed by interns. By Nov. 2033, this aspect of the project took highest priority, even ahead of promoting the bones of the program: five pilot campuses in five different locations, to open in Fall 2035.
Colleges were graduating more Cultural Creatives
In the 1980s, for the first time, 63% of all us citizens had at least some college education. The “factory style,” “cattle” approach to mass education, begun in the 1880s, stopped working well. A Cultural Creatives approach should have come in — yet did not. The quality of curriculum and teaching methods declined correspondingly.
If your audience is college-educated, if your audience is already used to thinking for themselves — at least somewhat — they are less interested in your leadership or in how much you know. Educated learners are more and more interested in what they know and what they can learn from their own experience (see “spinning straw into gold,” Chapter 28).
To some degree, the highly educated, have internalized teachers and teaching. A speakers at Monday Lunch with Experts explained it this way, “When I was a child, teaching and teachers came to me from the outside. When I became a woman, I became the teacher; my teachers stayed alive inside me.”
This is the genius of effective higher education, what it imparts. Prior to 2030, male-minded college administrators were too busy re-shaping endowment funds into hedge funds. They did not notice the changes in their own student body. Students themselves were too young to clearly articulate how their needs had evolved.
Piscean Age group process, Scholasticism (12th century Italy) of “teacher leads, students follow” remains age-appropriate — in Grades 1–5. In Grade Six and progressively up the grades and into college, the age-appropriateness of the external teacher declines precipitously (a Waldorf-methods K-12 insight). The Aquarian Age of education begins to come into its own and dominates thru graduate school.
“Awakening the Inner Teacher” caught on with the public and journalists. External teachers and professors can only facilitate this. If you have a healthy Inner Teacher, you can learn from other people and learn from your own experience. Outer teachers become increasingly secondary. The Writers Room came to understand at a deep level how New College college teachers would have to teach less and facilitate more in classrooms.
Academic researchers in 2045 did research and field visits to document New Colleges instructional methods. Compared to group process in colleges in 2020 and earlier, they found, 50% of group process changed. it changed away from information delivery; and towards, interpersonal and intrapersonal learning.
Higher education creates Cultural Creatives
Effective higher education, Grade Six thru PhD, creates Cultural Creatives, more than any other single factor possible to identify.
The more higher education an individual consumes, the more likely you are to value thinking for yourself (critical-independent thinking). The more likely you are to want to use your talents to make the world better; and, to see thru the manipulative ploys of would-be populist demagogues. The more likely you are to become a self-propelled problem solver, optimistic and solution-focussed.
Effective higher education, Grade Six thru PhD, creates Cultural Creatives, moreso than any other single factor possible to identify.
The more higher education an individual consumes, the more likely you are to value thinking for yourself (critical-independent thinking). The more likely you are to want to use your talents to make the world better; and, to see thru the manipulative ploys of would-be populist demagogues. The more likely you are to become a self-propelled problem solver, optimistic and solution-focussed.
More women conceive of themselves as CCs
As the Monday Lunch series progressed, elected Women In Congress began to conceive of themselves as CCs. They began to hear and remark, on hearing Cultural Creative values, in each others conversations.
Women began thinking of their most responsive and loyal voters as working class CCs and white collar CCs. As Women expanded their awareness of CCs in all classes as their most valuable allies and supporters, they quickly come up against a famous obstacle, the obstacle of “cat herding.” You can’t herd cats. They each want to go their own way.
“EDS an HP Company ‘Cat Herders’” (one minute video) -
dg-cat-herding
Women who were more psychologically oriented asked, “Do we have any good language to think and talk about CCs?”
This topic was addressed in a talk and interactive milling exercises about Please Understand Me (1978), MBTI and 16Personalities — https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types#diplomats
This scheme of personality typology is the simplest way to think and talk about Cultural Creatives. Unlike many typologies, MBTI employs a modern four quadrant system. This grounds it in our body of habits, our Habit Body. This makes it more tangible, stable and reliable than personality typologies based on seven or 12 or 32 or 64 categories.
What women Writers were most hungry for, was tools to create LIVE consensus. Alas, this was not quite the task of New Colleges. This impulse, towards healthy consensus, bore fruit only later in United Nations 2.0 in the 2050s.
Now it was time to get serious, make a serious, detailed statement of what New Colleges were to be; and, Plan for hiring and training interns to sell this to the public.
