Set 1
1939-1992
Introduction to the Archive
This biobibliographical archive is a story about one person’s path from a tradition that has eagerly anticipated the end of “this Earth,” and cultivated an attitude of domination over, rather than stewardship of the earth. It contains six sets of writings, each introduced by a chapter of the story that identifies the life situation or circumstances within which the respective set of writings were produced. It is organized for the most part in chronological order. This is the first set.
The three most formative events of my life
This first set of writings, from1939 to 1992 spans the three most formative events of my life. The first was an encounter with a classmate named Eloise which occurred in 1955-56 in my senior year in high school in Eden, North Carolina. The second was an experience in Germany ten years later in 1965. The third occurred in in Chicago, almost thirty years later, 1992. Because of the extended time-span of this set and its confusing number of institutions and changes, I have included a Timeline below for reference, covering these 53 years. I have highlighted these three events in the Timeline below with special type. The 1992 event set me on the course I have pursued down to the present. I took to referring to it as the “’92” event and find myself still referring to it, especially when I have “lost the scent” and am trying to find the trail again. The writings after 1992 are organized into five more sets after this one. I have included more than one explicitly autobiographical essay, in some cases telling different versions of some earlier important experiences. In other words, I recognize that my understanding of my own story has changed over time and that this archive is still another version, one that is opening a door to another chapter today in 2026. This is a point I will come back to later.
Timeline of First Document: 1939 to 1962
1939 I was born in Eldoret, a town in what was then the British colony of Kenya and spent most of my childhood years in Kenya, except for the three war years, from 1943 to 1946, when Dad was a paster in Benton, Pennsylvania.
1954-55 We came home to the States and spent the year living in New Jersey across from Philadelphia where my Dad was born and raised.
1955-1956 Eden, North Carolina. Mom was from North Carolina. I spent my senior year of high school living with my aunt and grandmother in Eden. Meeting with Eloise, and her boyfriend, Ronnie.
1956-1960, College Years. Columbia Bible College (CBC) in Columbia, South Carolina.
1960-1961 Dallas, Texas: Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas.
1961-1962 University of Pennsylvania – FIRST DOCUMENT (Masters Thesis)
Timeline of the rest of Set 1 of writings: 1962 to 1992
1962-64 Westminster Seminary, Willow Grove, Pa, Masters in Divinity, Westminster in 1964.
1964-1965 Temple University, Instructor in History.
1965-1968 Second formative event, University of Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany – “THE DAM BREAKS”
1965 and 1966 Two visits to L’Abri, located in the Swiss Alps, overlooking the Rhone Valley, L’Abri is a missionary center founded in 1955 by famed Presbyterian minister, Francis Schaeffer. See also the document, included in the fifth set, entitled “Faith as Fetish.” This is my unpublished review written in 2008. of a book written by Schaeffer’s son, Frank (“Frankie”) Schaeffer, entitled, Crazy for God,” published in 2007.
1968 BACK TO THE U.S., TO CHICAGO
1968-1978 University of Chicago Divinity School
1971-1978 Urban Life Center, (ULC), Chicago
1972 SECOND DOCUMENT: “Children, Artists, Prophets, and Politics”
1978 THIRD DOCUMENT: Ph.D., doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago Divinity School
1969-1971 working full-time at University of Illinois Tuberculosis Sanitarium
1971-1984 working full-time for Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS)
Master’s Degree in education from Northern Illinois University while working for DCFS
1979 DCFS DOCUMENT ONE: “PROPOSAL FOR A TRAINING CENTER FOR DCFS
1983 DCFS DOCUMENT TWO: REVIEW OF MINDSTORMS
1984 DCFS DOCUMENT THREE “The Empty Ideal: A Critique of Continuing Learning in the Professions, by Cyril O. Houle,” Adult Education, 34/3, Spring, 1984
1984 Resignation from DCFS to take a job in the computer business
1984-2011 27 years in the computer industry.
1992 Third formative event: Decision to begin doctorate in education at Northern Illinois University
Bio-bibliographical Narrative of
Master’s Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1962
1939 to 1962
I was born and raised in Kenya in 1939 when Kenya was still a British colony. My parents were self-described “fundamentalist” missionaries who believed the world needed saving. Today I still believe the world needs, not a savior, but healing, from fundamentalized private money-capital on the warpath.
