Paul R. Klohr

Paul R. Klohr A Hermeneutic Portrait Originally Published by The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Sprint, 2001.

Reproduced here by permission. Copyright 2001, Robert V. Bullough, Jr.

By Robert V. Bullough, Jr. Brigham Young University Chairman, Graduate School, University of Utah

The purpose of Hermeneutic Portraits is to present a narrative that "explores historical and contemporary curriculum theory and practice."

Further, they recognize "the importance of examining individual lives within their historical and cultural contexts."

They are "reminiscences." In what follows I reminisce, but I also want to make a point. I reminisce about Paul Klohr (photo at left), my mentor at Ohio State, who is properly recognized as the father or perhaps some might argue the grandfather, of the reconceptualist movement in curriculum studies.

The point I want to make, a point that comes from thinking carefully about what it was about Paul that drew me to him, has to do with the nature of the education professoriate and the privilege of professing.

The path to the point is a circuitous one: twisted turnings across time.

I arrived in Columbus, Ohio in the fall of 1973 to begin graduate study within the College of Education, Academic Faculty of Curriculum and Foundations. I enrolled at OSU at the urging of one of the professors with whom I had studied for my master's degree, a former student of Harold Alberty and former OSU professor. I trusted him. Soon I discovered that although many faculty faces remained the same the Ohio State my professor remembered was no more. Over one of the doors into Ramseyer Hall, the former University School Building, are Tennyson's words, "The Old Order Changeth." And it had.

Shortly after beginning my course work I began to

A simple interpretation of the events surrounding closure would be that Klohr and his colleagues who supported keeping University School open misunderstood the nature of higher education politics, that they were out of step with the times, even non-progressive. There is another view that I believe is more accurate. Since the early 1970s it has been common place to argue that curriculum work is inherently political and that all curriculum decisions involve conflicts in values. The question is "How does one go about resolving conflict while achieving a practical intent: the formation of potentially educative spaces?" This question has both philosophical and practical implications. Put differently, the challenge is to generate principles that are adequate for guiding action, which inspire non-compelled assent and cultivate virtue. Philosopher Robert Kane is helpful when he argues that while we can never know if what we are seeking is objectively true, we can, in our aspiration for meaning, engage in quests for truth that are open to every value and respectful in the highest degree possible of every person and value, to the extent that they support an enlivening moral sphere. The later principle derives from the Kantian imperative to always treat others as ends, never as means. If openness is fully honest and respect is active and sincere, agreement will often follow if interaction takes place within a secure moral space, a place of goodwill. Outside of the moral sphere, respect will necessarily be limited, but not within it. In the battle over the closure of the University School, the moral sphere broke down, yet Klohr opted to maintain commitment to the principles of openness and respect.

To do otherwise would have been to do violence to

realize that something was not quite right. The faculty was divisive, but not openly so. Faculty meetings were tense. Putting together a graduate committee was very difficult, and for reasons unknown, I learned that I should avoid certain faculty members. A kind of truce seemed to be in operation. There was little that bound the faculty together except sharing offices in the same building and using the same letterhead. The graduate students claimed that the then department chair, Jack Frymier, a force within ASCD and Kappa Delta Pi and an important figure in curriculum studies, was testy and aggressive because he had been hit on the head by a brick thrown by a graduate student during the riots of the spring of 1970 that had prompted Governor James Rhodes to send National Guard troops onto Ohio campuses, including Kent State. The university had been shut down for two weeks. With a sly grin, the student who first told me the story said that he was a likely brick-throwing suspect. The incident had never happened, at least I do not think it had, but the story was funny because a brick in the head provided a reasonably good explanation of a situation and of faculty behavior that did not quite make sense. The place was crazy; divisions were deep, but I did not then know why.

Not only was the faculty divided, it was subject to generational tensions. I was 24 years old, long-haired, with a background in alternative education, wrapped in a romantic view of human nature and a smug sense of the wisdom of youth. Looking back, I realize that I failed to recognize that good intentions are no substitute for hard cultural work. Perhaps naively, I believed that education was the hope of the world. In my ignorance of earlier generations' trials, I was openly scornful of anything laced with tradition. My education heros were mostly, but not all, romantic critics, soft progressives: Ivan Illich, John Holt, Allen Graubard, James Herndon, John Kozol, Herb Kohl, Carl Rogers. The exception was Paulo Freire. Arthur Jensen was one enemy, along with any and all so-called elitists. Open classrooms, free schools, and alternative education promised a different, more free and just America. Or so I thought. America, in Charles Reich's words, was "greening" because of the wonders of my generation: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act....

