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The Current Director of The Johnston Center, Yasuyuki Owada, writes about his idea of the importance of contracts. He uses a term coined by Margaret Meade, prefigurative , to differentiate the kind of education that must take place in modern society, compared to the kind that had to take place before this Century (postfigurative). The essense of this distinction lies in the question of whether or not old value and knowledge systems are appropriate ways to educate young people. In a prefigurative education, the instructors must engage in a process of discovery along with the students, whereas in a postfigurative education the instructor's purpose was simply to pass down knowledge directly to the students.
Owada's claim is that the process of contracting itself, combined with student evaluation of courses and professors, was the essence of what made Johnston education prefigurative.
Through participation in the establishment of Johnston College in the 1970s, I came to recognize that the needed vision for meaningful survival would articulate itself only if we, the older generation, dared to engage in a genuine reciprocical relationship of learning with the younger. The Johnston contract system served as a vehicle for such reciprocity, a revolutionary alternative to supervisory education.[21]
Yet, that paper cannot (and does not claim to) avoid the simple, obvious observation that it is only with the right professors and the right students that this kind of learning can take place. Yes, the contracts did provide a method for prefigurative education; according to Owada, then, they were certainly necessary, but not sufficient.