The small town where I grew up, Eldoret, made the news in the U. S. in 1993, when a story appeared in the November 9 issue of Time magazine, with a photograph “recently seen in Eldoret” with the name, “Monica Lewinsky” on the back of a crowded bus.
The first item in this archive was completed in 1962. As the Timeline above shows, a lot had happened by then, but I will pick up the story in the summer of 1961 when I began writing this document.
By that summer, having graduated from college and completing one year of seminary in Dallas, Texas, I got a ride to New Jersey to spend the summer with my parents. They had just returned from East Africa to spend a year of furlough in South Jersey across the river from Philadelphia. After driving all night from Texas, our car pulled up to the home where my parents were staying. I got out, went to the door, and knocked. My mother opened the door and saw me standing there. “What can I do for you?” she asked, completely taken by surprise, and not recognizing me after almost seven years. She never tired of telling that story. I spent the summer with Mom and Dad, and then, instead of going back to Dallas, I stayed on with them through to the summer of 1962, when they went back to East Africa.
During that year while living with my parents, I applied to the Master’s program in History at the University of Pennsylvania and to my delighted astonishment, was accepted. Dad and Mom not only supported me, Dad let me ride his motor-scooter from South Jersey, across the river to school in Philadelphia all year.
My Master’s thesis for Penn, completed in 1962, was entitled, “The Debate Over Indirect Rule in the Light of the Changing Relationship Between Europe and Africa, 1870-1960.” I have chosen to include the first three chapters of the thesis as the first document in this biobibliographical archive, recognizing that it is a disturbingly limited, naive understanding of the long history of colonialism, otherwise known as white supremacy. On the other hand, it demonstrates my growing sense of the importance of history.
I also proposed to Ruth Bergstresser in 1962 and she accepted. Ruth and I had met five years earlier in college. Ruth was teaching in Norfolk, Virginia that year and Dad let me ride his Vespa scooter from Jersey to Norfolk and back several times that year.
In addition, I decided to transfer from Dallas to Westminster Seminary, located in Willow Grove, a suburb of Philadelphia. Dallas Seminary was founded to promote a particular fundamentalist way of interpreting the Bible called Dispensationalism. I had doubts that I would be able to sign the Dispensationalist doctrinal statement required to graduate. The upshot was that by the end of 1962, my parents had returned to Africa, I had completed my studies, written the Master’s thesis, and received a Master’s degree in History from Penn. And I had moved to Willow Grove and begun my first semester at Westminster Seminary.
The First Formative Event: 1955-56
Senior Year in High School in North Carolina
I need to backtrack to my senior year in high school to describe the first major formative event in this story. What focused my attention for good was doubt. One moment I was sitting in a high school English class, talking to Eloise, a girl who sat in front of me, while we waited for the teacher to begin the lesson. The next moment a string of questions had started firing inside. I had begun telling Eloise about Jesus. Her response was, “Do you think you can change my mind?” I was about to answer, “No, but God can,” when, for the first time in my life, I wondered if I really believed that. I didn’t answer. She turned the tables on me. It turned out that she and her boyfriend were the two agnostic intellectuals of the class. They spent the rest of the year challenging my faith which, up to that point, I had taken for granted. The Bible also came up that year in a history class when a substitute teacher mentioned it, a fact that stuck in my mind. The outcome of the conversation with Eloise and her boyfriend is that that I spent the next four years at Columbia Bible College, (CBC), in Columbia, S.C., as an agnostic, asking myself Eloise’s question. Was the Bible the final authority for all time for the whole world? I also began to realize how little I knew about the Bible, and, I believe, because of the connection that had been made between the Bible and history, my question, my inquiry, focused on the Bible as a source of history. My lifelong interest in history was born here.
I also met Ruth Bergstresser at CBC. She was the best thing that happened to me there. Her parents were also missionaries. They had gone out to the Philippines when Ruth was in high school. She finished high school there and attended the University of the Philippines for her first year of college, before coming back to the States to enter CBC as a sophomore. She and I met at the end of our first year at CBC, courted the next three years, and got married in 1963.
