Rochdale College

EdCon

(more to come)

CURRICULUM 1969

Education at Rochdale is

– happening, in flux, multi-level, unpredictable, dynamic, continuing, many-sided.
You discover tomorrow what you learned yesterday. Nothing is extra-curricular.

– yours to make, take, find, give, design, improvise. If that sounds like freedom,
remember it's also the heaviest load of responsibility you've ever carried. You
have to start by learning what it is you want to learn: you may be surprised
at the answer. A lot of us have been.

– comprehensive. 341 Bloor St. W. is a living articulate cross-section of contemporary
society different only in being genuinetly self-(often un-)determined, and in the
openness with which it citizens act out both their joys and troubles. You may have
trouble distinguishing between the academic, the therapeutic, and the vocational.

– inexpensive, mostly. Rents are higher than in some student residences in Toronto,
but lower than comparable high-rise apartment buildings. "Tuition" is nothing more
than your annual membership fee – unless, of course, Your Own Thing needs equipment
we don't have or money from a bare Education Budget cupboard, in which case the
first thing you learn is fund-raising or equipment design – or that it was really
something else you wanted to do.

– confusing, painful, difficult, and exciting. Nobody is ready for what's happening
here: nothing in your past experience – or any of ours' – could prepare you for it.
Nothing quite like Rochdale ever happened before. We don't know anywhere else it's
happening now.

THE ROCHDALE CURRICULUM

Nobdy knows exactly how many Education Things are going on here. Seminars come and go
before anyone has thought to write them up for the Daily. (Average life-expectancy
for the formal seminar: 6-8 weeks. Average attendance for the more enduring ones:
6-8 persons.) Workshops, projects, formal and informal tutorials thorw up brief structures
faster than the mind can boggle. Quantative measurements will get you nowhere, and all
descriptions are on their way to being out of date as soon as formulated.

Still, a College Catalog has to have a Curriculum: This one is a selective, subjective,
statement about some of the learning structures available at Rochdale during the first
half of March 1969.

   S is for Seminar; S* means it has lasted 4 months or more.
   W is for Workshop; Wp means it's motivating purpose is a pragmatic one.
   LL is for Living Laboratory, the Rochdale specialty.
   A is for Affiliate: a group or organization with its own distinct structure, operating
   as part of Rochdale.

