Education Automation, Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies
Foreword by CHARLES D. TENNEY

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS, CARBONDALE AND EDWARDSVILLE
FEFFER & SIMONS, INC., LONDON AND AMSTERDAM
Copyright 1962
ISBN 0-8093-0137-7
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62 - 17620

My feeling about today’s meeting with you is first, that it is a tremendous privilege as a human being to stand with other human beings who are concerned fundamentally and deeply, as you are, with the process and further implementation of education and to be allowed to disclose to you what I think I have discovered regarding education’s trending evolutionary needs. I am quite confident that the Southern Illinois University’s new Edwardsville Campus studies are uniquely important.

Because President Morris has mentioned it in his introduction of me to this meeting, let me begin with some of my own student experiences at Harvard, for what I have to offer to you today springs from my several educational experiences. I am a New Englander, and I entered Harvard immaturely. I was too puerilely in love with a special, romantic, mythical Harvard of my own conjuring‹an Olympian world of super athletes and alluring, grown-up, worldly heroes. I was the fifth generation of a direct line of fathers and their sons attending Harvard College. I arrived there in 1913 before World War I and found myself primarily involved in phases of Harvard that were completely irrelevant to Harvard’s educational system. For instance, because I had been quarterback on a preparatory school team whose quarterbacks before me had frequently become quarterbacks of the Harvard football team, I had hoped that I too might follow that precedent, but I broke my knee, and that ambition was frustrated. Just before entering college I was painfully jilted in my first schoolboy into-love-falling. Though I had entered Harvard with honor grades I obtained only "good" to "passing" marks in my college work, which I adolescently looked upon as a chore done only to earn the right to live in the Harvard community. But above all, I was confronted with social problems of clubs and so forth. The Harvard clubs played a role in those days very different from today. The problems they generated were solved by the great House system that was inaugurated after World War I. My father died when I was quite young, and though my family was relatively poor I had come to Harvard from a preparatory school for quite well-to-do families. I soon saw that I wasn’t going to be included in the clubs as I might have been if I had been very wealthy or had a father looking out for me, for much of the clubs’ membership was prearranged by the clubs’ graduate committees. I was shockingly surprised by the looming situation. I hadn’t anticipated these social developments. I suddenly saw a class system existing in Harvard of which I had never dreamed. I was not aware up to that moment that there was a social class system and that there were different grades of citizens. My thoughts had been idealistically democratic. Some people had good luck and others bad, but not because they were not equal. I considered myself about to be ostracized or compassionately tolerated by the boys I had grown up with. I felt that my social degradation would bring disgrace to my family. If I had gone to another college where I knew no one, it would not have mattered at all to me whether or not I was taken into some society. It was being dropped by all those who had been my friends that hurt, even though I knew that they had almost nothing to do with the selecting. I became panicky about that disintegration of my idealistic Harvard world, went on a pretended "lark," cut classes, and was "fired."

Out of college, I went to work and worked hard. In no time at all, reports went to Harvard that I was a good and able boy and that I really ought to go back to college; so Harvard took me back. However, I was now considered a social maverick, and I saw none of my old friends; it hurt too much. Again I cut classes, spent all my year’s allowance, and once more was "fired." After my second "firing" I again worked very hard. If World War I hadn’t come along, I am sure the university would have taken me back again, and I am sure I would have been "fired" again. Each time I returned to Harvard I entered a world of gnawing apprehensions, not an educational institution, and that was the problem.

But I did get an education in due and slow course‹but an education largely of my own inquiring, experimenting, and self-disciplining. Forty-seven years later Harvard’s Dean Bundy, who is now one of Kennedy’s White House advisors, invited me to come back to Harvard in 1962 to be the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. This is regarded as an honor. The Norton professorship is a one-year appointment. The chair was founded because its donor felt that the university needed to bring in individuals who on their own initiative have long undertaken objective realizations reflecting the wisdom harvested by the educators, which realizations might tend to regenerate the vigor of the university world. Harvard fills this professorship with men who are artists, playwrights, authors, architects, and poets. The word poet in this professorship of poetry is a very general term for a person who puts things together in an era of great specialization wherein most people are differentiating or "taking" things apart. Demonstrated capability in the integration of ideas is the general qualification for this professorship. I am able to accept the Norton professorship for 1961-62 even though I am a professor on the faculty of Southern Illinois University because I have to be in residence at Harvard only for the months of February and March, 1962, when I am officially absent from Carbondale.