The story of “Children, Artist, Prophets and Politics” – Chicago, 1972
1962 to 1972
I wrote the second document in this archive, “Children, Artist, Prophets and Politics,” in 1972, ten years after the Master’s thesis at Penn. It was published in the first issue of what became Jim Wallis’s Sojourners Magazine. By that time, we were living in Chicago, and a lot had happened. I wound up spending the 1964-65 school year teaching at Temple University as an instructor in history, then spent three years at Tubingen University in Germany before returning to the States, and moving to Chicago from the East Coast.
Of course, a lot had also happened in the world in those ten years of “the Sixties.” The title of that first issue of Sojourners was The Post American, and the article itself reflected what Garry Wills’ called The Second Civil Wat in his book of that title, published in January 1 of 1968. It also reflected my reactions to those events, as well as to all that had happened in my own life and our family. For one thing, Ruth and I had a six-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. In 1962 I had in fact transferred from Dallas to Westminster
Westminster
A word about the varieties of “Christian fundamentalism”
At Westminster I encountered the historic Bible of the Protestant Reformation, the Bible of Calvinism. This was not the same Bible as the one at Dallas, and both differed significantly from the one I was taught at CBC, After Dallas and CBC, the sense of history at Westminster was enlarging. CBC traced its tradition of spirituality, which it described technically as the “deeper Christian life,” back fifty years or so to the early part of the twentieth century. As noted, the Dispensationalism taught at Dallas went back only to the nineteenth century. Both treated the eighteen or nineteen hundred odd years between Bible times and the nineteenth or twentieth century as of secondary importance if not for the most part a time of degeneration and Catholic heresy, with only a “thin red line” preserving the one and only authoritative interpretation.
In keeping with its Reformed roots, Westminster took pride in its intellectualism and scholarship. Its founder, Machen, had been a student for a time in Germany, studying directly under some of the great liberal theologians. Westminster was not afraid to pit orthodox Christianity against the best that secular or liberal or Enlightenment rationalism could offer.
The apologetics course at Westminster was liberating for me because it was the first course I had taken in seven years where the questions which had launched me were openly addressed. It was a little bit like coming out of the closet. I had read a couple of classic apologetics texts at CBC but had done so on my own, with no one to discuss them with.
On the other hand, for Westminster as for Dallas doctrinal purity took first place as the only way to genuine spirituality. Belief was defined in terms of what Westminster described, in astonishingly rationalist terms, as “propositional revelation.” Destiny, the unending, eternal destiny of the soul depends in the last analysis upon assent to a set of propositions – so they taught.
Westminster’s Bible was the Bible of the Protestant Reformation, more particularly, the Bible of Calvinism, even more particularly, it was the Bible of the orthodox Fundamentalists who broke from Princeton Seminary. This was the verbally inspired, inerrant Bible, without contradiction. But agreement on this seemingly airtight basis of belief had not meant the end of controversy. No sooner had Westminster been founded then a split occurred and a second institution, Faith Seminary, was founded by dissidents led by Carl McIntire. Some years later a party of dissidents at Faith Seminary broke off to form Covenant. In each case new ecclesiastical institutions, “denominations,” were also formed. Within these traditions, with few exceptions, only hostile attention was paid to any of the scholars representing three centuries and more of critical biblical scholarship, going all the way back to Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, written in 1670. All three traditions, CBC, Dallas, and Westminster agreed that this whole tradition, known generally as “German higher criticism of the Bible,” was an enemy of Christian faith and was responsible for the evils of “modernism.”
Teaching History at Temple University 1964-65
I graduated from Westminster in 1964. By this time, I was intellectually adrift. That is a judgment I make looking back. At the time I would not have put it so bluntly, but I could not decide what denomination to join. I told myself that I wanted to teach, but would have been hard pressed to define what it was I wanted to teach. I wanted to continue my studies and had thoughts about pursuing a doctorate. I hastily applied to Temple University’s doctoral program and was accepted but then changed my mind. By the end of the summer, I was looking for a job to tide me over for a year while I decided on the next step.
Miraculously, instead of spending the year working in a factory I found myself teaching history at Temple University! The baby boom had hit college in 1968, just one of the many shocks that punctuated that year. The fall semester had already begun when I got a call from Temple on a Friday asking if I could begin teaching four sections of a freshman Western Civilization survey course starting on Monday, three days later. Naturally I said yes. That year I taught Western Civilization from the Sumerians to the sixteenth century eight times. I finally felt as if I had filled in some of the gaps. I finally felt as if I could begin to locate Bible history within the larger sweep of human history. And at the end of that year Ruth and I sailed off to Europe to spend a year learning German and studying at Tubingen University, paid for by my Temple salary, while we lived in Ruth’s salary as a second-grade teacher. That stretched into three years.
