Ch.34 FAQS for prospective students and parents
In Chapter 34 a public FAQ was published for prospective students, parents and the public.
Q: Why did we feel it necessary to re-write all core college courses and teaching methods?
A: Colleges were increasingly out of calibration with the needs of high school seniors; and, the world they were entering as college grads.
QUOTE
“Students today no longer come to the university to educate themselves. Instead, they throw themselves down in front of teachers like a pile of boards to be turned into furniture” ~ William Albrecht, PhD
END Q
How did this happen? For 200 years or more, patriarchal males had boxed Humanities into only what Patriarchal males believed males had thought and done in the past. High school seniors were increasingly ready for college curriculum and teaching methods to challenge them appropriately (see Joseph Chilton Pearce on teenagers). Few Humanities courses and few professors, stimulated students to do the work of gaining insight into their own humanness, the humanness of others; and, how to set internal~external boundaries, organize flow with relationships.
The College Crisis of 2029–2030 prompted us to re-think colleges to train learners for the changing job-scape of stewards of Team Human and SpaceShip Earth, in the 2030s.
Experiential Insight Colleges liberal arts are driven by truly-human values, those values relevant and sustainable for the next seven generations.
The end of “ivory tower learning”
Everywhere young adults do have access to college education, people are cracking the sedate, quiet, cosmic “egg” of “ivory tower learning.” They are catching the vision of colleges re-made for the 99%, not for the 1%. This set of FAQs was produced in response to public demand for info on how New Colleges is re-shaping liberal arts education.
Q: How will classroom instruction be changed?
A: The New Colleges Project Core Group takes a hard line in three areas of college fundamentals:
1) To move from Violent Communication to Compassionate Communication on multiple levels of interaction, as many levels as possible:
- between adult admin staff,
- between teachers and students; and lastly,
- between students and students. After each semester, students receive a written evaluation-assessment of their Interpersonal Competencies. This becomes part of your permanent record, your EQ score. See attached draft assessment. We have a plan to avoid both unnecessary rigidity and Political Correctness. Come and see. Ask us questions.
2) College administration staff and teacher faculty meetings, must be run according to Best Practices in both:
- Interpersonal Competency; and,
- in Facilitating Group Process.
No more corporatized college hierarchies. Every face-to-face meeting of eight or more must have a Program Committee tasked with minimizing boring meetings and maximizing how each meeting meets multiple authentic needs of all attendees.
3) Experiential Insight Colleges is a journey of re-making colleges one student, one professor and one administrative staff person, at a time.
Young learners will have opportunity to use college to make and/or re-make their own myth, their own Hero Journey. Students will be asked to talk and write about this. Legacy faculty returning as New Colleges faculty, will be asked to talk and write about this. Administrators referred to personnel for any reason, will be asked:
- How they picture themselves growing in the next two, five and ten years; and
- What motivates them (see Motivational Mapping).
This is how to get beyond buzz words and buzz phrases, beyond empty, superficial symbols and memes of “progress.”
We are willing to make errors here — and once pointed out — learn from every error.
Two kinds of teacher-facilitator texts
Classroom facilitator texts are either:
- For new teachers, Open Court-like textbooks, where every minute of each class is scripted; with, what to do and how to do it. These are much larger than student texts. Classroom facilitator texts contain suggested live interactive exercises and partner exercises for most class periods. As much as possible, alternative second and even third interactive exercises are described with instructions giving classroom facilitators choice of which exercise is best for this class at their time (For example, an extraverted and introverted exercise is given for each topic where interaction is suggested. You choose which to do).
Most of the work for Classroom facilitators is to review the next days’s lesson plan in the text; and, makes notes about which exercises he or she wishes to use with this group of learners, at this time. in this way, “Doing the right thing, at the right time, with the right people, for the right reasons” is always encouraged.
Or,
- For more experienced teachers, Waldorf-style Roy Wilkinson “recipe cookbooks” for each teaching block of four to six weeks. These permit more originality and improvisation, for those teachers looking for this.
FYI Classroom facilitators are required to have a teaching credential and take a three month summer training prior to first year of classroom instruction.
Q: If 50% of classrooms is partner exercises, does college become all fun and games?
A: Here’s how we address this question internally: Does each classroom lesson plan have a healthy balance between student’s Inner Game of Life; and, student’s Outer Game of Life? This is how our teacher-facilitators are trained to think about lessons.
We also balance lessons and curriculum between “now-oriented” face-to-face social processes (Outer Game) with EQUAL EMPHASIS on written papers and public speaking (Inner Game preparation). In this way learners are led to more balance and better balance internally and externally. They develop capacities in both brain hemispheres; they develop intelligences in both gut-brain and head-brain.