In the last thirty years of the half century that has passed since my Harvard fiasco, I have been invited as a lecturer, critic, or experimental seminarist to visit 106 universities around the world, and many of them quite frequently. I have had appointments, for instance, to Princeton University nine times, starting back in 1929, M. I. T. eight times, North Carolina State eight times, University of Michigan five times, Cornell University four times, and that’s the way it has gone. There have been many revisits, and all of my visits have been entirely a consequence of their inviting me to come. I developed a self-discipline long ago regarding exploration on the science, technology, philosophic, and economic frontiers which requires that I must not spend any time asking people to listen to me or to look at what I may be doing. If, however, what I am discovering seems to be of interest to others and they ask me what it is that I am working on, I will tell them. I am quite confident that if in the evolutionary processes we deliberately attempt direct personal exploitation of the economic advantages accruing to our personal scientific explorations, we inadvertently become preoccupied and prejudiced with the item we have to sell and are no longer free to explore scientifically with a wholesome intellectual integrity.

By my own rules, I may not profess any special preoccupation or capability. I am a random element. Considering these self-imposed conditions, I am happy that I have been asked back to the universities, and I am happy that several of them have seen fit to give me an honorary degree. At Washington University, where I had been a one-month visiting critic and lecturer for four successive years, the University gave me a degree of Doctor of Science, "with all the rights and privileges thereonto attached." I feel that this was not an exclusively honorary degree ; the circumstances were akin to those of a doctoral candidate. My degree was voted unanimously by the University faculty as a direct consequence of my campus work. Though I have degrees awarded by other leading universities under similar working or earned circumstances as Doctor of Arts, Doctor of Design, and Doctor of Humanities, I am confident that I am not professionally classifiable. I do know, however, from personal experience that there is nothing even mildly extraordinary about me except that I think I am durable and inquisitive in a comprehensive pattern. I have learned much; but I don’t know very much; but what I have learned, I have learned by trial and error. And I have great confidence in the meager store of wisdom that I have secured.

As a consequence of my university visiting, I have had about two thousand students who have worked with me in different parts of the world. As I go around the world I find these students active and doing well. When I arrive in New Delhi, Nairobi, or Beirut I find that the students know that I am coming. They are waiting for me with programs they have arranged, and I am able to assess the effect of the kind of learning and communication we have shared. I am confident that the boys I have worked with are trending to become strong citizens around the world. That, I find, is one of the best tests of the validity of whatever communicable wisdom I may have harvested and disbursed from my experiences.

My experience is now world-around. During one-third of a century of experimental work, I have been operating on the philosophic premise that all thoughts and all experiences can be translated much farther than just into words and abstract thought patterns. I saw that they can be translated into patterns which may be realized in various physical projections‹by which we can alter the physical environment itself and thereby induce other men to subconsciously alter their ecological patterning. My own conclusion is that man has been given the capability to alter and accelerate the evolutionary transformation of the a priori physical environment‹that is to participate objectively, directly, and consciously in universal evolution‹ and I assume that the great, complex integrity of omni-coordinate and inter-accommodative yet periodically unique and nonsimultaneously co-operative generalized principles, and their myriad of special case realizations, all of which we speak of as universe and may think intuitively of as God, is an intellectual invention system which counts on man’s employing these capabilities. If he does not do so consciously, events will transpire so that he functions subconsciously in the inexorable evolutionary transformations.

As a consequence of man’s having the faculty to apprehend patterns external to himself and the capability of altering those patterns, interesting changes in the conscious relationship of man to universe are now multiplyingly in evidence. Unlike any of the other living species, man has succeeded both consciously and subconsciously in greatly altering his fundamental ecological patterning. None of the other living species have altered their ecological patterning. All the species other than man are distinguishable throughout geologic and biologic history by their approximately unaltered ecological patterning. In the last half-century, man has graduated from a local twelve-mile radius daily domain into a world around multi-thousand-miles radius daily domain, as a consequence of his ability to alter his own ecological patterning.

