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WILLIAMS-IN-INDIA
Volunteer Lab Rats

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I see oversees experience in the Peace Corps as an opportunity for education…That education begins in an open conversation with strangers. Probably the hardest and most difficult response for human beings anywhere is to listen to and hear that which is different. Yet that is where we must all start.
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Every day I think about something I never thought about before. I figure that if you feel noting you are nothing. I’ve rather come to the conclusion (it’s dangerous to come to conclusions however) that it is vastly better for a person to feel pain. Only pain seems to be real. Happiness is a delusion […]
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The country that — I heard him say often — the country that has the most beggars in the world.
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It makes me think about the first times in India for him and seeing the people lying on the side of the road. In my opinion that’s what started — he already had the feeling, but it’s what got him going.
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Another aspect of Bob – he was a very close evaluator of what he did, and this is what led to these experiential programs, which were completely different from the classic political philosophy classroom approach that he came to Williams with. To make a real shift in your pedagogy in mid career, why did he […]
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I think he felt that some Williams students were innocents, which of course they were.
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I think the older the department member, the more likely to reject experiential education. It’s not what we’re used to and it may be kind of old-fashioned to oppose it, and I do think now that experiential education has its virtues although I would perhaps confine it more often to the Winter Study period than […]
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Experiential education to him meant the importance of experience, but not raw experience. The importance of consciously, thoughtfully imbibed experience for a person’s intellectual development. Let me explain the qualifications. Experience can be anything. You know, you go out and play football, it’s an experience. Or you go out and shovel your sidewalk. Experience is […]
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I was familiar with India because I had been there as a Fulbright Scholar in 1963. India was a dangerous place to one’s health. That was before the Green Revolution and in a big Indian city at that time the sanitation department would come and pick up the corpses off the sidewalks and streets every […]
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I don’t think he would’ve taken students to Oxford. He would’ve taken students to India and to Mogadishu, to Appalachia, to some place to give them a jolt. Not to give them something that they would relate easily to, but to give them something that would shake them up, make them change their perceptions. The […]
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