Media is the message
By Marjorie Brahms, Chicago Daily News, November 1967
The lights were switched off and l4-year old Skip Herman hovered anxiously over a table on which he had placed several small while triangles. Then red and blue spotlights bathed the triangles, and as Skip manipulated them to cast changing, eerie shadows, his classmates oohed and aahed with appreciation at the strange effects.
Skip’s project was part of a new program for freshmen at Francis W. Parker School, 330 W. Webster, a private elementary and high school with a substantial waiting list and an urbane, educationally liberal out-look.
THE PROGRAM IS CALLED “media curriculum,” which is an admittedly inadequate title for a complicated, experimental approach to dealing with what one Parker teacher calls “our changing reality.”
“There is some thinking that it’s absurd to turn out kids who are literate in print – in essays – but are naive about photography and other media,” says William Idol, a bearded, 29-year-old Yale graduate who is one of nine teachers in the program.
One or the aspects of the world our Electronic Age children must cope with is the much-discussed “information over load,” or knowledge explosion. And something that schools must cope with, Idol and others contend, is youngsters reared in a world where photography, films and television are as important – or more so – than the medium of print.
Hence, Parker decided to replace the traditional freshman English course this year with a combination of art, dance, drama, music, physical education, photography, sculpture, shop and writing.
THE PROGRAM, A GOAL of which is to help the students see patterns in the huge amount or information they must absorb, has three parts:
• A series of “how-to-do-it” courses;
• A “concept” class in which students take a principle-such as context, emphasis or repetition-and work with it in various ways;
• Experiments done by each student on a regular basis and displayed and discussed, as Skip Herman’s.
After each student’s performance or display, Idol asked, “Are you pleased?”
For Idol, the point of the program isn’t finding a right answer, Working with media, he says, is “the only open ended thing left in education.” The point is to “develop people, not turn out experts,” he explains.
SKIP HERMAN WAS PLEASED with his attempt to “create patterns or forms without content.”
Carmela Rago, another freshman and daughter of Henry Rago, editor of Poetry Magazine and his artist wife, was happy with her essay about a, “gray day” and the oil painting she did to illustrate loneliness. Experimenting with media, Carmela said, “makes you think more—builds imagination.”
Gardner Stern III, who took photographs of outdoor scenes and doctored them to show how the camera can lie, said that since the media curriculum had begun, he was beginning to “notice things more.”
Talking about the modern dance she had just performed, Susan Fried said it showed “growing, struggling to live, living, then being defeated and dying.”
Says Idol: “What I keep finding about this program is: The more I talk about it, the less clear I get. But one thing is certain. We want to get off the content and onto the kid.”
Media Program – What Is It?
BY MARY BRIAULT, FRANCIS PARKER ALUMNI NEWS, WINTER 1969
Media is the plural of medium (any means, material, or agency used for expression), and that never raised much excitement until Marshall McLuhan started using it. He is a great punster (and Professor of Communications at the Universities of Toronto and Fordham) who announced that The Medium is the Message- his way of saying that how you learn something has greater impact than what you learn. His press has been good – Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Woman’s Day – you may have received the message already.
Better than anyone, he has understood the impact of television. If you learn most of your facts from TV, as he maintains children do, you see a different world from the person who learned mainly by reading. You have learned a certain total reaction to experience, not unlike the total reaction of the child in the primitive village to whom all experience is available. He is not sent off to bed, or seen and not heard. He partakes and participates.
At Parker, the Media Program began because of an English teacher, Bill Idol, who reacted strongly to this new quality in students (think of it! most teachers are still of the radio generation) – and who read McLuhan very well. He found that teaching reading and writing on one hand, and isolated arts programs on the other, compartmentalized learning and expression in a way that did not correspond to the Gestalt of the incoming. freshmen. With imagination, an unusual skill in scheduling, and not a little charisma, Bill Idol won over the vested interests of the Art Department, the English Department, and the Shop, Music, Sculpture, Dance, and Drama departments, to his vision of a program that could work and that would demonstrate that saying things in many ways is equally valid and exciting.
In August 1967, he gathered us all – nine teachers and a visiting expert- for a workshop to work out the program. Chandler Montgomery, Director of Art Education at NYU, and a specialist in Related Arts, was our expert. He is a man who believes that “teachers must be personally involved in creative experience before they can effectively guide others to it.” We became involved, all right. In silence and Indian file, we followed him on a walk through the school-down through the boiler room, between the teeny chairs of the kindergarten, up the freight elevator, and out along the very edge of the roof (a space walk, it was, and we noticed things we had not).