Three Years in Germany:
1965-68
The Second Formative Event: The Dam Broke
Our first two months in Germany were spent at the Goethe Institute on Lake Constance, studying German. During those two wonderful months, Ruth and I met and became friends with a fellow student, a young Indonesian man who had been a Divinity School student in the States. He spent the whole two months challenging our views about the American war in Vietnam, our first such encounter.
After that two months Ruth and I moved into our tiny apartment in Tubingen. The first evening I was able to sit down to begin study, I started by revisiting the tentative plan I had made, a project safely within the walls of orthodoxy. Within a few minutes there came welling up inside a flood of questions, questions from the apologetics class at Westminster, questions from CBC, questions going back to that first question asked by Eloise in 1956. For a brief moment the walls held, and then the water was over the top and I was being swept up in the torrent. The next three years were as exhilarating as any I have lived as that river carried me down, down, down until in 1968 it deposited me, with Ruth, and our year-and-a-half daughter, Heidi, in Chicago. We arrived the day after the Democratic Convention in Chicago to discover a city in shock.
At CBC we were taught was to read it in its historical context. This injunction was qualified by the overriding principle of Biblical inerrancy. The result was a travesty of historical interpretation, totally in the service of apologetics. Nevertheless, I latched onto the principle and took it at face value. It was one reason I chose history as a field of study at the University of Pennsylvania. In Tubingen I was swept up into the stream of twentieth century historical interpretation of early Christianity. The first discovery I made was that most of those engaged in this enterprise considered themselves Christians, followers of Jesus, pious, devout, as committed to their faith as were all of those on the other side of that inerrancy wall.
The Bible I discovered at Tubingen was Bultmann’s Bible, the demythologized Bible, the Bible of the dangerous historical critics, the liberals, the destroyers of true faith. I began reading Bultmann’s commentary on the Gospel of John in my first semester in Tubingen, five hundred pages in German, since the commentary had not yet been translated into English. Later I attended lectures given by Bultmann’s student, Ernst Kasemann, a genial person and an intellectual bulldog. In addition to his courses, Kasemann held a monthly colloquium for foreign students.
Rudolf Bultmann, notorious because of his blunt recognition of myth in the Bible, was not a sarcastic, cynical atheist but a lifelong member of the Lutheran church and a lifelong student of the New Testament. He believed in God and his studies of the New Testament were intended to nourish faith. During my three years in Germany, I read every one of Bultmann’s major works, and many of his four volumes of essays. I did not really understand what I was reading, especially the existentialism and phenomenology which he had taken from Heidegger. But it was obvious to me that here was someone who, on the one hand, was at the forefront of critical New Testament scholarship, drawing on all sorts of non-Christian Hellenistic texts to make sense of the Christian texts, and, at the same time, was talking about a sovereign God of grace and judgment.
I was drawn to Bultmann because here was someone proclaiming that God is “wholly other than we thought him to be;” in other words, a God who transcends our propositions and systematic theologies. He talked about the inexhaustibility of believing comprehension. I felt like a diver breaking the surface of the water and gulping in great mouthfuls of air after his lungs have been almost bursting.
I was drawn to Bultmann because he sought to keep the act of living and the act of thinking from being torn apart. I encountered this formulation of Bultmann’s in the one book of his that I read while still at Westminster. It leaped off the page then and intrigued me. I was not sure what he meant at the time but it sounded a note that resonated deeply. Looking back, I can see that it struck at the subordination of life to doctrine in fundamentalism and orthodoxy. Above all as I began my reading of Bultmann’s commentary on John, I became convinced that, contrary to the strict Calvinist teachings of Cornelius Van Til at Westminster, human agency, how we understand ourselves, is absolutely inseparable from how we understand everything else. I understood the language of human “agency,” to refer to the gift of being co-creators and stewards of one another and our world. This is not the language I would have used then. At the time all I had was a glimpse of this sensibility. But it went deep, indeed, looking back I can say it went all the way down to my soul. It is the truth that led me and Ruth to choose as the inscription in our wedding rings, the words, “heirs together of the grace of life.” I understood and still understand the word “grace” to be inseparable from “gift” as well as beauty. The word “grace” in Greek is “charitos,” from which comes our word “charity, but “charity” does not have the connotations of class difference it carries today.