    * PRIMITIVE CULTURE & SURVIVAL SKILS (LL): Dalton McCarthy, Headman. Conducted on the Rochdale Land Company & Agronomistics Institute's 410-acre tract in northern Ontario, this continuing seminar of (currently) 12 members offers elementary and advanced training in: Logging and logging construction; Subsistence farming; Primitive plumbing; wiring, and building repairs; maple-tapping; the anthropology of the rural community; social dynamics of farmer-priest-student relations; driftwood and soapstone carving; dressmaking and bone needle invention; cooking by woodfire and solar battery; bushmanism. Special courses available in esoteric transport (mud-driving, snowshoe manipulation, etc.), and in the socio-psycholgics of isolation and communality. Auditors, part-time participants, tourists, etc. welcome by arrangement.
    * CENSIT: Centre for the Study of Institutions and Theology (A): Brwster Kneen and Philip McKenna. "Our methology is dialectical-based on the assumption that social analysis must lead to existential questioning and the conscious understanding of the operative assumptions of the society. Conversely, theological study must lead to consideration of the social and political and economic consequences of personal faith. Social analysis and theological study carried out together should expose contradictions and provide the basis for the handling of these contradictions, either by changing the convictions or the society. This cannot be done abstractly. Members of the Centre are involved with church groups, political parties, the police, government departments, the university psychiatric and psychoanaltyic groups, theological faculties and media." The Centre has conducted a number of seminars of which the most successful currently is Phil McKenna's "Violence".
    * NEW STRUCTURES (Wp) (formerly Admissions Workshop): meets 1-4 times weekly, with 3-8 people, to study re-design of membership, residence, rental structures which have proved inadequate or inappropriate to the unique circumstances, in the light of the experience to date. Makes recommendations to Council.
    * HOTEL AND BUILDING MANAGEMENT (LL): Andrew Raney, craftsman/designer in metal work, and brewmaster extraordinary, Director. A continous seminar and laboratory course with 12 student/instructors under the supervision of Property Manager Raney, plus an indefinite number of specialist, part-time, and temporary participants. An 18-story high rise building in downtown Toronto with a hyper-active shifting 24-hour population of 1000 or more has been secured for laboratory facilities. Typical projects include: The Otis Trip – elevator and overworked computer maintenance; Garbage compression and shute clearance; Locksmithing and master key control in an individualistic society; bulletin board theory and practice; Plumbing for overcrowded Ashrams; Fire alarm suppression; Supplies: theory, distribution, and control – furnishings, cleaning equipment, linens, light-bulbs, etc.; Property management in the co-op and/or communal and/or chaotic society. This course has been particularly popular with draft resisters, and has had notable success with vocational training of philosophy, poli-sci, art, and poetry students.
    * SCULPTURE (W): With the guidance and participation of craftsman/sculptor, Ed Apt, the group has created a cooperative sculpture for the front plaza, now being cast in bronze, and due for unveiling in April. Student-members of the group are now going ahead to individual works.
    * DRUGS (S): Tuesdays, 8pm, main lounge, conducted by Dan McCue, with frequent guest speakers, films etc. Intense discussions of effects of drug use and abuse, and varied aspects of the 'drug culture' by people who know and people who want to know. Guests have included members of the Alcohol and Drug Addiction Research Foundation, Community Services Organization, etc., and U.of T. faculty biochemist, Deba Sinha.
    * SUPERSCHOOL (A): Based on the same educational orientation as Rochdale itself, Superschool offers a unique learning and living experience to 36 students (11 resident) between the ages of 3 and 20. Students plan their own classes and are largely responsible for housekeeping and maintenance. All decisions are by concensus: the 'Resource Person', as teacher and human being, earns student respect rather than demanding it. The school is in an old house on Beverly St.
    * THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE (A, W, Wp, LL): Jim Gerrard, the director, is also a member of the Rochdale Governing Council; The group's oblectives are three-fold: performance, education, and community interaction. They function in and out of the Bloor St. building with a startling combination of professional standards and amateur excitement. The weekly drama workshop welcomes all Rochdale members on Monday evenings in the large living room of Jim's Zeus suite. Improvisations are likely to occur anywhere in the building at disconcertingly likely times. The group's first production was a 3-night (till the fire marshals heard about it) sub-basement production of Tom Paine; their second one was a production of Futz at the Central Library Theatre, which made Toronto legal history, when the Morality Bureaudecided to serve obscenity summonses on the entire cast as well as director and producers at each performance. The play was greeted as "an impressive performance" by first-night pre-bust critics, and as the "arrival here in Toronto of the new theatre" afterwards.
