BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BULLETIN
Volume 1 February, 1943 Number 3
Issued four times a year, in November, January, February, and April. Entered as second-class matter. November…..
Study Building, built by students and faculty, lower right. Assembly and Dining Hall and twin dormitories at left.
Black Mountain College is a small cosmopolitan community of students and teachers living together an education stressing democratic co-operation. Through participation in the life of the community, through study and discussion of the past and present, through the discipline of the citizens with the understanding and the maturity to play a constructive part in the world at war and in the post-war world.
Black Mountain differs in many respects from traditional liberal education. It rejects the required curriculum, the report cared, the board of trustees. It finds that intensive and independent work under faculty guidance, discussion classes, continual contact with teachers, are more conducive to learning than the syllabus and the weekly quiz. It finds that participation in the operation and maintenance of the College and its community are better guides to a democratic way of life than fraternity politics or organized athletics. It finds that eager students living, studying, working with interesting people in a stimulating community, discover themselves and the world as they never could through the academic formality of a more traditional college.
This booklet is intended to show you something of the way in which Black Mountain people live and work; what they believe in, and what they do.
College means study and study at Black Mountain means hard work. It means extensive reading and considerable reflection. It means the experience of creating and the adventure of discovery. It means hours in a study behind a “do not disturb” sign, and it means discussions and conversations from breakfast to bedtime. It means that a student works intensively in a chosen field, but it means also that he takes courses in the social sciences, the physical sciences, the arts, language and literature. Above all, it means finding things out for himself, coming to his own conclusions about them, fitting past and present ideas and events into his conception of the world.
Academic life at Black Mountain takes the form of private reading, small classes and individual tutorials. Intimacy between students and teachers has particularly happy results in the study of languages. For not only can students become familiar with foreign culture through foreign literature; they can also learn to speak any of the chief western languages through conversation. The shared experiences of community life vivify the study of the social sciences, philosophy, psychology, and literature, which is considered as an expression of the inner life of mankind. Through discussion and reading the motives, desires and experiences of men are seen in universal perspective. Serious writing is encouraged. Students write and produce plays, and each year are responsible for a series of radio broadcasts which originate from class materials.
In social science fundamentals of social analysis are studied both as theory and in their application to the history of civilization. The more recent past is examined with emphasis on both America and international relations. Students and teachers reflect different currents of political thought, and while a scholarly approach is insisted upon, controversy is encouraged. For the social scientist today is not merely an inquirer, he has to take a stand against fascism in the war and beyond.
Graduation is based upon achievement rather than on credit hours or length of residence. Rigorous comprehensive examinations are personally given by an authority from outside the College when a student is fully prepared. The examiners are from the country’s leading universities.
To discover and to experience is to know as one can never know through a textbook or a lecture alone. The use of a microscope, a scalpel, an analytical balance, is more than a training in precision and accuracy. It is an introduction to the more abstract concepts of chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics; concepts which are fundamental to an understanding of the world and its people.
Black Mountain supplements the laboratory with its seven hundred acres of lake and mountain country containing forests of pine and hardwood, varied minerals, prolific vegetation, swift streams, and native wild-life. Likewise, dairy cattle, and cornfields, small farms and neighborhood industries become factors in education.
The problems of architecture are the problems of shelter for millions of people. The low cost home of today and the planned community of tomorrow, a more complete use of new materials and new processes, a way of building centered around a way of living: these are architecture’s concern, in its plans for a decently housed world.
Architecture classes at Black Mountain do not spend their time discussing a Utopian future. Students design and construct: an addition to the kitchen or the library, a new dairy barn, quarters for the kitchen staff, a faculty home, a study building. They discover that architecture is hammering nails and pouring cement as well as drawing plans; that it means knowing what houses are and what they can be, what makes good housing and how it can be better. They find that architects must study ways of life as well as ways of building, that they must know, not only materials and their uses, but people and their needs.
Art at Black Mountain is based upon art as an active, appreciate and creative force permeating all activities of life. It attempts to aid the student to see in the widest sense; to open his eyes to his own living, being, doing; to understand the essential crafts, tools and materials. Art students learn that the experience of creating, constructing, and seeing is not a hobby or a pastime. Even the beginner can sense the exhilaration of creation and while thus giving form to personal ideas relate these ideas to the world in which he lives. Some students evolve art studies of interest to the entire community. Some design and weave textiles suited to widespread industrial production, others evolve stage settings and costume techniques. Development of an understanding of the meaning of form extends to dorm in nature and human beings as well as to works of art.
Music at Black Mountain is not only a part of the curriculum but an element of community life. Students and teachers of every interest take part in the instructional and vocal groups enjoying the experience and discipline that comes from functioning consciously as part of a whole. Their performances are a weekly occurrence. Music is studied as a language with its own innate logic and architecture. Designs in melody, harmony, counterpoint and rhythmics are practiced as elements of musical architecture and in their mutual interdependence. The history of music is conceived as an integral part of the culture of a period. The early music studied is sung and played before it is analyzed. A good music library facilitates the practical and theoretical work. Black Mountain believes that in a shaken world of ideas, music as a world of inner order can help toward developing that community for which we all toil.