In Germany I emerged from the ghetto of fundamentalism into the twentieth century. The three years in Germany spelled the end of one life and the beginning of another. The new life that was forming was pouring into old wineskins and they were beginning to stretch and weaken. When I read today what I was writing then I am struck by the jarring incongruity between what I was saying and the language I was using to say it. By the time we left Germany, in 1968, I was beginning to reach out for spiritual nourishment to the wide world of meaning beyond the confines of Christianity. I had caught glimpses of spiritual struggle and meaning and power in all sorts of places, including the myths of other religions. I was hungry to push back the walls even further.
Return to Chicago
We arrived in Chicago in August of 1968, a day or two after the Democratic Convention had exploded into violence on the streets of Chicago. In Germany we had begun to wake up to the dizzying, exhilarating, disturbing events happening in the States. We were in Germany as the civil rights movement merged with the anti-war movement. We were still in Germany when Bobby Kennedy and then Martin Luther King were assassinated and the West Side of Chicago went up in flames. We had debated U.S. policy in Viet Nam with a Malaysian student the whole three years we were there. Student protests had hit the European universities as well and there were picket lines outside the halls of Tubingen University and heated remarks by some of the professors in class. For a while it appeared that our travel plans home would be threatened by the strikes in Paris. In the end we were able to take our train across France to Le Havre where we boarded a student ship for the nine-day voyage home. We spent several days in Paris and took pictures of protest signs still hanging out the windows at the Sorbonne.
Chicago and John Fry
In Chicago the full force of events hit us in the face. After visiting some of the churches in Hyde Park, we heard about John Fry and visited his church across the Midway in Woodlawn one sunny Sunday morning, taking the Cottage Grove bus down to 64th Street and then walking through the ghetto streets, asking directions of some Black kids along the way.
John Fry captivated us immediately and we joined First Presbyterian Church. Once again, as in Germany, I was caught up in something that was way over my head. I was not equipped to grasp what was happening and was swept along by events. I was following my guts, while my mind tried desperately to keep up.
Within a few weeks Ruth and I were teaching Sunday School classes. We were also attending a mid-week evening class. The book being discussed in the evening class was not the Bible. It was Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution. John Fry showed up late for one evening’s session, smoking a cigar, drinking a glass of Jack Daniels, and cursing like a Marine. He had, in fact, been a Marine chaplain. Fry was, at the time, caught up in the gang war taking place on the streets of Woodlawn, between the Black Stone Rangers, the Disciples, and the police. Fry considered the Rangers his parishioners and visited them in jail and was invited to gang meetings. He even had occasion to preach to them, taking as his text, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Fry reminded me of Kasemann and both were like bulldogs. Fry’s face, even, was gnarled and tough looking. Both men were tough-minded, and in the case of both, mind and soul were richly fused.
John Fry’s Bible was the Bible of the prophets. Fry preached outrage, outrage at the sins of an unjust, unequal, racist city administration, police force, Federal government, and church. On Thanksgiving Sunday Fry asked the congregation to consider Thanksgiving from the point of view of the Native-American. First Church under John Fry was actively engaged in school reform efforts in Woodlawn. He became a target in Mayor Daley’s efforts to destroy the Federal government’s War on Poverty program because the funds bypassed City Hall and went directly to neighborhood programs in Woodlawn and elsewhere. The summer before we joined First Church, Fry had been summoned to Washington to be attacked and vilified by a Congressional subcommittee ostensibly investigating misuse of funds.
Urban Life Center
Through a friend named Eunice, whom we met at First Church, we met Phyllis Cunningham, and soon after, Don Schatz. Eunice and Don were married soon after we met. In 1971, Phyllis, Eunice, and Don, invited Ruth and I to become involved in founding the Urban Life Center, a Semester-in-the-City program for Christian colleges in non-urban locations. At the Urban Life Center, the priority was action, not doctrine. The imperative to take action against injustice and inequality was enough doctrine. For a while I was working full time, enrolled in one class at the University, and spending the rest of my spare time at the Urban Life Center, teaching one class, visiting colleges on recruiting trips, and chairing endless board meetings.
