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A career that is historical with the biggest names in psychology that changed the world. Such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

FALLACIES OF NONDIRECTIVE EDUCATION

In schools across America, time is taken from academics to provide children with drug education, suicide education, and sex education courses; the promise is to reduce or eliminate personal experimentation with drugs, sex and suicide. That promise is false. Follow up research shows increased drug use and sexual activity after the typical classroom exercises; and from the popular "death and dying courses," there are preliminary indications that this kind of education also leads to a greater likelihood of violence against the self. The education is called "nondirective" or "affective." Teachers are instructed to withdraw to the position of "facilitator," offering students "reflective listening" and nonjudgmental acceptance instead of confident instruction. Gradually the most undisciplined children begin to take over: parked in what one commercial curriculum purveyor proudly calls "conversation circles" (a kind of enforced friendship), the experimenters among the student body begin to teach the inexperienced how to become more experimental. It's like persuading the class there's no need to take the problems of drugs, violence and premarital sex very seriously: what's needed instead is principally to uncover feelings-this instead of being instructed.

W. R. Coulson was one of the initiators of the 1960s-styled contemporary movement away from classroom academics. But he long ago turned away and recanted.

A licensed psychologist, Dr. Coulson is director of the Research Council on Ethnopsychology and long-time consultant to Georgetown University Medical School in Washington. In the 1980s he served as a member of the Technical Advisory Panel on Drug Education Curricula for the U. S. Department of Education. His background includes clinical internships with the Psychotherapy Research Group of the Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute and the Neuropsychiatric Service of the U. S. Veterans Administration Hospital System. He has consulted on ethnopsychology for the Federal Bureau of Prisons and is presently a Consultant for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U. S. Department of Justice.

Holding doctorates in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and counseling psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, in the 1960s Dr. Coulson was research associate to humanistic psychologists Maslow and Carl R. Rogers at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. He directed programs in the philosophy of science and post-doctoral clinical psychology and helped Dr. Rogers create the country's first program of facilitator training. From 1968 to 1973, the two men co-edited a series of 17 volumes on humanistic education for the Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company. In 1972 Harper and Row published Dr. Coulson's preliminary analysis of the destructive effects of encounter groups in education, Groups, Gimmicks and Instant Gurus.

A partial list of clients and sponsoring organizations includes: Today Show, NBC, New York-Family Research Council, Washington-Parents Roundtable, Westport, Connecticut-Psychology Today editorial board-Free University of Berlin, Germany-Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, Kentucky-Southwest Policy Institute, Oklahoma-Immanuel Bible Church, Springfield, Virginia-Phillis Schlafly Live and Point of View (syndicated radio)-ABC News 20/20, New York City (on death education)-the Donahue Show, New York City (death education/AIDS education)-Virginians for Family Values-Parents and Schools Together, Minneapolis-Lockheed Corp., Burbank-Bell & Howell Corp. Pasadena-University of San Diego-Porter Memorial Baptist Church, Lexington, Kentucky-Burroughs Corporation, San Diego-Berean League, St. Paul-Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation-Oregon Citizens Alliance-Delta County Public Schools, Colorado-Mendocino County Public Health Department Youth Leadership Conference, California-League of St. Michael the Archangel, Baton Rouge and New Orleans-California Task Force on Self-Esteem (counter consultant)-White House Conference on Families-Citizens for Abstinence-based Sex Education, Waco, Texas-Citizens for Better Education, Greenwich, Connecticut-Human Dimensions in Medical Education, La Jolla-Concerned Parents of Ohio-Christian Broadcasting Network-Citizens for Excellence in Education, Indianapolis-Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, La Jolla-Family Foundation of Kentucky-Franciscan Renewal Center, Scottsdale-Constitutional Coalition, St. Louis-Citizens for Better Education, Virginia Beach-Concerned Women of America-Eagle Forum-University of California Extension, San Diego and Berkeley-Dads Foundation of Michigan-California Society of Professional Engineers-Concerned Parents of Richardson, Texas-Rohr Corp.-La Jolla Presbyterian Church-University of Kansas Medical Center.

TMP: Too Much Psychology
By Dr. Coulson

This writer and Carl Rogers, as co-editors of the Studies of the Person textbook series, played too aggressive a role in stimulating school teachers to adopt the nonjudgmental stance of the clinical psychotherapist. In 1967 we launched a facilitator training program: we said, "In times of rapid change, teaching as to go." To "facilitate learning" is what we said teachers must do instead of teach. (This was our teaching, but we failed to notice. We wanted teachers to be nondirective, but we were not nondirective ourselves. Of course not. No one with a sense of responsibility is nondirective about one's own good ideas.) Between 1968 and 1974 we followed up by delivering our series to the C. E. Merrill Publishing Co. The first volume was on the philosophy of science and featured two great minds: Michael Polanyi and Jacob Bronowski. Most of the rest of the books, however, advocated what could be called the psychologizing of American classrooms and as such were destructive of mind.