Q: If 50% of classroom time it taken up with exercises, does this make college classes into therapy groups?”
A: This is the other most-asked question. New Colleges would be UNnecessary if old male-led colleges led students to a closer balance of inner~outer expressions. This did NOT happen. Colleges graduated seniors who were 95% invested in the Outer Game of Life, only 5% invested in their own Inner Game of Life. So the most useful priority of New Colleges is to redress this imbalance.
How NC education differs from the colleges today’s parents attended — can’t be helped. To mix metaphors — if SpaceShip Earth is to pull out of its crash and burn arc — there is little sense to cut off the dog’s tail a little at a time.
Q: If 50% of classroom time is live exercises, won’t students be over-whelmed with their own unresolved personal issues? Isn’t this just unproductive naval-gazing? How will they focus and learn useful marketplace skills?
A: One answer is, “Think about your own life. Take one week of your recent life. If we look at only your waking time, not sleep, what per-cent of your waking life is spent with or thinking about other people?
In the USA, research on this is the average number is two-thirds, 66% of your time is spent with or thinking about other people?
Learning to get along with other people, learning to think and behave calmly when others are upset emotionally, learning to appreciate and value diverse viewpoints — there is no more useful competency. Good physical health is the only other very large “competency” for life-long wellness. After college, grads go out into a world of people. We want them to have Best Practice tools at their fingertips” and “on the tip of their tongue.”
Q: Are New Colleges for everyone, all college-age students?
A: We’re not sure. This is part of the experiment. What we are pretty sure of is, if NCs perform as expected, older adults, who attended earlier colleges, are likely to be a 1/4 to 1/3 of freshman classes in about three years after opening.
Why? Well, the way old males used to talk about this was “creative disruption.” As early as 2015, for instance multiple big voices on Twitter echoed how both college education and germ-drug-surgery medicine were both ready for major “creative disruption.” What happened? The expected creative disruption never took place. Covid and Male Gender Collapse happened first. New Colleges are the most bold attempt at creative disruption for colleges in what — 500 years? If NCs catch on with younger generations, older adults and education professionals will enroll to learn what we did and how to do it. They will take this back to their cities and countries and replicate it locally, according to their needs.
Another answer to our question is: New Colleges are for Cultural Creatives and those likely to become Cultural Creatives.
Old colleges failed in part because they tried to be all things to all students and all stakeholders. Old colleges failed because their idea of “best and brightest” was a cockeyed scheme to perpetuate corrupted Patriarchy’s one-sided domination over women, children and Nature. Outside of tech and financials, identifying and promoting Best Practices in other fields of endeavor fell by the wayside.
Another answer to your question is, “New Colleges come to make the world more wonderful for the 99%, not the 1% or even the elite 10%.”
If NCs do NOT graduate young adults willing to serve the 99%, in local communities, and around the world — we will keep tweaking things until they do.
We estimate by the year 1700, old churches and religions stopped being the heart-beat of new, progressive culture. The 1980s Reagan Revolution of the rentiers and corporations against the New Dealers included making all colleges more like corporations so they would stop being the heart beat of new progressive culture.
By the 1990s, corporate consumerism filled the cultural void vacated by churches, colleges and libraries. Atheistic, consumer corporate culture became the heart beat of mainstream culture. Colleges became the handmaidens of corporate donors.
What’s happening in Fall 2035 is an experiment. We’re re-making colleges. We have a great deal of support from many directions; including, from newer corporations, those which are worker-owned and worker-run. These newer workplaces are starving for executive talent who wish to stay connected with the workplace floor — not with the ups and down of stock prices and shareholder dividends.
Public Town Hall experiences, Q&A
If your local community is in the running for one of the five pilot program campuses, interns will be coming to hold local town halls to address all questions. We want communities educated about the aims and methods of New Colleges.
During toxic Patriarchy (1100–2024), males were addicted to outdated talking-head formats: lecture formats, interviews; and, limited value Q&A formats. If you are male, if competition-control is your game, you prefer head-oriented formalized, machine-like group process. This is termed “hierarchy.” It works for herding and controlling plants, cattle and herd animals. Machine-like group process does not work, cannot not work, to manage people who can and like to, think for themselves.
Between 1965–1995, Best Practices in Group Process took many strides forward; yet, males at virtually every level of society were uninterested. Between 1965–1995, large group learning seminars, such as Insight Seminars, employed and took further, a variety of these newer Best Practices. Yet, these methods were rarely if ever adapted into college classroom teaching. By 2030, this change was long overdue.