The Urban Life Center was explicitly founded to combat racism, most directly by bringing together white students from non-urban schools with African-American students from the inner city in an experiential and academic learning residential community for a semester. Conflicts over authority and legitimacy were of had exploded into violence in the Sixties, and not just in the inner cities.
While the ULC was founded to combat abuses of authority and power, during the eight years I was actively involved, four years as president of the board, the same conflicts issues were present from the beginning of the center’s existence, and after eight years, experienced a conflict over succession, a parallel to what I had been writing about that I couldn’t help but be aware of.
I call attention to this because it was in this context that I got to know Phyllis Cunningham in action as a Christian fighter against racism in every fiber of her being and what I now call a warrior for equal citizenship and real democracy.
ULC was the community that gave birth to the second article, “Children, Artist, Prophets and Politics.” It was published in 1972 in a new periodical named, The Post American. Jim Wallis, who produced it renamed the periodical Sojourners, still being published.
U. of C. Dissertation, Completed in 1978
The third document
Two items of this period that are linked to this archive though are critical to my life story must be mentioned even though they are not archived here. One is my University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, completed in 1978, and published in 1981 under the title Johannine Christianity in Conflict: Authority, Rank, And Succession in the First Farewell Discourse.
When I wrote the dissertation my purpose was to understand and interpret the text called “The Gospel of John” in its historical context in the first and second centuries of the Common Era, when Christianity was born. This was the period of the early Roman Empire, a context shaped by the cultural ferment historians call the “Hellenistic World.” My adviser was Jonathan Z. Smith, a historian of religions, who was an expert on this period. I chose Smith to be my adviser precisely because he was an historian, not a theologian. I published an article summing up the dissertation in 1980, under the title “The Departure of the “Way”: The First Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John” available here.
Today, writing this autobiographical narrative, my interest is in the questions that led me to write the dissertation and article in the circumstances and context of 1968, when I launched the project, questions such as why I chose Jonathan Z. Smith to be my adviser. Today, in 2026 for example I am far more keenly aware than I was in 1968 of all that would fall under what I would have described then as a strong interest knowledge and self-understanding; what I describe now as epistemology; that is, not just knowledge, information, facts, data about the world, but knowledge specifically about knowledge itself, knowledge about knowledge, thinking about thinking, philosophical questions about the activities that fall under the notion of knowing and understanding and interpreting our human experience of the world, activities including imagining, and therefore co-creating our worlds of experience, as well as circumstances and activities that cultivate individual as well as collective ignorance and denial of reality. I have a good friend who for years has been asking me, with mild exasperation, “Bruce, why epistemology? Which I have interpreted to mean, why use academic jargon? Why not say “knowledge.” I won’t address that question here. I will refer the reader to the paper I wrote in the summer of 1992, called “The Dark Hole of Epistemology,” devoted to answering that question. To give the reader a sense of its momentous significance for me I will say that the “Dark Hole” paper was born out of and part of what I call my ‘”92” experience, an experience which included the sense that I had been given a new “baptism” name, “Epistemology,” with a capital “E.”
As I write this, I can’t help but be aware of the fact that the conflict over authority today has, since 2000 been actively threatening to become a civil war over succession in the U.S, by a situation in which the man occupying the office of President is determined to be President for life and is determined to choose his successor. This fact both heightens my interest and give to that that-two-thousand-year-old text new life. Also, that one of the issues that stands out like a blinking red neon warning light in today’s situation, the situation reflected in The Gospel of John, in the Urban Life Center situation in 1980, and in the revolutionary situation First Church was engaging with by reflecting on Arendt’s On Revolution and its lessons for today, is the issue of limitless concentrated power in one unaccountable claimant.
1971-1984
Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS)
Biobibliographical Story of the DCFS subset
For a year and a half, from 1969-1972, I worked at the Tuberculosis Sanitarium associated with the University of Illinois in Chicago on the West Side at 1919 W. Taylor St., as a member of the social services team. In 1972 I was hired by the Illinois Department of Children and Services in their Protective Services Center (DCFS) almost across the street of the Sanitarium. After a few weeks working days at DCFS, I was able to transfer to the night shift, working 9PM to 6AM. The night hours enabled me to continue taking one course a term at the University of Chicago. I also had time to continue working for the Urban Life Center for the next ten years, six of those years as Chairman of the Board. When in 1978 I finally finished my doctorate at the University of Chicago, I transferred to days. I was assigned to supervise a team of protective service workers.