I have for a third of a century been convinced that thoughts must be translated into patterns that can be articulated out of the organized capabilities of man and that these patterns, which can be translated from our thoughts into physical actions, then become utterly impersonal facilities that begin when adopted in emergencies to change the relative advantage of man spontaneously and subconsciously with respect to his total environment. It is a philosophic requirement of my comprehensive working hypotheses that the intellectually-projected tools which result in new ecological patternings must give man, consciously appreciable, advantage increase. My experience shows that these impersonal tools tend to eliminate many of the errors of conceptioning that men who have not translated their thoughts into experimental physical undertakings have heretofore imposed upon one another as inherited conventional thoughts and misinterpretations of their respective experiences‹misconceptions which they have hopefully and lovingly gone on relaying for ages from one generation to the next.

I am convinced that humanity is characterized by extraordinary love for its new life and yet has been misinforming its new life to such an extent that the new life is continually at a greater disadvantage than it would be if abandoned in the wilderness by the parents. For an instance of misconception extension there is my own case. I was born in 1895. The airplane was invented when I was nine years old. Up to the time I was nine years old, the idea that man could fly was held to be preposterous, and anybody could tell you so. My own boyhood attempts to make flying machines were considered wasted time. I have lived deeply into the period when flying is no longer impossible, but nonetheless a period in which the supremely ruling social conventions and economic dogma have continued to presuppose a non-flying-man ecology.

My daughter was not born into the kind of a world that I was; so she doesn’t have to struggle to sustain the validity of the particular set of spontaneously-logical conceptions that were pronounced "impossible" in my day, nor need she deal with the seemingly illogical concepts that the older life thought to be "evident"’ and "obvious" in my day. The new life is continually born into a set of conditions where it is easier for it to acquire more accurate information, generated almost entirely outside of family life and folklore, regarding what is going on in human affairs and in nature in general; and, therefore, the new life has the advantage of much more unshaken intellectual courage with respect to the total experiences than have its as yet living elders who have had to overcome these errors, but who retain deep-rooted delusively-conditioned, subconscious reflexes.

As a startling consequence of the as yet prevalent and almost total misconceptioning regarding traditional education, both formal and informal, I have heard the following problem discussed among leading scientists. A serious question arises when a university student demonstrates extraordinary capability in science as judged by our present academic criteria. The exceptionally high-ranking student has completed his graduate work, and if enabled to develop further there is high probability that he might be able to make important contributions to science and there through to society. There are funds available to foster the super education of this promising individual, but first there is a decision to be made concerning resources much more important than money. This man is going to have to be associated with some of the senior, proven, living scientists‹some of the very rare great men‹in order for the latter to find out whether the neophyte is a real front-rank scientist. The neophyte is going to have to be given the opportunity to grow in that association with the proven great one. Therefore, society is going to have to risk wasting some of the preciously meager remaining lifetime of its proven, really high-powered intellects, should the candidate fail to demonstrate exceptional capability. Whether that risk is warranted becomes the strategic question. As a consequence, the kind of examination procedure that our science foundations and other science leaders have developed is one in which they explore to discover whether this capable student is able to unlearn everything he has learned, because experience has shown that that is what he is going to have to do if he is to become a front-rank scientist. The frontiers of science are such that almost every morning many of our hypotheses of yesterday are found inadequate or in error. So great is the frontier acceleration that now in a year of such events much of yesterday’s conceptioning becomes obsolete.

I said I started a number of years ago exploring for ways in which the individual could employ his experience analytically to reorganize patterns around him by design of impersonal tools. To be effective, this reorganization must incorporate the latest knowledge gained by man. It also should make it an increasingly facile matter for the new life to apprehend what is going on. It should eliminate the necessity of new life asking questions of people who don’t know the answers, thereby avoiding cluttering up the new minds with bad answers which would soon have to be discarded. I felt that the evolving inventory of information "decontaminated" through competent design might be "piped" right into the environment of the home. Please remember my philosophy is one which had always to be translated into inanimate artifacts. My self-discipline ruled that it would be all right for me to talk after I had translated my philosophy and thoughts into actions and artifacts, but I must never talk about the thoughts until I have developed a physical invention‹not a social reform.

