THE PEARSON INTEGRATED HUMANITIES PROGRAM ("IHP")

" 'To awaken wonder was the major work of the muses and of the Integrated Humanities Program,' writes Robert Carlson, professor of English at Casper College in Wyoming. Carlson pursues the role of poetic knowledge in education in the same way that has been surveyed throughout this study:

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Western tradition has divided the long itinerary of liberal education into three stages each contributing something of its own to the three purposes of liberal education - to humanize, to acculturate, to make happy. These are the stages of poetry, liberal arts, and sciences.  According to Plato, the first step in the long itinerary of liberal education is the elementary or poetic stage.. These descriptions of the poetic stage of development mention the powers within the young student-senses, memory, imagination. Poetic education begins to humanize by developing these powers."

Carlson's book, Truth On Trial: Liberal Education Be Hanged, also includes a chapter that documents in detail how poetic education in the IHP begins to humanize by developing these powers in one particular student. And, it is at this point that I now turn directly to the IHP, for it is one thing to have traced the philosophical history of poetic knowledge and presented a case for its rightful place in learning and education - theoretically. It is quite another matter to have discovered where these ideas were actually applied, as in the case of Maslacq, France, and more recently in America, where in the last years of the IHP I had the opportunity to know and experience the poetic mode in practice. That this program existed at all is extraordinary, given the almost complete demise of traditional humanities programs in the United States; that it lasted for nearly fifteen years in the midst of some of the most intoxicated times for educational "change" and that it was so clearly successful seems to be in the order of the miraculous.

Dennis Quinn c. 1975 Frank C. Nelick John Senior

In 1971, three professors at the University of Kansas, Dennis B. Quinn, Franklyn C. Nelick, and John Senior, began a four-semester program for freshman and sophomores called The Pearson Integrated Humanities Program. The IHP, as it came to be called, was taught, as we shall see, according to the principles of the poetic mode of knowledge, carefully adapted for a young college-age audience.

This was a time of great upheaval on many American campuses. The tendency, even now, might be to recall these times of campus unrest as largely related to the protest against the war in Vietnam and student activism in regard to civil rights. However, the original catalog printed for the IHP reveals another aspect of student dissatisfaction in the early seventies, at least, at the University of Kansas.

In recent years college freshmen and sophomores have complained with increasing bitterness that they are treated as second-class citizens at the big Universities. Many underclass courses are taught by graduate students rather than by full time faculty, beginning classes are routine and dull; the underclassman is a mere number, never knowing or being known by any faculty member, the freshman-sophomore curriculum, consisting principally of unpopular "required" courses, is fragmented incoherent, and directionless; typical college courses have nothing to do with the fundamental questions of life.

The IHP was a curious approach, by modern standards, in meeting these fundamental criticisms. It used the traditional great and good books, yet it was not a Great Books Program - far from it. It received the traditional receptive attitude of the students attending lectures, but they were not allowed to take notes; they had to listen. In fact, these twice-a-week, hour-and-twenty minute meetings were not lectures at all but, rather, conversation between the three professors, one from classics and two from English, who had come to know one another through their shared ideas of education and had become friends.

The conversations were, by design, unrehearsed and spontaneous, begun by simply taking up some moment from the Odyssey, or from Herodotus, or The Republic that interested one of the teachers, then exploring it with anecdotes, stories, connections with other readings, following wherever the theme took them. Now and then, they would acknowledge directly the presence of the nearly two hundred students in the hall, but for the most part the experience was one of listening and watching a real conservation take place among three men who were themselves sincerely caught up in their own topic and friendship.  As a result, students were caught up with them, for the mode of conversation, as opposed to canned lectures or the tedium of analyzing a text, is a poetic thing, and was the intention of the professors not to talk about teaching in the poetic mode but to actually do it. Precisely because of the serious attention needed to conduct such spontaneous talks, it was a rare conversation that was not complemented by an intense silence as the students discovered that they could, after all, really listen when the distraction of note taking was laid aside; and it was an equally rare class period that did not erupt at some point in real laughter. Laughter of this kind is also poetic in that it comes to us a s a surprise of suddenly seeing the connection between two dissimilar things. One of the recurring themes of the IHP was that while life was not "fun", it certainly was often funny.

During the week, between Tuesday and Thursday lectures, smaller groups of students met to memorize poetry, truly by memory, since no text was used, but conducted by another student who had himself the poems of the program in his memory. In this way, the professors spoke of doing poetry, rather than studying or analyzing it. It was in the order of music and gymnastic at the same time, since in the first place most of the poems memorized were lyrical and, in the second place, by withdrawing all books or handouts of poetry, nothing came between the student and the poem, not even his eyes.

Don Quixote

The brochure for the IHP, and often topics of conversation, spoke of professions and careers more as vocations, as "callings" to a life's work, rather than the usual tired prospects for the top-dollar jobs of the day. These were invitations to consider being sailors, soldiers, cowboys, mothers and fathers of families, poets, and stressing the cultivation of crafts and farming. No wonder that the picture of Don Quixote was soon adopted, by the students, as the emblem for the program.

The professors of the IHP clearly recognized the steady falling off of students' abilities to read, speak, and write on a college level taken for granted only a generation ago. But the goal was never to improve test scores. They would say that the tests themselves and the entire system built up around such Cartesian measurement instruments were an indication of the problem in modern education.

