A Personal Summing-Up

Abstract

This is going to be a very personal report of my conference, as distinct from the conference, what it has done to my thinking-a report, if you like, of a marginal and not entirely adapted person. . . . Over all our work, whatever we call ourselveseducateurs, psychologists, or what-have-youhangs an awareness of the huge question marks raised by the fundamental changes in our society. I have detected in many of the reports and in many of the groups in which I have worked a rather sad note of pessimism, as if in fact we were in a sick society. In my view, we are not. We are in a society that is undergoing a process of change, evidently with considerable tensions, but that is moving toward pluralism, toward concern for the individual, and toward a nonauthoritarian stance. Now this is not a sick society; this is a society that is extraordinarily difficult to live in, but extraordinarily rich in the possibilities it provides. And it is for this reason, it seems to me, that many of us have viewed with some anguish the problem of the role of those of us who are concerned with the young, whether they are maladjusted or not, in terms of enabling them to make choices about the type of person they wish to be and the type of subcommunity or culture to which they wish to contribute. And then there is the problem that arises from the variety of angles from which we come to this rather difficult situation, angles of professional skill, of professional disciplines, and so on, which has made for some of the confusion in our thinking. This has been to some extent augmented by the very different educational and cultural traditions of the participants. We sometimes talk about a European cultural tradition; but in fact, of course, though there may be a global European cultural tradition, there are almost as many differences within Europe itself as there are in other parts of the world. . . . More and more, I think, we begin to see that human problems do not lend themselves to the kind of intellectual simplifications that are embodied in the traditional disciplines and in the traditional professions. That is to say, the more