That is the philosophy I evolved in 1927 when at thirty-two I began my own thinking. I have been operating since then on the 1927 premises, looking exploratorily for tasks that needed to be done, which would, when done, provide tool complexes that would begin to operate inanimately at higher advantage for the new life. I am the opposite of a reformer; I am what I call a new former. The new form must be spontaneously complimentary to the innate faculties and capabilities of life. I am quite confident that humanity is born with its total intellectual capability already on inventory and that human beings do not add anything to any other human being in the way of faculties and capacities. What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed, so that by the time that most people are mature they have lost use of many of their innate capabilities. My long-time hope is that we may soon begin to realize what we are doing and may alter the "education" process in such a way as only to help the new life to demonstrate some of its very powerful innate capabilities.

I went to the World Affairs Conference in Colorado last week. At the meeting were many important individuals‹the ambassadors of Ghana, Nigeria, and so forth. Also participating
were economists, sociologists, and scientists, and among them was a Yale scientist, Dr. Omar Moore. Dr. Omar Moore, you may recall, was reported on in Time magazine last year. At Yale University in the Child Study Clinic, he began to be suspicious that there were drives in human beings other than those of fear and longing which have been the assumed fundamental drives. He developed a hypothetical working assumption that there was a drive of the new life to demonstrate competence, and began working with his own child when she was two and one-half years old. He took an electric typewriter and colored the keys to correspond with the touch system. He then colored his child’s fingernails to correspond with the keys each finger should operate. He had a hidden electric key, and when she didn’t match the correct finger to the typewriter key the circuit was not closed. When she put the correctly colored finger on it the key worked, and quickly she learned to match her fingers to the proper keys. Every time she touched a key with the proper finger, not only did it print on the paper, but a big letter also came up in a window. By the time the child was three she was typing swiftly with the touch system the stories that were generated in her imagination. She seemed to find it just as easy to communicate this way as by talking. Dr. Moore’s community and a number of his colleagues who happened to live in the same little town became fascinated, and began working experimentally with their children. There was a wave of excitement. These men say they used to like to get the children to bed early so they could have the evening to themselves, but now they hate to have the children go to bed early because everyone is so excited and stimulated by what this new life is demonstrating in capacity and capability. These are just some of the inklings corroborating what I am saying regarding very powerful face ulties born in the human being which, if given the opportunity, may very readily regenerate to higher advantage for other men.

As a consequence of my kind of technically objective philosophy, I have had wide and copious experiences and firsthand practice in mechanics and structures. I am an engineer by tutorial work with one of our country’s leading engineers of the 1920’s; I am capable in the general world of physics and mildly capable in the world of chemistry; I am a mathematical explorer. I have been able to translate many of my philosophies into physical inventions in gap areas where there have been no previously recognized functions whatsoever‹where people have not thought of the problems as being soluble by some device, but soluble only by social procedure reforms. As a consequence, I have developed quite a number of unprecedented devices and structures. At the present there are almost two thousand of my geodesic domes in forty countries around the world. All of those structures are of an unprecedented type. They were patentable in the countries around the world because they were unprecedented and were not included in structural engineering theory and therefore were true inventions. They enclose environments at about 1 per cent of the invested weight of resources of comparable volume enclosed by conventional structures with which you are familiar. They had to meet the hurricanes, the snow loads, and so forth. My structures are also earthquake proof; most of their comparable conventional counterparts are not. I have found it possible to do much more with less.

I have been able to demonstrate that there are important patterns to be employed by men and that there are inherently available ways of thinking which are simple and logical. My exploration into mathematics has disclosed extraordinary and comprehensive mathematical patternings of nature. I am quite confident that I have discovered the coordinate system employed by nature itself, in contradistinction to the arbitrarily adopted X,Y,Z system which science employs and by virtue of which it translates its calculus through analytical geometry into informations which can be used technically.