The Midpeninsula Free University

MFU Articles Published by The Stanford Daily
1966

‘Experiment’ Started; Will Offer Education Beyond Classrooms

A program conducted mainly by graduate students and aimed at bringing the personal element back into education is being initiated on campus this fall.

Titled simply The Experiment, its courses will be primarily of the workshop and seminar variety.

Approximately 70 students had signed up to attend one or more of the seminars by the end of registration yesterday.

Course offerings for the fall include seminars on the American Youth in Revolt, Contemporary Education, Black Power, and Existentialism and Political Commitment, as well as workshops in photography, sculpture and poetry.

Single Requirement

The only requirement for our seminars is a belief that everything is not all right in our society today, Barry Greenberg, one of the founders of the program noted. Greenberg, who turned down an assistant professorship at Michigan State University to work on The Experiment, continued, We will be asking questions about contemporary issues, not, I hope, providing dogmatic answers.

The primary purpose of The Experiment, according to its publication Commitment, is to offer students an opportunity to integrate their educational experience with the questions, issues, and choices which deeply affect their lives…

The curriculum is based on two beliefs:

• Knowledge and the educational experience should not be used to open doors to social acceptability and security, but rather… to open doors to an understanding of one's self, one's society, and the relationship between the two.
• An excellent way to integrate the educational experience with this search for self and social understanding is to take the acquisition of knowledge out of a purely academic atmosphere.

New Campus Publication

The Experiment hopes to publish Commitment on a bi-weekly basis during the school year.

The group is registered as a voluntary student organization and hopes to be allowed to hold classes in university facilities.

At present, no academic credit is given for work done in the seminars of The Experiment, however several professors have indicated that they may give directed reading credit to students involved in the program.

Albert Guerard of the English Dept. noted that The Experiment could be a very valuable supplement to the current educational offerings at Stanford. They can offer courses dealing with contemporary issues such as black power, and East Palo Alto, that can't possibly be offered by the university, he said.

And, quite possibly, if some of their seminars prove very successful they might be later offered by the university, he added

Continuation of Seminar

The genesis of The Experiment was a seminar in existential thought at the Free University of Palo Alto last year. Founders of The Experiment view it as a practical continuation of that seminar.

In a sense, we're trying to put into effect some of the ideas on education that have been suggested by Dave Harris and others during the last year, Greenberg says.

Chief among these ideas is the belief that everything is basically all wrong with American society, and that American universities are playing a major role in preserving that society.

The university's major function is to prepare you for a social role, and this preparation primarily involves the mastering of socially useful… skills, The Experiment's publication says. In fact, many major universities are actively engaged in supporting and propagating the status quo.

The Question of Why

The Experiment hopes to bring the question of why to the forefront, and its catalogue of course offerings notes, it is our society's failure to concern itself with the question of why that leads many of us to criticize what America is doing.

The Experiment hopes to maintain a relatively unstructured approach to education, viewing its curriculum as fluid becoming rather than static being.

Courses are not rigidly defined entities. Teacher and learner proceed together, not in a hierarchical relationship.