The Personal Educational Philosophy of
William M. King:
Its Aims and Objectives,
and a Word on My Particular
Instructional Strategies

I believe there are at least two types of learning activities that go on in a formal institution like the University of Colorado at Boulder. They are: Education and Schooling. The first of these, education, is for me a life-long process of human resource development from the inside out that does not end on graduation day. Rather, it is fundamentally about learning how to learn. In so being, it embraces self-discovery, identifying and detailing the limitations (self/other imposed) under which one operates, and the acquisition of a commitment to creating a sense of purpose that gives meaning to one's life at the same time that it instills in us that set of values that allow us to accomplish much of what we desire. It is almost as if the student is text wherein he learns to read himself in the sense of the ancient African notion that self-knowledge is the genesis of all knowledge. Education in this sense is about giving voice to oneself as a way of authenticating oneself--of addressing four fundamental questions that might be taken as cornerstones of a black educational practice that once answered permit the student to "know" who she is as a prelude to "knowing" what she can do. They are: "Who am I?" "Where am I?" "What is my purpose?" "What might be my destiny and in what ways might I influence and realize the same?" Each of these questions can be addressed in multitudinous ways identifying a number of different dimensions in a dynamically adaptive manner so that one learns to respond more so than react to the situations in which he finds himself.

Schooling, the other major activity that animates the University, is, as I have experienced it, an act of inculcation, of instruction, of placing in the mind of the student from the outside a set of values, expectations, attitudes, information and ways of behaving crafted by another that may not necessarily be in the best interests of the person so instructed. It is, as I have said in talks to teachers and students over the years, a special kind of coercive socialization begun in that academic boot camp we call a kindergarten where one learns what it is to be a student and what is expected of him in terms of classroom behavior. Too often, its desired outcome is the reinvention of the candidate (especially when the candidate is female, a person of color, or in some other way does not reflect "normality") in keeping with the articulated needs of the society. One consequence of schooling, then, is a kind of domestication that limits the wide variety of human resource development we say we desire inhibiting our "progress" as a society. In short, what really seems to me to be the case here is that schooling is primarily about preparing one for membership in any one of a number of occupational clans, and about replicating the social order to ensure continuity of the status quo without which a society could not survive. And, if Peter F. Drucker is correct in his assertions about the need for political and social innovations and a rethinking of the purpose, values, and content of schooling to prepare us more adequately for the twenty-first century, a century in which knowledge itself will be a new source of capital, and the knowledge worker the new capitalist, it will have to be changed and changed radically ( "The Age of Social Transformation," Atlantic Monthly, November, 1994, pp 53ff).

Clearly, both educational process and schooling practice proceed from a priori models of human nature and its possibilities, and are frequently made manifest in institutional mission statements about the types of graduates transit of that institution is intended to produce. Further, it is equally apparent to me that no system of structured learning is wholly education or wholly schooling. That is, some of each is contained in both which imparts a very special kind of responsibility to those who have chosen the profession of teaching. Indeed, what seems more likely, to me, from my observation, reading, reflection, and experience in a variety of "educational institutions," is that educational process and schooling practice are emphasized differently at different times contingent upon the needs of those who decide what shall be done how, when, where, why and to what end.

Because I began my teaching career in elementary school and then progressed up the ladder through junior high, high school, and the liberal arts college to the research university, I have had to redefine my concept of student, my expectations thereof, and the materials and methods I employ to help students realize the kind of self-empowerment I believe necessary for them to take responsibility for the quality of their own education. This is in keeping with my contention that college students are near-adults in the process of being prepared to enter a world where they will have to transfer what they have learned in the university classroom--knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and ways of behaving--to the address of a series of real-world encounters that will markedly affect their life chances and their ability to prosper in a sometimes hostile environment.

I believe, they must be taught what they need to know in a different way, a way that reminds them several times throughout the semester, that they will get out of a course what they themselves have put into it. This, of course, is something that takes time--something not easily actualized in the course of one semester--as one struggles to reorient oneself from teacher-centered to learner-centered instruction, to gear up the instrumentalities of mental growth so that once a student has left school, she will be in a better position to absorb and interpret for herself the experiences she will encounter. This realization, that my students in the University of Colorado at Boulder had more in common with adult learners, albeit they were in some ways a captive population not unlike the children I used to teach, led me to wonder how I might do differently what I had been doing with respect to instructional method.

In searching through the educational literature looking for new ideas, I came across a 1970 volume by Malcom S. Knowles titled The Modern Practice of Adult Education; Andragogy Versus Pedagogy. In brief, writes Knowles, andragogy, (first employed by E. Rosenstock in Berlin in 1924), is the art and science of helping adults learn as distinct from pedagogy which is defined as the art and science of helping children learn. As I noted above, because I was of the opinion that college students were more adults than children, and because I was becoming increasingly more aware of the limitations inherent in much of what I had learned about teaching in keeping with my growing belief that college graduates needed to be critically self-aware and self-actualized to more effectively and appropriately respond to what lay ahead, after examining his work, I concluded that some of his suggestions might have far more utility for me at CU than those I had brought with me from my earlier experiences in the public school.

Knowles assumes that with maturity, a person becomes less dependent and more self-directing--something we see in college students selecting course work and career paths in which they believe themselves to have an interest. That with experience in life, they develop a reservoir of "knowledge" that can be used as a resource for additional learning. That readiness to learn is increasingly related to anticipated social roles; and that a college student's "time perspective changes from one of postponed application of knowledge to immediacy of application, and accordingly his orientation toward learning shifts from one of subject-centeredness to one of problem-centeredness."