Q: What kind of graduate will New Colleges produce?
A: This requires a longer response:
The shortcomings of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
When in the early 1990s, New York Times journalist Daniel Goleman stumbled upon “emotional intelligence,” he knew he had found a journalistic goldmine, a niche he could write about; and if the book did well, travel a lucrative lecture circuit on.
The long history of group therapy began at the end of WWII. EQ methods and beneficial outcomes were known within humanistic psychology (1955–1975); and, within the the human potential movement (roughly 1965–1985). Yet these were fringe movements with little to no academic standing.
Dan knew inside East Coast and Ivy League colleges and corporations, EQ was a “foreign land” and a “foreign language.” As a reporter, Dan made it his business to bring the ideas and benefits of EQ to this wealthy audience and make them better-known. He got the whole messy business of healthy relationships down to two letters EQ. His male audiences loved this.
Thanks to Dan’s writing, lectures and promotion, between 1995–2010, many more people were exposed to EQ; and, able to penetrate it more deeply beyond its abstract veneer.
To male academics and corporate types, EQ took on many positive projections. If personified, EQ would be a big man with EQ written in large letters across his chest; who is, more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet (saves struggling marriages); and, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound (such as improving academic achievement among all students).
Male business authors of the 2010s went so far as claim EQ as the hero for today’s “emotional decay:” EQ can address drug abuse, the rising divorce rate, school violence, psychological disorders, etc, etc.
Between 1995–2010, among corporations and others with no counseling nor psych background, the hope was EQ will be the magic bullet to allow, create, promote empathy, optimism, and, self-control — outcomes no other psych topics — including Martin Seligman’s 1990s Positive Psychology were able to make operational.
Daniel knew for corporate types, if they could not measure EQ results — results did not exist. EQ promised a way forward to train people and measure results. Yet this never materialized in the EQ community.
Reference
Above is reduced and adapted from “Can we improve emotional intelligence?” in Emotional Intelligence; Perspectives on Education and Positive Psychology (2008) by Cassady and Eissa (editors) p. 25–26 In Books.Google.com
Q: How can Insight Colleges replace “Greed is good” education?
dg-gordon Gekko explainer
dg-gordon gekko charisma
A: We believe the greatest damage old Patriarchy colleges did was producing graduates who took Gordon Gekko at face value when he intoned, “Greed is good!” This is the mafia-like thinking at the roots of too many male-led institutions. New College principals intend our curriculum to do two things:
- Uncover, expose and release old male-mafia-like thinking and mental constructs,
- Make room for new win-win concepts, methods and hands-on practice with sustainable values and ethics.
Q: How and why did old male-led liberal arts institutions fail?
A: No simple answer here either. Several months of presentations at Monday Lunch With Experts revealed a pattern of failure in all cultural institutions led by males. Orgs, businesses and institutions which did thrive and grow, were too often Dr. Frankenstein creations, extracting wealth from Nature, people and communities, not making SpaceShip Earth more resilient and sustainable. This topic is taken up in our four-year History curriculum (see later chapters).
What was learned in brief? The pattern is cultural institutions fail primarily from the top down. Once adult group process at the top loses its heartfelt quality, democratic processes at lower levels deteriorates, becomes mere ritual, habit and conformity to power norms.
Reversing this trend without outside consultants skilled in Best Practices in Group Process is virtually impossible. Briefly, the quality of group process in an org defines its culture. This is explored, discussed and debated in our Communications core course, a transformed psychology-sociology core course (see later chapters).
More and more worker-owned businesses were finding out in the 2030s, simply having a building, low overhead, congenial workmates, low debt and high consumer demand — does not guarantee a harmonious workplace. Worker-owned businesses can become hierarchical and unhappy places to work almost as quickly as corporate workplaces.
The crucial difference? The health and quality of face-to-face adult relations.
Q: How do you define “Best Practices”?
A: In the 2030s, we can no longer afford to preserve old, unworkable patriarchal male norms, ideas, methods and rhetoric. If college graduates do not learn healthy values of social acceptance and tolerance in college — it’s unlikely graduates will learn these values out in the corporate world. In corporate culture, too often primitive defaults of selfishness, prejudice, bias, superstition and blame (scapegoating) dominate.
Better idea: If method X, or Y or Z is beneficial to the 99% of people, to 99% of animal life, to 99% of the oceans, air and forests — AND — likely to be beneficial for the next seven generations of children; then, X or Y or Z is a Best Practice for Team Human and SpaceShip Earth.
