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| Black Mountain College One of the hallmarks of what we fondly call the "American educational
system" is the fact that someone, somewhere, is always dissatisfied with it.
This has been the case all the way back to Cotton Mather, up through the first
high school in Beverly, Massachusetts, the first college, not far from there
(Harvard) and fortunately, this dissatisfaction continues today. It is, I think,
what has made our higher education system (at least) the envy of the world. It
was this feeling of dissatisfaction, a feeling of "we can do better" that led
John Andrew Rice into the backwoods hills of North Carolina to a small town
called Black Mountain and the founding, in 1933, of Black Mountain
College.
As institutions of higher education go, even in the midst of the
depression, it wasn't much of a college, at least not in the traditional sense.
It held its first classes in a rented church social room, then a year later
moved across Lake Eden to cobbled up "permanent" facilities that were much more
like a farm or summer camp than any kind of college campus. Actually, during the
summer it was BOTH, supplying the college and the local community with
agricultural products while at the same time playing host to a list of guest
lecturers that today, reads like a "Who's Who" of the arts and liberal learning
of the time. To a somewhat lesser extent, the same could be said of those who
attended classes there too. It was a topsy turvy educational world with the
faculty (rather than the administration) in command, with a great deal of
democratic input from the student body. It was never accredited by any
governmental or educational authority and was never far from financial collapse
at any point in its 24-year history. In fact, fewer than 1200 students ever
attended classes there before it closed in 1957.
It may sound trite to
say so today, but back in its heyday, it was more a frame of mind than an
institution of high education. Even the phrase, liberal arts school, doesn't do
it justice. The centerpiece of the entire curriculum were the fine arts--music,
dance, drama, and painting. Grades were unimportant. What mattered was the
complete freedom on the part of the students and faculty to experiment with all
things new and beautiful in the arts. Studies were rigorous and the faculty
demanding, but neither of these factors adequately account for the creative
burst of energy that radiated into the American fine arts world from this tiny
candle of free expression. It was not, however, a perfect learning situation. A
former student perhaps put it best: "If you went to Black mountain...you learned
a lot about art in its various forms, you learned nothing about the Real
World."Contributed by Lane, Jim
23 August 1998 |
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