In other words, everything in the IHP was, in one way or another, the result of the awareness of the poetic mode of knowledge. This was the awareness of wonder, in the books and in the teaching, and the awareness that these texts and much of the teaching needed to point the senses and emotions toward the objects of delight and wonder. This is why the IHP did not teach philosophy - Plato and Cicero, for example, were always read and commented on in the literary mode, never in terms of argument or debate. The atmosphere was intended to be meditative, not disputatious. Thus, the conversations replaced the modern sense of lecture and were closer to the medieval idea of lectio where the teachers spontaneously delivered a commentary on some text. This was, in turn, derived from the practice of the ancient rhetors, Cicero, for example, where the professors were aware and at ease working within this tradition. The students, as mentioned earlier, freed from the distraction of taking notes and trying to listen to the teacher with a book in hand at the same time, could now participate in this conversation among the teachers by being physically passive so that they could be emotionally and intellectually receptive as listeners. As the professors pointed out, to receive is not to do nothing: a baseball catcher does a great deal, but he is still the receiver of the activity of the pitcher. Furthermore, they explained to the s tudents that every conversation requires an attentive listener, alert and sympathetic; otherwise, the occasion deteriorates into mere discussion, a kind of noise, really, losing the meditative silence within which what is being said can be pondered. Listening then, it was explained, in this way is a poetic thing.

Smith Hall at Kansas University

Conversation, a word whose etymology was revealed by the professors to show how it meant to turn together around some subject, was a sign of friendship and an activity that involves the alertness of the whole person, not just the mind but the eyes and ears, noticing gestures and tone of voice that indicate meaning and nuance within the give and take of such dialogue. On the other hand, lecture appeals mainly to the intellect and even more so, to the extent lecture is prepared and planned, relies less and less on the intuitive connections within the memory of the speaker. In the end, lecture of this kind eliminates the surprise and delight in learning. The analogy of a traditional jazz band, improvising on a familiar theme, was used by the professors to describe their spontaneous conversations.

The example of these professors, teaching by way of their personal conversation, speaking as naturally as if around a table where a leisurely lunch was taking place, making quick connections with the similar and contrary ideas contained in the other books of the program, from daily life, or meandering, wandering around and around the topic, digressing to personal experiences relevant to the subject - all taught the students, indirectly at least, the joy of the memory and a healthy independence from books and notes and all the gimmicks so often used to keep this generation's attention. Also, it was the presence of the three professors in friendly, lively conversation that personalized the impersonal education decried by many students than and referred to in the IHP brochure. Usually, By the end of the semester, the professors knew most of the students' names, largely as the result of the continuing conversations that took place after class between the students and the teachers that often continued throughout the week in the teachers' offices with the smaller groups.

Given the fact that their physical childhood had passed and the students were in various stages of middle and late adolescence, direct early experience of reality in games, sports, and crafts was not possible. (It is instructive to mention that all the professors of the IHP believed or soon came to believe that what they were doing on the college level, in spite of the obvious success, was needed much sooner, beginning at the elementary level making the necessary adjustments in texts, etc.). More significantly, an entire preindustrial culture was missing from these students' experience, and in its place was our familiar modern life, artificial and insulated more and more from direct experience with nature and reality. Still, the IHP eventually added activities that led students closer to poetic experience. In addition to memorizing poetry, students also learned calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing. Night-time outings were organized for naked-eye stargazing where students learned to recognize several of the constellations and their main stars and the Greek stories that accompanied them. Each semester the students learned by heart several traditional songs, usually sung by the older students before lecture, so that by mid-semester one could hear an entire auditorium filled with the song lyrics of "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" or a Stephen Foster favorite. This quickly produced a sense of delight in the students, not only in the simple refrains but in the fact that now these poems and songs were placed within them and were part of who they were. This is what the professors meant by doing poetry, or song, as opposed to studying them. The senses and emotions were being called on to experience the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth, rather than offering mere definitions to be learned for an examination. Letting the stars, the poems, the songs come in directly through their senses, learning to control a flowing ink pen with just a little careful attention so that their usual scrawls became beautiful written characters, was already accomplishing the end of poetic education.

Each spring, preparations began for the IHP waltz, an event that the student suggested and organized. Fellow students gave dance lessons, others saw to hiring an orchestra to play the music of Strauss, and the University ballroom was rented for the evening. Many of the female students made their own evening gowns, while the young men arrived in rented tuxedos. Many parents of the IHP students attended the annual spring waltz as well as professors from other departments of the University to gaze on this amazing transformation - a roomful of young people normally decked out in flowery tops and bell-bottom pants, now moving in time, like twirling blossoms on a clear pond of water, to the music of civilized nineteenth century Europe.

Literally and figuratively, in this way the IHP was a musical education, observing in poetry, dance, song, stargazing, and calligraphy, an understanding of what Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Shields, and Charlier all called for as preliminary and prerequisite music and gymnastic for humanizing the student prior to any advanced studies. The IHP neither encouraged nor discouraged higher studies beyond its program in any general way. What they offered was minimal for all. To become a scholar, to study philosophy or literature or law, was a decision for individual students in concrete cases.

Furthermore, the professors taught the books from the classics of literature, history, and philosophy in the poetic mode, rather than in any analytical way. Not only because many of the great books lend themselves to appreciation at the literary level, but also because of the deprivation of traditional culture in modern life, the professors presented these texts imaginatively to the students. They made use of concrete examples from everyday life, from traditional life, from childhood, all to give a vicarious experience of philosophy, history, and so on."

The six articles that follow this one eloquently detail the program, its mode and goals in the words of the IHP triumvirate - Quinn, Senior and Nelick together with a lecture on topic by Mortimer J. Adler delivered at KU in 1978 for the IHP.

Classics teachers need not apply.

 

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