An early work in the series, Dr. Rogers's Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become, set the standard for what followed. It offered the theory that the student is really the teacher's "client" and that in "the best of education" no less than in "optimal therapy," this client will become involved in "an exploration of increasingly strange and unknown and dangerous feelings in himself, the exploration proving possible only because he is gradually realizing that he is accepted unconditionally" (p. 280). Predictably, given Dr. Rogers's skill as a rhetorician, his personal goodness and reputation as a scientist (and the persistence of a John Dewey influence in American teacher training), Freedom to Learn became an educational best seller. The theory of the psychiatricized classroom, which had been created almost on a dare (for it was the era of valuing the spontaneous and "far out" for their own sake), became Holy Writ. In 1972 a dismayed Dr. Rogers encouraged this writer to quote his prediction that "nothing but bad" would come from the theory, given the reverence with which it had been received in colleges of education and the wild psychologizing it had stimulated among curriculum writers.

What could be done? Well, in 1977, proposing to study families and other organizations that hadn't overdosed on psychology, we started the Center for Enterprising Families. The new organization was spun off from the organization that Carl Rogers and this writer had incorporated with three colleagues nine years earlier, the Center for Studies of the Person. CSP had itself emerged from the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, where yet earlier the co-editors had launched an experiment called the Educational Innovation Project. That project was organized in the 59 schools operated by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the West Coast.

In the long term the project turned out to be far more destructive than anyone had expected-except, perhaps, the parents and faculty elders who'd judged the idea to be foolish in the first place. Going into the Catholic schools, we'd said we wanted to teach everyone to be "better listeners," much in the manner of Dr. Rogers's client-centered psychotherapy. But in truth, we didn't listen to the parents or the elders, didn't really want to. We wanted them to keep their place.

It was something of a shock to discover they'd been right all along. The discovery led Dr. Rogers to call the plan for Rogerian classrooms "crazy." "Why did I ever write that crazy 'Plan' paper?" he said, reflecting with project staff in 1969 on an article he'd published in Educational Leadership in 1967. In truth, he'd written it because youthful colleagues had pushed for his methods to go where they didn't belong: out of the therapy clinic and into the classroom. Calling the plan crazy and dropping the experiment with the nuns was the best we could do by way of apology at the time. (Later Dr. Rogers found himself under pressure from a new and more entrepreneurial generation of followers not to retract anything, and there are members of the new Rogerian generation today who interpret our colleague as never having admitted-or ever having needed to admit-to a mistake.)

For our part, by 1977 we'd seen the need for society to pay respect to traditional family values once more; under increasing attack in popular psychology, family continuity was being destroyed and freedom lost. Authority was being assumed by experts who possessed what the repentant humanistic psychologist A. H. Maslow, our colleague in the mid-'60s at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, had called "an almost paranoid certainty of their own absolute virtues and correctness." Things were supposed to be getting better with each passing generation in America. That was the immigrant ideal. But they were really getting worse. Youthful under-achievement had come to be seen as almost heroic: if it was youth's own choice, it was said to witness to creativity. For their part, parents were no longer supposed to take pride in their children: it was said to witness to selfishness.

To rebut these trends we started the new Center, and by 1981 it had been recognized by the U. S. Office of Families as one of 53 outstanding national programs of outreach to families.

The Research Council on Ethnopsychology furthers the work of outreach. It responds to parents who are trying to do a good job and who realize the necessity of an intelligence operation in protecting their children. What do the theorists have in mind for our children this time? That's what parents need to know. So they collect and read the research literature and make contact with others who are trying to be equally protective and responsible.

The nation's mothers and fathers, that is, are a primary source of the documentation on drug, sex and "lifestyle" education that is collected, organized, analyzed, and circulated to policy makers by the Research Council.

A note from Tony DiGirolamo, executive producer of Culture Shock:

On August 18, 1994, Columnist Thomas Sowell wrote a thought provoking column on William R. Coulson, in The Detroit News titled, The Dangers and Distortions of American Education.

He begins, " Many of us change our general outlook on life at some point or other, but few of us go back and try to repair the damage we did during an earlier period when we thought differently. Dr. William Coulson, a psychologist who once played an important role in the movement to re-orient American education from academic to psychological goals, is now trying to get people to understand what a tragic mistake that was.

Dr. Coulson's mentor, the late psychotherapist Carl Rogers, was a major guru in the drive to get schools to downplay traditional academic subjects taught in the traditional way. Instead, they were to be permissive and tend to children's emotional needs. The effect of Rogers and others with similar views would be hard to overestimate, though their names are virtually unknown to the general public."

Bill Coulson has been a contributing guest on Culture Shock and has been a valuable assistance to the awakening of the American people today. It has been a slow process but progress non the less.

Thomas Sowell's column in the summer of 1994 speaks volumes only a decade later. Given the changes that are in the government schools today Coulson and Rogers profoundly changed it.

Sowell continues, "People who today express alarm at the supposed infiltration of "the religious right" into the public schools typically have no idea how widespread, how systematic and how persistent have been the infiltration of directly the opposite ideas which have been pushed by people like Carl Rogers and his then-disciple William Coulson."

When one recognizes the magnitude of what has been done here, it has been due to the drum beat of the secularist ideology to the reduction of religious influence.

In closing, Sowell says, "The issue in the schools today is not religion but education. It is the secular messiahs who have redirected the schools away from intellectual activity and toward psychological tinkering and ideological indoctrination.At least one of those secular messiahs has now decided to alert others to the dangers. For that, all parents owe Dr. William Coulson a debt of gratitude."