While at DCFS I became increasingly aware of the poor quality of training received by line staff, many of whom had no social work background. Most of it was on-the-job training for staff who are routinely responsible for the extremely sensitive issues involved in state intervention in parent-child relationships. In 1978, when I completed my studies at U. of C., my writing turned to issues of staff training. I began taking courses in Adult Education and reading some of the literature on social work. I turned to Northern Illinois University (NIU) which had a strong department of Adult Education, a department which, since 1976, included Phyllis Cunningham. A list of the writings, several of them published, which I completed for a Master’s degree can be found at the end of this bio. They suggest something of the perspective I brought to staff training in public institutions such as DCFS.
First Document in the DCFS Subset 1984
I include this document because it expressed my misgivings about the notion that “Adult Education should an academic “discipline,” and underscores why Phyllis Cunningham’s critical understanding of adult education as learning to be an active citizen agent of a democratic society.
Second Document in the DCFS subset 1979
“Proposal for A Child Abuse Staff Development and Resource Center for Cook County,” is the first document in this DFS set.
One particularly important item was an inter-agency proposal in 1979 for a training center which I sent to Jeanine Smith, Director of the Protective Services Division of DCFS. That document is the first document in this DCFS subset. Coincidentally, two years later, in 1980, Greg Coler became the new Director of DCFS and one of his first actions was to create two staff training centers, one in Chicago, serving Chicago and Cook County, and one in Springfield, serving the rest of the state, both directed by Jeff Buhrmann in Springfield. Jeff hired me to be the Supervisor of the Training Center in Chicago, supervising a team of four social workers.
My experience at DCFS taught me much that is not included in these writings. One of the most important was what I learned from Greg Coler’s four years as Director. He was the first Director, in my experience, who knew what he was doing. I was in Springfield when he introduced himself to staff. He set forth his two-page mission statement which identified the five goals the Department was responsible for carrying out.
After nine years with the agency, I was as cynical about mission statements as were many other staff. However, it was not long before I began to change my tune, and by the end of his four years, I felt as if he had given a master class to the public on managing a large, vital, unwieldy, politically explosive public institution.
Prior to Coler, when the press reported a horrifying case of child abuse in a foster home the Department tended to react by returning children to their natural parents precipitously, until sometime later, when a natural parent was the abuser, foster parent placement would be the focus and the reverse would happen. Coler, instead, would in each case go on the offensive citing the relevant goal of the mission statement. In the first case, for example, he would call the attention of the public, via the press, the legislature, and the private agencies to the goal of increasing funding for the state’s child abuse and neglect hotline service. When the issue was a tragedy in a foster home, Coler called for efforts to be directed towards the goal of making permanent plans early for children in foster homes, either to return the child to the natural parent(s) or to seek adoption, using the mission statement to lobby the public. In other words, he used the mission statement as a public communication touchstone of the Department’s purpose and responsibility, which could be appealed to in the sense that he held himself, the department, and every stakeholder accountable to.
He demonstrated how such explicitness could be used appropriately, powerfully, morally. He was criticized, in fact for being “too political.” I would go further and say that Coler’s example is an instance of publicness, of transparency as an essential feature of the exercise of self-government we call democracy. His use of the mission statement democratized, that is, made visible to all, what the department was accountable to. Jeff Buhrmann, the Director of the two training centers, embodied Coler’s vision in his approach to training. I remain forever in his debt, and Coler’s, for what they taught me. When I left DCFS, I gave a plaque to the Chicago Training Center, with words that to me spelled out this vision: “Organizations are to be sailed, not driven.”
In 1984 I decided to leave DFCS and plunge into the exploding computer business. Two years earlier, in 1982, Time Magazine’s cover featured, instead of a person, the personal computer as the “Machine of the Year.” For many years I had been fascinated with stories about computers and artificial intelligence. As early as 1976 I was aware of efforts to teach computers to translate texts from the Bible. I was not impressed when one of the widely-circulated examples, the saying of Jesus, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41), was translated as “The wine is agreeable but the meat is spoiled.” More seriously, I recorded in August of that year that I was “wrestling” with the place of the computer in my future, provoked by reading Henry Adams’ chapter on “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” in his famous memoir, The Education of Henry Adams.