    * DRAMA FOR MEDIA (LL): Required course for all Rochdale residents making use of public parts of the building. Learning-by-living techniques. Journalist-jousting, media-malfeasance, rhetoric, ad-lib, guerilla theatre, stage management of seminar sets, contra-direction, over-lighting, interview skirmish tactics, producer-hassling; the Fishbowl Philosophy. Special tutorials when necessary for building bureaucrats and resource persons in particular demand. Additional training facilities for exceptional students at CHUM-FM studios. Establishment of Radio Rochdale in the near future will undoubtedly deteriorate the situation.
    * COACH HOUSE (S*, A, Wp, LL): Coach House Press accomodates a Heidelberg press, an A.B. Dick offset press, a linotype, hand press, process camera, plate-maker, and assorted smaller machines, as well as steel-rimmed red-bearded post-literate Stan Bevington, and half a dozen to a dozen Rochdale apprentices and journeymen. Courses offered – formal and otherwise – include: Bureaucracy-baffling; Hand-binding; loft building; Do-it-yourself book publishing; a seminar called Teach!; Techniques of the reduction wheel. Coach House does all Rochdale publishing, and also publishes some books (latest, Bill Hutton's "History of America").
    * PATIO AND TERRACES COMMITTEE (Wp): Also under the direction of Ed Apt, this group is planning for the last stages of the building of Rachdale: the designing of the front plaza and the terraces on the 2nd and 17th floors for summer use. A Crafts Fair, where Rochdale artisans will make and sell leather goods, candles, batiks, carvings, ceramics, posters, etc, and a refreshment stand featuring hot dogs and crepes suzettes are planned for the main entrance. The 2nd floor is to have a smail stage and music shell for open air concerts and performances. Up top, they plan for an adult,/children's playground, with small and large size swing, slides, and boxes, etc.
    * THE INSTITUTE FOR INDIAN STUDIES (A): An educational/residential centre where Indian people can study and teach their own languages, history; and culture in their own way, and where Indians and non-Indians can develop a cross-cultural exploration and dialogue. Offices and workshop centre of the Institute are in the 17th floor Ashram Lounge at Rochdale. A variety of seminars and workshops are offered through the year.
    * LASERS (S): Sundays at 2 in the 6th floor Ashram Lounge, led by Etienne of the 6th floor, and/or guest speakers (with or without lasers). Currently exploring DNA.
    * MUSIC DEPT. (S,W): Less than two months old, the Dept. offered its first concert (medieval, baroque, and modern music) in February. Classes in musical notation, harmony, ear trainuig, solfeggio, history of western music, jazz, blues, folk & rock. Workshops in clarinet, recorder. sax, piano, strings, and composition. A Spring Festival Concert is scheduled to present a full day of classical, folk, and jazz. Instructors: Michel Roy, Paul Wexler, Mark Berger, Frank Rhys, Byron Wall. (Rochdale does not forbid 'classes' and 'teachers'.)
    * CHESS (W): Various times and places. Chess ladder posted weekly.
    * GOVERNMENTAL AND SOCIETAL DYNAMICS (LL): Mon, Wed, Fri, 3.30, Room 202; alternate Wed's, 8.30, main lounge. Attendance, l0-l00, usually including a quorum (6 out of 12) of the Rochale Governing Council. (Non-Council members are all, in theory, auditors.) The 1; #return true planned curriculum includes: Fiscal management; Intercorporate relationships; Government by General Manager; Government by discussion; Tourism and immigration; Population dynamics; The microcosm as a state. Spring semester extras, to date: Public Health (making a clinic, & corridor cat-shit control); Donation acceptance techniques (making a library); Security: crime control, police control, firearms control, theft control, vigilante control; Penology in the unstructured society (Is banishment the ultimate punishment or the only available one?), The media – making overexposure pay; Inter-institutional relations – making sociology surveys pay; N-dimensional space-time allocation.
    * HOUSE OF ANANSI (A, LL): Publishing house presently managed by Dennis Lee Rochdale Resource Person, poet ("Civil Elegies", etc.) journalist and editor ("T.O. Now", This Magazine is about Schools, etc.). Proximity of Anansi provides unusual opportunities for manuscript typing and book collation (no fee). Latest publication: "Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada".
    * REVOLUTlON (S*): Mon, 9.30, with Jim Beckman. "The purpose is to provide a setting to study and discuss the processes of rapid social change at work in the contemporary world, and to get clear about possible strategy by critically analyzing the existing revolutionary alternatives and strategies."
    * MODERN DANCE THEATRE OF CANADA (A): Elizabeth Swerdlow, artistic director. Professional ballet training. Hours by arrangement with Robert Swerdlow, 904 Younge St., Toronto 5

Rochdale Printed Curriculum, March 1969