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XIII This piece wrote itself "out of the blue" one morning in the early summer of ig?1 - I considered sending it to Saturday Review in response to the Illich article which helped to set it off, but my impulse was fragile and didn't survive. It is published here for the first time. During this year I was preoccupied with my relationship to the Camphill Movement for the mentally handicapped, which has "villages" in this country. I had very nearly joined the movement in 1964, and its spirit has companioned me during the seven-year period which this book covers. Much of the work I did in 1971, in clay and poetry and thinking, took its life from my connection with the Beaver Run Village for Mentally Handicapped Children, where I went often to share the life and work, and where I set up a pottery studio. We share an interest in learning community, in handcrafts and artistic expression, a love of the earth and its seasons, biodynamic farming, a new consciousness and social impulse religiously based, an integrated society that includes not only the colors and races of man but the old and the handicapped in need of special care. Camphill is based on the work of Rudolf Steiner. As early as 1963, in my review of Paul Goodman's Community of Scholars for Liberation Magazine, I mention Camphill Village for Mentally Handicapped Young Adults near Copake, New York, as the purest example I know of a "village" movement, where young adults and their teachers live together in deepest life-commitment to work, mutual service, artistic fulfillment and spiritual festival. . . . I do not mean that the hope of the world lies in mental illness . I mean that if we teachers are serious about serving an idea of community, we should realize that .there may be handicaps even normal intelligent people have to overcome . Intellect itself may act as a handicap to humane endeavor. There may be a competitive and unyielding pride. There may be a static obsession with the right to think as one pleases, the right to illusion and prejudice. They must dissolve, must they not, in order that we may be free enough in ourselves to execute the purposes of others? Must we not examine our assumptions about the nature of man, and study best how to foster values of material simplicity and spiritual union? The next year the same magazine printed another piece of mine, again responding to statements by Paul Goodman.It is about Community and Art as New Impulses in Education. It ends, "Out of community and art will grow our curriculum and our pedagogy.Within them will grow our way of knowing and perceiving. Handicaps and imbalances will be understood and acknowledged,and education will become an art of healing." The theme of understanding and healing our mental handicaps recurs throughout this volume. I have felt for many years, through the experience of my professional and community life, that a concept of "mental handicap" could be fruitfully applied to those of us who are undiagnosed, if we could look at it with objectivityand imagination. There may well be some20y thing destined for me here: to find a way to live and work with the mutual resources of handicapped and normal individuals, and with our mutual needs in learning and living. It expresses my passionate concern for "total community" and for working with the artistic capacities of both handicapped and normal people. The final lecture in this collection, for Michaelmas 1971, also owes much to the spirit of Camphill, where I have sometimes celebrated the autumn festival. Mental Handicap and Human Learning T J.ODAY I received the current announcement of a Growth Center. It says that they are hoping to provide Ph.D. students facilities and instruction while they work on the creation of the new profession of Humanologist, or one who aids people to attain their full human potential (true maturity). The new profession of Humanology would limit itself to working with "normal" persons, rather than pathology which has been the primary concern of Medicine and Clinical Psychology. Obviously, much research and experimentation will be required to establish the long overdue profession and we believe the awarding of the Ph.D. degree in the field will do much to establish the profession. When I read this, I had a number of thoughts which I would like to offer here. At the same time I had been reading Ivan Illich's piece...

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