This is the revolution of the new generation." No wonder there were generational tensions. My generation had shut down Ohio State. Students had been shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State (also by my generation but under the controlling eye of an older generation). We had occupied university presidents' offices across the nation, picketed against our nation's involvement in the Vietnam War, and challenged the authority of the President of the United States. The

himself and to others--to treat them as means not ends--a loss of even greater consequence than the loss of friendship. What was at stake, then, was his conception of democracy, of academic citizenship and of self.

The same principles of openness and respect underpinned Klohr's response to the students and to the revolt. Rather than respond with fear and distrust, he responded with openness and respect, even delight.

Long before Governor Rhodes closed the University, Paul had been thinking counter-culturally. The certainty of Marxism and historical materialism did not resonate with his pragmatist roots, but other elements of cultural critique did. He was open to criticism and open to new experience. John Dewey argued that learning is the reconstruction of experience, and coming through Bode, Alberty and Hullfish, this was Klohr's tradition and his life-commitment. Openness to difference, a profound gesture of faith, is a first step toward reconstruction.

Harold Alberty used to say that if the idea of learning as the reconstruction of experience were taken seriously, it would revolutionize education. He was right.

Klohr's work in curriculum centered sharply on experience and the nature of experience: his own and others'. At Paul's request, early one Saturday morning I went with him to Bill Hines' home across the Ohio river from Cincinnati in Kentucky and witnessed Paul being "rolfed." Tears rolled down his face as his pain "was released," as Bill Hines said and as Ida Rolf taught.

Hines wanted to get hold of me to release my pain, but I balked. I lacked faith and courage. On the way home Paul explained that after his sessions with Hines he felt more in touch with his emotions, more alive. Paul opened himself up to other experiences as well: to encounters with people, places, and things well outside the worlds of all of his colleagues whom I knew. His reading was vast, promiscuous. Reading lists for classes were long and filled with surprises. He pointed me toward historical works, including some on educational progressivism and curriculum history, and he slowly helped me to begin to fill in the considerable gaps in my knowledge. In the process I learned the importance of knowing the past in order to criticize the present and effectively work toward the future. I discovered value in tradition and came to understand why charges of elitism left Klohr cold: Being well-read was a virtue.

Paul probed my ignorance so gently I was unaware of being probed until a subtle suggestion would follow or an invitation. He took me to my first opera then afterwards laughed at my response, suggesting that perhaps Salome was wasted on me.

Paul Klohr's openness to the world took him outside the established curriculum categories, outside of "how" questions to "what" and "why" questions and toward the most neglected question of all--"who?"

Paul's colleague and friend Ross Mooney asked the

deaths of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy had proved there was no redemption possible for what was America. Revolution was necessary. Yet, ironically, we still wanted degrees, although many of us wanted them without having to meet our forbearer's standards. After all, serious academic standards were elitist.

When Ohio State was shut down, some professors found themselves on the side of the students. The campus speaker's rule, the so-called "gag rule," was challenged. Following a College of Education sponsored lecture by Harold Rugg in 1951, despite College faculty protest, the trustees imposed the rule and began censoring who could speak on campus. The cause of free speech found both student and faculty champions. The closed and confidently secretive administration of President Novice Fawcett was challenged and badly shaken. The faculty made promises, hoping that the University would become more open to diverse points of view and responsive to under-represented groups. My own class was a very diverse lot, indicating that to a degree the faculty kept its word.