Drama is primarily an art form. Yet outside of its literary and creative aspects are other educational values. An actor must live for a while another life; he must discover other ways of thinking and make those ways his own. He must put himself in another place, another time, another situation. From a written outline, he must create a living person.
There is rigid discipline in the necessary surrender of the personal and the peculiar, in the finding of fundamentals in movement and voice. The actor discovers that motion comes out of emotion; that within the character he assumes, are absolutes of rhythm, tempo, mood. He find that a play, like a musical performances, is a carefully balanced whole, and that he must always be aware of himself as part of that whole. He realizes that his acting (or it may be his costume design, his scenery, his lighting) is good only in the degree to which it communicates the ideas of the play and its author, and the attitude of the performers towards those ideas.
Black Mountain’s democracy is more than word or concept; it is a way of living. Owned and controlled by its faculty, the College bases this democracy in a unique charter, legally providing for student participation in all College affairs. Community problems are discussed in community meetings, and students annually agree among themselves on the few basic standards which seem necessary to govern their lives.
The community is particularly concerned with the relationship of individuality, community membership, and active citizenship. It finds in the problems of its democracy many of the problems of larger, more complex groups.
Life at Black Mountain demonstrates that for democracy rights and duties are inseparable; that the fundamentals to which America asks allegiance can stand honest investigation and survive the acid test of experience.
Beyond administration or government, democracy means doing things together. It means living with teachers as well as studying with them, making them friends as well as advisors. It means eating together, dancing after dinner, dressing up on Saturday nights, listening to concerts and radio programs or playing in them. It means freedom in work and freedom in play, and at the same time it means continual community consciousness. It means discussing the problems of politics and philosophy with people of different opinions who have lived through wars and great social upheavals. It means leading a mature self-directed life prepared to face the threats and complexities of a critical age.
The democratic way of life means social equality. It means also equality of obligation and of work. Through the community work program Black Mountain asks of its students and teachers participation in a community citizenship which is far from theoretical. Community work is in no sense “made” work, contrived for educational purposes, nor is it a system in which some students become the servants of others. Instead, it is work necessary to the operation of the College, shared voluntarily by community members, and the responsibilities it imposes are real responsibilities. People at the College spend from ten to fifteen hours a week chopping wood, cutting corn, driving the tractor, working in the office. A student may manage the College store; he may report College news’ he may dig a ditch. Most students do several such jobs.
Like Black Mountain’s studying, this is hard work. But students find out important things about themselves and their world: the difference between group and individual projects, the importance of really finishing a job once started, the real excitement in the rhythm of an axe, the power of a truck, the building of a wall; the satisfaction of seeing stones and lumber and concrete and imagination become a place in which to live and to work. More than this, there is a discovery that the dignity of labor and of the laborer is more than a phrase, a discovery of causes instead of the casual relationship between theory and practice, of a social consciousness which, divorced from political by-words, finds its meaning in a consciousness of society as it is and an idea of how it might become better.
A Place to Learn and Live
If you are interested in the world you live in and the way men think and act; if you are interested in finding a purpose to your own working and learning, Black Mountain will attract you.
If you are interested in an education which asks the best you have to give; if you are willing to give yourself to education all day every day; if you can put aside preconceived notions of the world and of yourself, you will like Black Mountain.
Here you will find a college whose faculty consists of a distinguished group of scholars and artists from America and abroad; whose students represent an economic and geographic cross-section of this country, with several coming from foreign lands; a college whose students are characterized by unusual vigor, curiosity and self-reliance.
Admission to Black Mountain does not depend on financial well-being, or on the results of examinations. It depends upon you; upon what you can five to the community and what you can get from it, upon your potentialities as a constructive person, upon your desire for a better world. While admission requirements are flexible they are based upon ability to carry college work. At present applications from qualified high school juniors will be considered.
Fees are adjusted according to ability to pay and vary from $450 to $1200 a year. Those who can are expected to assume the full cost of their education. Where this is impossible, one may apply in confidence for a reduced fee scholarship.
Black Mountain is situated in the heart of the Great Craggy Mountains of Western North Carolina, 15 miles from Asheville, a section noted for its climate and scenery. Altitude 2,400 feet.
For more information about Black Mountain, or an application blank, write to the Registrar, Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Above- Chess game on sun deck in January.
Below- Swimming in Lake Eden in June.
Above- North Lodge, Twin dormitories are North (girls) and South (boys)- Assembly and Dining Hall.
Written and executed by students, former students and faculty, except for photographs of Student Study, Library, Board of Fellows, Concert, Farm and Logging. Courtesy Click Magazine.
Memorial building. Designed, built and furnished by a former student.
