“Antiochians know how to navigate the world with comfort."

[ConsAreLiars]

From Matthew Derr, now interim President of the now reviving Antioch College, from http://www.ysnews.com/stories/2009/07/070909_antioch.html :

“I came out of Antioch transformed,” he said. “Antiochians know how to navigate the world with comfort. We feel comfortable in our own skins and with finding our way.”

Some background. I graduated from Antioch and I think those three sentences describe exactly what it meant for me and what should be the highest possible goal for anything that gets called education. Yes, also a high degree of expertise in some things, and deeper understandings of many things, but those words really hit home in describing what was for me the very, very most valuable, the essence of what 'learning' means. Learning that we are all human, that we, in general tend to be helpful but that there are exceptions,

More background: Antioch College went bankrupt after starting up and spinning off the (still viable) Antioch University system. Efforts to continue the educational tradition the educational philosophy and practice conined in one strand and efforts to regain title to the campus and rehab the buildings in another, and a third group worked to maintain and continue the services provided in the 1000 acre Glen Helen nature preservation area.

Some links:
The Alumni org that raised the cash: http://alumni.antiochians.org/s/1050/start.aspx
The Yellow Springs off-campus educational philosophy continuation project (which also raised revival money): http://nonstopinstitute.org/
Glen Helen: http://antiochcollege.org/glen_helen/about_glen.html

A few more words about Derr regarding what was the Antioch experience behind those those three sentences:

"The only child of two longtime General Motors employees — his father was a foreman when he retired, and his mother worked on an assembly line — Derr was not the typical middle-class Antioch College student when he arrived in 1985 from his hometown near Flint, Mich. He felt challenged in many ways, he said, including during his first co-op in Atlanta, when he got off the plane with a job but absolutely no idea where he would live."

As a scholarship student from a small town working class background and income, with a lot of curiosity but limited experience, getting a job in NYC or DC or SF and arriving there with a little money, a promised job and nothing more, well that was perfect for allowing the transformation Derr describes.

These are the kinds of experiences anything called 'education' should provide, not rote recitations or coloring in 4-5 choice ovals on some form.

My kids have both taken different (very different from me and each other) and gotten to good (very different) places. But I think that if the Antioch work-study experience had been a part of their path, they would have valued it as highly as Derr and I do, and gained those same benefits.

For me, there are many instances where Antioch's work-study experiences empowered me far beyond what I as a HS student could have even imagined or wished for.

Coretta Scott King, Eleanor Holmes Norton. Steven Jay Gould, Rod Serling, and thousands you've never heard of,

Anyway. for those who know of Antioch or appreciate its mission or never even heard of it, good news.

[ConsAreLiars]

1. A late night kick for a very late night post a few might find interesting (nt)