Prefigurative Education: a Discovery At Johnston College

Abstract

This article argues that Johnston College's contract system of learning pro vided for a prefigurative education. It enabled students and faculty to learn how to learn. The argument has both autobiographical and ethnographic dimensions to it. Hachiro Yuasa and Maurice E. Troyer, two of the founders of International Christian University in Tokyo where I attended as a member of its charter class in the 1950s, impressed upon me that education was more than a transmission of cultural knowledge. They helped me to anticipate that ideas and ideals, however radical or lofty they might be, could never meet the contingencies of life ahead of us. We needed a vision that transcended the creations of the past, a rudder that would steer us in the murky water of the future. In the 1960s, Solon T. Kimball taught me to view education anthro pologically (or "synergically," to use a more fashionable term). I learned that the time-honored style of supervisory education, however deeply entrenched in our civilizations (from Confucius and Socrates on down), was clearly a relic of the past posing a great threat to our capacity for "adaptive radiation" to survive in the future. Through participation in the establishment of Johnston College in the 1970s, I came to recognize that the needed vision for mean ingful survival would articulate itself only if we, the older generation, dared to engage in a genuinely reciprocal relationship of learning with the younger. The Johnston contract system served as a vehicle of such reciprocity, a rev olutionary alternative to supervisory education.