Bennington College Self Study
Date
1994-03
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Abstract
The academic strengths of the College remain inseparable from its originating ideas: students
taking responsibility for designing their education; the central role of academic counseling; the
immersion of students from the outset in the center of the working life of the faculty; the
continual pursuit and elaborations of the interrelationships between life inside the classroom
and life in the world (the Field Work Term, emphasis on the practitioner teacher, teaching
and learning as performing arts). In those instances where the college works, the power and
intensity of the educational experience remain formidable.
The academic weaknesses of the College are: the recalcitrant rigidity of the divisions and the
subsequent problems for faculty and students in putting together educational programs that
transcend divisions; the unevenness in the quality of the counseling experience; the excesses
of the focus on the individual and, conversely, the inadequacies in the experience of shared
purposes and of social responsibility; an absence of uniformly high standards with respect to
the demands made on students; and the freshman year experience.
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Keywords
NEASC, Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, New England Association of Schools and Colleges