Black Mountain: An Exploration in Creative Community

(for Ryan who seeks to learn and in doing so teaches me to pay attention)

"Josef Albers believed that learning was facilitated when students continually compared their different solutions for identical tasks - and also when each student compared his own work from earlier and later periods (Is the latter more or less? In what way is it more? In what way is it less than my former work?) All education, Albers believed, is self-education, but self-education best proceeds through comparison. We must teach each other, he continually said - and included himself: students and I, we want to learn together...for me education is not first giving answers, but giving questions. And if a student comes to me with a question, I consider it very carefully whether I should answer him or not. When I give him the answer to an execution, then I take away from him the opportunity to invent it himself and discover it himself. I say, Boy, I know I could answer you, but I prefer for your own profit not to tell you....' Teaching is never a matter of methods, he said, its a matter of art. Though he believes in systematic treatment and systematic learning and has always been known, both in and out of class, for austerity and rigor, Albers prefers to emphasize that in the end it is the heart, the inner participation in somebody else that accounts for success or failure in the classroom."

- Martin Duberman, Black Mountain - An Exploration in Community

Black Mountain College: PBS Site

Black Mountain College Project

Fully Awake: The Black Mountain Experience

Every moment there seemed alive in a way that few have since. This had to do with being asked to be fully awake, to be at a new threshold of perception, whether in class, in the work program, in our own work, or in the life of the community...It let us perceive how much we, each of us, had meaning in the process of the life of the community. That was our education.

- A.G. (Black Mountain College Student, 1943-1946)

Quote from Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds © 1990.

Pedagogy of BMC

A Location Constantly Reoccurring: Black Mountain Poetry

Influence of Black Mountain's Multi-Layered Poetry

Ray Johnson: Education Before Fame