In attempting to operationalize Knowles ideas in the university classroom, I have operated on the assumption that when you know who you are, you know what you can do. Thus, my aim and one of my objectives has been to assist my students in learning a thing or three about themselves and the worlds of which they are a part; to catalyze, if you would, a process of self-discovery moreso than to teach them a circumscribed body of knowledge having an indeterminate half-life. I have sought to focus more on the processes of learning rather than the product of learning believing that knowing when to do something is more important than knowing how to do something. This is often a difficult row to hoe for me, and my students, because fostering a habit of critical thinking that I seek to accomplish in all of my classes, is a slow process whose results are not easily seen except over time forcing me to be patient and willing to allow the student to sometimes grope for the not readily apparent answer (if there is one). I am less concerned with transferring a specific body of information from teacher to student than I am with exposing her to perhaps two or three ideas during the course of the term that are then described, examined, critiqued, reviewed, applied, evaluated, whatever. In several of the courses I teach that deal with power, identity, ethics, change, and related topics, I ask them to identify what for them is important and spell out what they are willing to do to get what they want.

And then I turn it back to show that having is a very different thing than wanting. This forces them, I believe, to deal with values, especially their own values and how they acquired them; and how the possession of values shapes conduct and its consequences in particular situations. I want them to learn to question: What they know, what they believe, what they have previously taken on faith--that at some time in their lives they will have to come to grips with the idea that truth is not an objective ideal but rather a social product made up of selected bits and pieces of acceptable information organized for some specific purpose and very much a function of the belief system they have chosen to embrace, that they are then called upon to identify and interpret.

The informational content of my teaching is drawn primarily from the historical experiences and folk wisdom of black people. These materials then become a series of concrete examples and reference points students might then use to illuminate the times in which they live. By examining the lives, thoughts, and activities of others, and the consequences of those lives, thoughts and actions, they are presented with a contrastive context that they might then employ to construct a set of meanings for their own experiences in preparation for whatever lies beyond commencement. In a word, I see myself first, helping my students learn what they bring with them and then supplementing that more so than I see myself attempting to transform them into some kind of ideal type that has little relevance for action in the multiple-cultured world of tomorrow.

Personally, I am driven by an insatiable curiosity and a desire to stimulate other peoples curiosity about themselves and the worlds in which they live. And while I do carry around with me a model of what I believe an educated person should be and be able to do, I do not believe that my model is appropriate for all people at all times. However, I do believe that my students should know how I make sense of the world and I make numerous attempts during the semester to present to them my interpretations of the information I have gleaned from my studies.

I also do my best to make clear to them that belief informs scholarship and that values give meaning to facts. That I am guided by Allison Davis's statement that the "task of the black scholar is too important for him to remain in the discipline in which he was trained," requiring me to abide, in some degree, with Terrence's observation that "nothing human is alien to me." I stress the idea that knowledge, like truth, especially that presented in school, is also a social product assembled in accordance with the criteria of construction we learned in scholar school, and that it is a tool whose importance varies with the tasks it is called upon to perform. This means that while they might desire to become an ist or ian of some sort, they do so at their own peril in that such an identification with a preformed ideology based on the investigations of others without careful criticism, can lead to a kind of conceptual incarceration that makes it difficult to accept the existence of or see the utility of that that lays outside the chosen universe of definition.

To question systematically, I remind them, they must acquire discipline that they can then use to secure mastery over whatever talents they possess. No matter how much talent you believe you have, I tell them, if you have no discipline, you have no talent because your potential is unfocused and you cannot use those talents in your own best interest or to serve your fellow beings. I also tell them that for me, teaching and research are service activities that are most utilitarian when employed in the liberation of confined souls from the shibboleths of their imagination.

Finally, when size permits, I prefer to run my classes more as discussion groups than as teacher oriented lectures in keeping with the points I observed earlier. After some preliminaries, definition of terms, articulation of the main ideas I hope to cover, and related items, the class is split into smaller groups each group having the opportunity to present and defend what they have presented to others. The objective in this practice is to create an environment in which they can become aware of different thinking styles and different points of view--not just mine--and use that information to become a more fully developed person.

My goal, as a teacher, a choice I made when I was thirteen years old one afternoon paging through a volume on Egyptology while sitting in the library of Patrick Henry Junior High School in Cleveland, Ohio, if what I have said above can be reduced to a simple statement, is to effect a kind of liberation and self-actualization that will assist my students in transcending the boundaries of the known world. That will assist them to become contributors to a reshaping of society--a society more respectful of diversity and difference; a society in which we come closer to realizing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of the "Beloved Community," where people are judged not by the color of their skins but by the content of their character.

To accomplish this, I knew that I would have to learn as much about myself as I could. I believed that then and still do because I have learned that regardless of the subject that a teacher teaches, what is really being taught is the teacher--his beliefs, his attitudes, his values, his ways of thinking about specific materials examined, his interpretation of the facts gathered, his assessment of the ideas and information to which he has been exposed--the knowledges he has created therefrom. I still believe that with another 20 to 30 years of experience, I might finally learn something about teaching. I can say this easily now because in the light of my few short years in the classroom, my work in the martial arts as both student and sensei, I have come to realize that it will take me all of my life to know who I am.

As I have progressed along my journey, I have come to better appreciate that teaching is about sharing. Sharing what I have learned with others so that they might better understand themselves and the worlds of which they are a part. It is my intention to continue along this way knowing now that the journey is more important than the destination.