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Interview with Jean Houston
Possible Human, Possible World, II
Part 1 of 3 parts

THINKING ALLOWED
Conversations On The Leading Edge
Of Knowledge and Discovery
With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS
Reprinted with permission from Thinking Allowed Productions

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello again and welcome. This is Jeffrey Mishlove, back with one of my favorite people, Jean Houston. Jean, as we were finishing up on the last segment, you were telling about the impact that Margaret Mead had on your life. How did you meet Margaret Mead?

JEAN HOUSTON, Ph.D.: Well, she actually invited me to create a conference with her on women's education, which we did in Bath, England. And as I observed her behavior, I was fascinated. I mean, she was doing things that I had been studying for years. She was clearly thinking in images and thinking in words.

She was thinking, as we call it, kinesthetically with her whole body. She was using her dreams. She would program her dreams at night to dream about what she wanted to dream, and the next morning she would use this material. She clearly had access to all kinds of frames of mind and states of consciousness.

So I said to her, "You know, you have the most interesting mind I've ever seen. I would love to study it." She says, "Well, you know, that's very interesting. All my life, all my life, people have been interested in what I think. You're one of the first to be interested in how I think, so let's do it." And so that was -- what? -- of 1973. And then until virtually the day she died we worked together on many projects.

I did study the way her mind worked, and discovered so many
things -- the creation of a genius. Of course she was born with remarkable talents, but apart from that she came from a family who were almost all educators, and they felt that they knew so much about education that they refused to send her to school very much. So she was educated at homes, in terms of these newfangled theories of Maria Montessori, and also William James, who said if you want to educate a child to the fullness of their capacity, begin by educating
their percepts.

So little Margaret, from the time she was a little, tiny child, was exposed to masterpieces of painting; great pieces of music -- you know, wound up on the Victrola; or interesting touches -- you know, corrugated metal, ice cream, fluffy things. And so she had this multisensory body. Years later I would say, "Margaret, where do you exist?" And she'd say, "Why, all over me, of course!" And she really was.

If I say to some of my relatives, "Jasper, where do you
exist?" "Why, I live in my head." If I ask my Sicilian relative, "Graziela, where do you exist?" "Ah! Right here!" Margaret: "All over me, of course!" So she was multisensory, and she was also taught to do whole processes from beginning, middle, to end, so that she would say to her mother, "Mother, would you show me how to make cheese?" And her mother would say, "Oh yes, Margaret. But you also have to watch the new calf that's about to be born." Now that's the whole
process from calf to cheese. "Daddy, can I weave?" "Yes, Margaret. Let's go out and cut down several saplings and make a loom." And so she would learn to do the whole process.

MISHLOVE: The organic interconnectedness of things.

HOUSTON: Absolutely. You see, too many people today, they know the beginning of something, they know the end --

MISHLOVE: Or a piece in the middle.

HOUSTON: Or a piece in the middle. But they don't have the whole process. They have no sense of the organic unity. They have no commitment to process. So in studying Margaret's ways of working with process I began to then work to put process back into schools, so the children would learn whole process, and not just be caught in little pieces of it. That's why we put art -- in many of the schools we helped to redesign the curriculum; we would put art back into the curriculum, often as the center of a curriculum. So a child would learn to weave and also learn about fractions at the same time. A child would learn musicalnotation and rhythm at the same time they would learn mathematics, you see.

And these children did not fail, because you can't fail when you're putting art, rhythm, music, multisensory learning, because you're operating again on many, many different kinds of mind. And the children, if they could not think, if they
were not natural verbal-linear thinkers, they might be kinesthetic-musical thinkers. If they were not kinesthetic-musical, they might be visual. So if you begin to
bring a child into the full domain of his or her intelligence, and teach them whole process, you generally have someone who is a very successful learner.

MISHLOVE: The view seems to be, then, that no matter how many mental blocks there might be, or inhibitions, or places where a person is shut down, there are always equally many doors that can be opened.

HOUSTON: Oh, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many more doors, you see. And it's the old, "In my father's house there's many mansions." There are many doors. There are many passageways. The brain-mind system is immensely plastic. It is extraordinarily accessible. I remember once I was invited
in Brooklyn, New York to observe a team of teachers who were very good teachers, but who were working with what are called minority-group non-learners.

And I watched these teachers teach, and they were very good, but they were not reaching the children at all. And the kids went, "Aaaaahhh . . . ," you know. Well, at recess, in the school yard, these kids who were so bored and just not there and vacant in the classroom, when I watched them out in the school yard: "Hey, man . . ." "Yeah, man . . ." And they were brilliant kids. They were much smarter than I was. So I caught one of them; I said, "Hey, Tommy, what is this? Five plus three plus two." He said, "Oh man, get lost." So I said, "Hey Tommy, what is this? [clapping three, five, and two times]." "That's ten, man." I said, "Why didn't you tell me before?" He said, "Because you didn't ask me before. You thought you did, but you didn't." He was right. I was asking him a question in
terms of Northern European notions of the nature of intelligence. I went home with him.

His father was a jazz musician. He had learned all kinds of things, but in terms of the patterning being rhythm and music. So I went back to that classroom, and I said to the teachers, "What are they not learning?" They said, "Anything." "Well, like what?" "Well, like spelling." "Like what? Give me a word." They said, "Well, let's start with the proverbial cat, C-A-T." I said, "All right."

So I got the kids up, and I had them make a C: "[Rhythmically] C [pronounced K]--C,C--C,C,C--C,C,C--C,C,C." We'd get the sound going: "A--A,A--A,A--A,A--T,T--T,T--T,T." This went on for awhile. "Now close your eyes and see the cat, see the cat, runnin' around, see the cat, chasin' around, "C,C--A,A--T,T." And by God, they got cat. And you might say, what about rhododendron, you know, or a longer word? Well, it doesn't make any difference.

Once the learning takes place, then the brain-mind system seeks all kinds of things to wrap itself around, and the wounded learner is healed.

MISHLOVE: It seems that in our school system we've forgotten about the body as a learning instrument.

HOUSTON: Pretty much, yes. I mean, we seem to be educating people to -- you know, the soul of a fine machine. Much of our education came out of creating situations in which people would make good factory workers -- you know, in the nineteenth century, Horace Mann essentially creating, based on the education of the Prussian officers, educating people to be on time, to be punctual, to follow directions, to do the right thing. And so the body became embalmed, as it were.

MISHLOVE: There was a notion in the nineteenth century that the body shouldn't be felt at all. If you felt your body, that meant you were sick.

HOUSTON: Unfortunately that's true. But of course what happened is that we then got an enormous amount of wounded learners. Now, the reason that that's not working and it can't work anymore, is that America has become a multi-cultural society. We don't have a melting pot anymore; we're not melting away people's ecstatic or cultural edges. I mean, Koreans are still Koreans, Vietnamese are Vietnamese, Hispanics are Hispanics, and we have to work with the genius
of different ways of thinking and learning of many cultures, and integrate that into the schools. You know, as I said earlier, there's no such thing as a stupid child, but there are incredibly repressive, uni-cultural ways that children have become repressed. And this can't happen. In a multi-cultural society we're going to need multiple ways of learning, knowing, and doing.

End Part 1 of 3 parts

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