How to redeem and repair culture? The New College War Room and Writers Room are determined to explore this question to its practical, workable, brick-and-mortar solution, whatever it takes.
Q: what is “interpersonal competency”
A: Our aim in New Colleges is “Relationship competency” or “interpersonal competency” first for women first; then, for men. Mothers teach the children. Why? On these topics women teach the men.
How to teach the women? Constructivist (hands-on, face-to-face practice) in a lively variety of formats. Don’t prescribe this; don’t talk about it. Demonstrate and allow learners to experience “relationship competency.”
New Colleges Project has written into its founding document, a strong commitment-consensus to emotional transparency. We believe “Emotional transparency — often vulnerability — is beautiful.”
Q: What impact will NCs have on K-12 education?
A: Once a new college curricula and methods are stabilized, and they receive good reviews, these Best Practices will automatically trickle out and down to other colleges and down to K-12. Eventually, appropriate changes spread out into all adult workplace environments. Finally, they trickle into the living room, into family life.
Q: How will you discuss and teach “honesty” and “humility”?
A: The H factor of personality; Why Some People are Manipulative, Self-entitled, Materialistic and Exploitive — and Why It Matters for Everyone (2012) by Le and Ashton, has proved to be the missing link of effective personality assessment. HEXACO improves on both earlier MBTI and the Five Factor tests
The “H-factor” stands for Honesty with Humility. This personality factor wasn’t studied in research psych until about the year 2000. Further study of other cultures confirmed the reality and relevance of a sixth polarity neglected in the Five Factor personality preference test: sincere and modest vs. deceitful, greedy and boastful (p.14)
The H-factor was the biggest, most significant advance in personality preferences (Personality typology) since the late 1970s version of MBTI thru Keirsey-Bates.
Measuring for the H-factor addressed the main problem of MBTI. MBTI was too polite, too even-handed. For all its elegance, it generated no way to profile, or even talk about, truly toxic, manipulative persons, those people with psychopathic tendencies. The H-factor self-evaluation solved this simply and elegantly. Test results also make clear to anyone interested, how to remedy a low H-factor score. A prescription for redemption and remediation is built-in.
Positive H-factor traits, translated from the original Korean: truthful, frank, honest, unassuming and sincere.
Negative H-factor traits, translated from the original Korean: calculating, hypocritical, pompous, conceited, flattering and pretentious. (pg. 13–14)
dg-HEXACO chart
To Learn More
The H factor of personality; Why Some People are Manipulative, Self-entitled, Materialistic and Exploitive — and Why It Matters for Everyone (2012) by Le and Ashton. Preview available in Books.Google.com
Q: What does “Teach less, facilitate more” mean?
A: Once an individual has a healthy Internal Teacher, he or she can more easily learn from other people; and, learn from the prior experience of themselves and others. Outer teachers become less needed.
New College principals believe this is the genius of effective higher education. At its best, for students wiling to learn, the Inner Teacher can be awakened. External teachers and professors can model and facilitate Awakening the Inner Teacher. Each learner internalizes worthy external teachers to diverse degrees.
In older language, what was conspicuous by its absence in old college textbooks and classrooms was:
- Teaching to multiple intelligences,
- Cooperative, collaborative learning methods,
- Teaching social-emotional literacy, and
- Teaching critical thinking to equip learners to deal with daily onslaughts of advertising and propaganda.
To convey competency in any of the above requires engaging methods far beyond, “open brain, add information, test periodically, graduate when full” (Barbara Shell, NorthCarolina Waldorf School).
Q: How will college textbooks be different?
A: Insight Colleges transform old, 40-pound college textbooks into two texts, a student text and a teacher-facilitator lesson plan “recipe book.” Outside of STEM classes, Insight Colleges will have no more expensive, pre-digested 600 page bricks.
Student texts are two-fold, article handouts on the topic at hand; and, “recipe books” (rubrics), for written papers and oral presentations. Each student assignment will have a published rubric describing in detail what a quality work product looks like, its length, what it sounds like, how footnotes are to be formatted, number of spelling errors. The rubric also publishes the grading scale criteria for each work product.
Included in each work product rubric is criteria for how much outside resources and literature is to be accessed, how it is to be accessed; if needed, where it is to be accessed; and, within what time frame. In this way New Colleges emphasizes not information itself; rather New Colleges emphasizes Best Current Practices in how to access information. Outside of STEM topics, this is what is useful in real-world workplaces.
With re-writing of courses and texts going well, the War Room turned its attention to the extraverted functions of New Colleges, marketing, promoting and selling five pilot program campuses to a national audience.