Being teachers, we also talked a lot, of course. But during the second week, we underwent impressive media training at each other’s hands. Each teacher taught a media (medium?) class, and we teachers were the students. This meant that during the dance class, a writing teacher and a musician worked hard to produce a dance that would be acceptable to the dance teacher. I remember being flat on my face, tangled in my Chinese jump rope, while Chauncey Griffith, a leg and arm in the air, hissed: That is not the way we rehearsed it!” The art teacher worried about her photography experiment, the dance teacher almost lost a thumb carving balsam, and at one point, we all sat helpless and blindfolded sniffing jars of Vicks, peanut butter, cloves, and mothballs, plunging into childhood memory, and surfacing with haikus for the writing teacher. The shop teacher wrote the best piece, but Chan Montgomery’s poem on the joys of reading the Bible in the bathtub was certainly arresting.
The role of teacher is the comfortable one of expert. Teachers don’t like to fail, and they work terribly hard to do well. But we all did fail, miserably, in one medium or another. We all had to shed our special skins and take big risks walking across the stage “with power,” for instance. The effect was exhilarating. We did learn to try, way out of our “field,” to learn a bit of technique and then to try something, using it. If we failed, that was somehow a kind of success. We still operated in the bond, almost the glow, that this shared experience worked in all of us. We emerged different people. Meeting regularly each week is a top requirement for all media teachers. We have sharply different viewpoints, and we argue quite a bit. But we exchange ideas, discuss students, share discoveries, and seek always to join our efforts. What if the dance class used the music originated in music class? Why not use a writing assignment as the starting point for a class in sculpture?
We are teaching art, music, drama, writing, dance, film, and clay, wood, and metal sculpture in four week units, during which time a student studies two media. In the following four weeks, he changes to two others, and so on to the end of the semester. This completes one cycle. For the past two years, we have then repeated the cycle, changing scheduling somewhat, so that the student who worked in art and dance during the first term) might study art and writing together during the second. This year, however, we are considering a suggestion from students: that they have the “survey” the first term, and be allowed to focus on two media for the entire second term. The obvious and built-in weakness in the program is that technique training is limited because of time. The suggested compromise would allow for more intensive training in two skills, and permit more ambitious experiments. The great strength of the program is that it develops skill in attacking problems in varied ways. Considering that our students will be grappling with problems that we cannot even imagine, this is important instruction.
What problems do the students attack? At the beginning of each four-week session, they are given a ”starting point” for an experiment. This might be a “happening” performed by the teachers, a walk along the lake, reading Ecclesiastes, a word, or a feast. It is a stimulus to which they must react, and then express that reaction in one or more media in which they are working. The idea is to try something out – to explore. We have had a construction that burned on stage (brilliant! but worrying), and films that were deep gray and black. But we have also had boys who attempted on stage to convey a tree growing, using their bodies as media; an original song on the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.; some poignant statements; and a concerto for coke bottles.
Media is necessarily a pass-fail course. In the true experimental atmosphere, an ambitious failure is more “successful” than a good, cautious project in which no risk was taken. Another beauty of the non-graded program is that the onus is removed from criticism. Objectivity is much easier to attain when personal involvement is not frantic. With the sting removed, students develop their critical faculties, comment easily on each other’s work, and offer suggestions. All this leads to joint efforts and group projects, a genuine exploitation of each person’s talents, and the best sort of personal value judgments.
What are the results so far? We notice that the student who works for grades only is the disadvantaged one, the one slowest to blossom. Creative students bloom, and delight in the freedom. But more exciting are the many who are freed from failure, and who really attempt something because they can do so without “punishment.” Eight teachers plus a coordinator focus on each student and compile their knowledge of how he works, and his methods of attack. It is a precious evaluation that sometimes tempers academic judgments, and offers insights as to who the student really is, and how he should be stimulated.
There are success stories: the student who could write no more than three consecutive sentences, who came to write Thurber-like stories; the shy boy who suddenly orated in a deep voice; the academic problem who did great things in all media and found a new confidence in himself. Two teachers of academic subjects noticed a certain confidence in the first students who had taken the course-a great willingness to tryout an idea and test it several ways, a certain freedom in entertaining possibilities.
And that is just what the Media Program is all about.
The evening began with a reception in the main hallway of the Arts Club, after which performers dressed as waiters led the audience members into the lecture hall in groups and sat them at bistro 
tree of life
House on Shields I will be grateful to leave by month’s end.
This is an example of my horrible living room with too many books — it’s disgusting! How dare I have so many books! It’s gross!