Goddard pedagogy memo 2-2004   I find myself tuning out as soon as we do these criteria and standards talks, and have had to try to articulate why that is. Since our surrounding cultural framework is massively corrupt and in many ways pitifully rudimentary, we are counter-cultural in impulse. At the same time our students need to make their livings and we want to help them do that, though in ways that are corrective to what's wrong in dominant culture. I don't think we are individually confused about how to work with students, given this tension, but when we try to explicate standards and criteria we seem to revert to the language of approaches we are trying to counter. There is first of all the term 'mastery' itself. Though I adore skill and competency, both in myself and in others, 'mastery' seems to me to be a notion heavily tainted by its meanings within patriarchal history - master-slave, master of the household, master of men. For me the term is quite repellent. Another way to say it is that our fruitful tension is between an old idea of vocational mastery - professional formation and accreditation ­ and an even older idea of spiritual development, for instance as it might be practiced in a Gurjieff school, a Sufi school, a Zendo, where students are given exercises meant to rebuild them in the direction of basic sanity. (I am ignoring anything 'spiritual' that instead of working for basic sanity looks for some form of transcendence.) Because that's our tension, what we do best is a student who is willing and able to work on basic sanity at the same time as they are working to be professionally effective in some field they care about, and who sees that the former is a precondition for the latter. Sometimes we get students who've gone as far as they can in professional formation without addressing something in basic sanity, and then we do that with them and the cork pops out. Sometimes we get students so lucky in their background that we don't need to work on basic sanity with them; they just go full force into professional formation and that's all we do. With students of this kind questions of standards and criteria don't come up. We do worst with students who are stuck on certain of the basics of basic sanity. When we talk about standards and criteria we are mainly talking about these students. For students of this kind Goddard is probably the wrong place to try to do professional formation. Their weaknesses are often weaknesses that straight schools would force them to deal with - procrastination, lack of focus, disorganization, incoherence, dishonesty, fear of authority. When students with these weaknesses come to us because they cannot hack straight schools, we have few means to help, because we are not in a position to haul them along through whatever they are evading. With these students I think it makes sense to have a checklist of professional formation skills we demand they show competence in ­ academic ethics, writing a research paper, library search, etc - and I think it makes sense to use items of this checklist to flunk them, when we do. What I mean is that to my feeling of it the pass-fail question is inherently a professional formation question; when we speak in pass-fail terms about basic sanity questions I always feel queasy. These students are failing for basic sanity reasons but they are flunking for professional formation reasons. Our really hard cases are students who are definitely failing in some aspect of basic sanity but are borderline or very mixed in professional formation. My tendency with these students is to work however I can on basic sanity questions while I have them, and not flunk them if they wouldn't flunk in a straight school. The basic sanity work is on another timetable, and defiant students may have to get out of our faces before they can be willing to notice that they have learned. So what do I mean by basic sanity ­ ability to be mutual, concern/care, self-trust, self-loyalty, generosity, effort/commitment, clarity, curiosity, organization, focus, fearlessness, range, taste, judgment ­ all those lovely ethical/intellectual/creative/aesthetical qualities that are human birthright. With those students who have enough basic sanity to be able to work on basic sanity, what do I assume is needed - > a workable metaphysics which can imply an epistemology, ie an embodiment metaphysics. > a workable theory of what a person is, ie a psychology: some notion of attachment, dissociation, defenses, the unconscious, self-communication. > experience of the best that has been achieved in human sensing, feeling, thinking, saying ­ ie experience of cultural achievement, developed styles of being - especially within their own temperamental kinds ­ this often amounts to hot tips on what to read. > support to be interested in what they actually are interested in, ie a counter-cultural dialogue. > and so on. This is a longer conversation. Given these, I tend to assume that whatever professional formation is wanted can be added unto it really quite easily and counter-culturally. For example, given the framing culture they grow up in, young women often need a specific aspect of basic sanity work, which is contact with a feminist ethos that teaches them self-loyalty, culture-criticism, and the resources of a parallel intellectual lineage. They can't authentically work in any profession unless they do this work first. Once they do it they are in a position to alter the field they choose, and altering it is often the only way they can succeed in it.