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From 1971 until the last few years of the seventies, ``programs'' were a very important and significant part of a Johnston education. Programs were run by faculty and students, with and without outside grant money. One of the main purposes of these programs was to offer real-life experiences for students who felt their academic experiences were too divorced from reality. Additionally, Johnston was following the idea that a purely academic education is not a full education. One of the best-known successes was a part of the Action program. With funding first from the federal government, groups of students worked as ``probation counselors for juvenile offenders'' at an Indio juvenile insitiution about an hour from campus. Eventually this was such a success for both Indio and Johnston that Indio funded part of the program.
The success for the programs seems to have been dependent on two conditions: excited, effective management (usually by a Johnston professor); a ``sharply focused context in a setting far removed from ordinary academic life. It embodied the Johnston entrepeneurial style at its best.'' Regular contact with the organizing faculty member was almost always essential to maintain an idea ``how their work was fitting in with their academic program.'' Some programs, like the Indio experience, were designed for many students. Others were designed for individual internships.
Action was only one of the programs at Johnston College. There were two other kinds of programs as well. The first, which included Cooperative Education, student-run internships and the Wilderness Program, shared Action's basic assumption that experiential learning was an indispensable part of undergraduate education. In these programs students went out into the world to learn. The second group of programs had precisely the opposite goal: projects such as the University Without Walls wanted to draw working adults back onto the college campus to add theoretical learning to life experiences. Both, of course, valued education based on a mix of theory and practice.[17]
Cooperative Education was run by a faculty who ``contacted government agencies and businesses to arrange internships, preferably with salary.'' Though it enjoyed remarkable success, Cooperative Education disappeared when its three-year grant ran out and ``Johnston's chronic poverty prevented continuing the program.''
In community service, homestays, in-service clinical training, transpersonal-spiritual experiences, and working internships, Johnston College offered a rich set of possibilities to the student who wanted ``hands-on'' education. Whatever the administrative problems raised by some programs, and whatever the academic resistance to others, the family of experiential programs at Johnston is strong testimony to the power of McCoy's vision. Johnston at its zenith did in fact make real McCoy's idea that education must reach out into the world and also deep inside the individual learner, to turn experience into a form of enlightenment.[17]
The same kinds of things could be seen as happening at both Johnston and Hampshire. That is, the educations students receive are becoming increasingly theoretical, with little or no connection to the world. At Hampshire, Div 1 investigations and experiments have been replaced (in the minds of many) in language and ideology by the Division 1 experience. Now they may be replaced by Division 1 seminars, which may pave the way for them to be completely replaced by Division 1 classes. I asked Jeff Keays[SEE FOOTNOTE] about whether the Programs seemed to provide the same kind of practical contact they used to. ``The past tense is appropriate here...''[12] he responded, ``practice is no longer.''