Third Document Included in DCFS Subset
This document is NOT included in the archive:
1983 Review of Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert, Association for Educational Data Systems Journal, 16/2, Winter 1983.
I have not included my review of Mindstorms because of copyright issues, but my encounter with the book is too important not to cite it.
Encountering Paper’s Mindstorms should, perhaps, have been identified as another of the major important formative event in my life. It so happens that all three of my brothers spent all or a major part of their working life in the computer business. What galvanized me into action in 1984 was a book called Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, by Seymour Papert, published in 1980. I spotted the title in the science museum in Toronto while on a trip to Canada to visit David and Nancy Newman, close friends we had met in Tubingen. I purchased the book on the spot and spent most of the trip home to Chicago reading it while Ruth drove. I was still working for DCFS, but soon after I got home. I registered for an independent course in computers and education at Northern Illinois University. I got permission from DCFS to attend a conference in California on the computer and “distance education.” A little later I wrote a proposal, arguing that purchasing personal computers for the use of the two training centers would enable the Department to use distance-education to provide orientation training to new workers without the expense of travelling to Chicago or Springfield. The proposal was accepted and Chicago received its computer a week before I left, one of the first “personal computer” it had purchased.
I also wrote a review of Mindstorms that was published in 1983 in the Association for Educational Data Systems (Volume 16, Winter 1983, Number 2). That review constitutes the transition document from DCFS to the next set of writings in this archive, and the twenty-seven years spent working in the computer industry, from which I retired in 2011.
Seymour Papert was Professor of Mathematics at MIT at the time he wrote Mindstorms. He is considered a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence. Before coming to MIT he had spent five years (1958-1963) studying with Piaget in Geneva. For me, the most important insight he shared with Piaget was that “children develop intellectually without being taught.” (MIT News, July 17, 2002, “Papert misses ‘Big Ideas’ from early days of artificial intelligence. Both shared the view that children are naturally thinkers, philosophers; that is, ontologists, epistemologists, and moral philosophers; that is, constructors of worlds of experience, thinking about thinking itself, and making judgments about what matters. An educators’ task, even of children, is not to do their thinking for them, but to create the conditions to facilitate their thinking and world-making, and engage in these activities with them.
Chronicle: 1978-1984
- 1978-80 Supervisor of a Child Protective Services Team at DCFS
- 1980-1984 Supervisor of new Chicago Training Center at DCFS
- Master of Science in Education NIU 1978-83
List of Documents written related to DCFS
not included in the archive
- 1978 Bischof and Sheehy on Adult Development: Criticisms and Comparisons,” for Dr. Robert C. Mason.
- 1979 “Report on Social Work Education in Light of Adult and Continuing Education Theory and Practice.” For Phyllis Cunningham.
- 1980 “The Chicago Training Center of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services: In Search of a Context,” For Ron Cevero, Fall, 1980.
- 1981 “Communication”: A Neglected ‘Theme’ in Adult Education,” For Professor John A. Niemi.
- 1982 Review of Organizational Learning, by Argyris and Schon, Lifelong Learning, June, 1982.
- 1983 Review of Microcomputers for Adult Learning, edited by David G. Gueulette, CLOUT, 1983.
- 1983 “A Call for a Rich View of Adult Learning,” Paper read at the Midwest Research‑to‑Practice Conference in Adult and Continuing Education, DeKalb, 1983
The third formative event of this story:
Back to Northern Illinois University
This first set of writings ends in 1992, with what I have ever since referred to as the “92” event. All I will say about that event here is that I decided to go back to Northern Illinois University to pursue a doctorate in education, working with Phyllis Cunningham. The experience of making that decision, what happened “inside” of me, I leave to the second set of this archive. I was 53 years old in 1992. Our daughter, Heidi, was 26. Our son Arthur was 21. Ruth was a social worker working for Catholic Charities. We had been living in Chicago for 24 years, in the Hyde Park neighborhood. I had been working full time in the computer business for 8 years. Clinton was running for President against Bush, Sr., and before the year was out and Clinton had won the election with Al Gore as his running mate, and what was being called the “National Information Infrastructure” was about to be launched as “the Internet.”
The next set of writings, the second set, begins in the same year that this first set leaves off, in 1992.