These events were not the only reason for the fracturing of what had once been a lively academic community. Another reason I discovered later, through conversations and while gathering material for my dissertation. Much of this story is told in a new book by Robert Butche, Image of Excellence: The Ohio State University School (2000), published by Peter Lang. The Ohio State University School was by any measure a most remarkable curriculum experiment. Opened in the fall of 1932, the school soon rose to national prominence. The faculty, carefully recruited by the director, Rudolf Lindquist, included many who became prominent in American education: Bill Van Til, Lou Labrant, H.H. Giles, Harold Fawcett, Norma Albright, and later Charlotte Huck, Robert Havighurst, Robert Gilchrist, and Frank Buchanan, among others. The University School was one of the six most experimental schools associated with the Eight-year Study, and visitors flocked to it by the thousands each year. The faculty explored the curricular and instructional implications of the philosophy of Boyd Bode, then widely recognized (even by Time Magazine in a 1938 article) as arguably the most important philosopher of education in America. At the same time pioneer work was done developing the core curriculum (see various editions of Harold Alberty's Reorganizing the HighSchool Curriculum), and in the areas of student advisement, achievement testing (initially under the guidance of Ralph Tyler), diagnosis of student needs, and in the arts and social studies. The aim was to realize, in the words of one of Bode's books, "democracy as a way of life." The relationship between democratic

"who" question in his famous 1957 ASCD essay, "The Researcher Himself." Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge was "must reading." Klohr recognized that the root meaning of curriculum was the Latin Currere, a course to be run, and he saw many possibilities for running: many directions both inward and outward that would lead to new opportunities for experiencing the world. Despite educator fascination with "how" questions, he nudged his students to move outside of and beyond technical questions. Slowly I came to understand that to do curriculum work is to live an answer: What is it to be human and how should we live?

Paul was not alone in his move outside of established curriculum categories, the sort of categories that are attached to the Tyler Rationale. Reading widely and thinking deeply, Paul recognized that a shift was taking place in curriculum studies, psychology, political science, philosophy--in fact, all across the intellectual landscape. To explain events, for a time he tapped the language and image of a "paradigm shift" first suggested

by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn gave a name to what Paul experienced and witnessed, a reconstruction was underway and Paul felt it. Preferring to work behind the scenes, he sought means to bring like-minded educators and curricularists together to explore what was transpiring in the culture and in education. The aim was to understand, not to seek means to control or direct events as a technical interest would require. By likeminded I mean only that like Paul these educators had also thought themselves outside of established categories. Thus, as Paul worked with former students-first Bill Pinar at Rochester, then Tim Riordan at Xavier, then Charles Beegle at Virginia--a series of curriculum theory conferences were held, and despite a sometimes smug dismissal by established figures in the field, the Reconceptualist movement was born and the boundaries of curriculum theory and practice stretched.

I am not certain that at the time I understood what was going on. The nation had taken a breather and a break from social turmoil, and the grumbling about the oil crisis had begun. Real wages for working class Americans had peaked and were beginning their ineluctable slide downward. The week George Counts died, Paul and I visited Hocking Hills. By then Paul was my chair and much more. I do not know whether he adopted me or I adopted him, but we drifted together rather naturally as I recall. As I said, he became my program and my dear friend--now of 27 years. That day we talked briefly about Counts and his passing. I made a stupid comment about how it seemed to me that despite all Counts had written and all he had accomplished, little had changed. I said this because competency-based curriculum and teacher proof

theory and educational practice was taken very seriously within the school, and teachers, parents, and children worked together to create the educational program.

The story Butche tells is of how the University School came under attack: How the College of Education was punished, along with the Dean of the College, at least until he embraced President Fawcett's desire to close University School for being notoriously liberal and progressive in its leanings. He describes how some faculty of a newer generation within the College supported School closure, believing laboratory schools were no longer valuable means for encouraging experimentation--this despite strong support from educators across Ohio who argued to the contrary and who, along with influential citizens, succeeded in gaining legislative support for the School. But despite this support, which proved that the issue was not one of limited resources but of trustee and administrator determination, the School was closed in 1968. The battle over closure ended long-term friendships; actually led to the death of one highly-regarded faculty member, John Ramseyer; shattered many faculty members' confidence in and trust of the College leadership; altered careers; and ultimately led to the departure of two of the central players in the closure, David Clark and Egon Guba. Before the battle began, Clark had been in line for the deanship.

Closing of University School, which had been the centerpiece of two, perhaps three, generations of education scholars at Ohio State, drove a deep wedge between theory and practice and widened the gap between fact and value--a gap the experimentalist philosophy of Bode and his distinguished colleague and former student H. Gordon Hullfish sought to bridge. It shattered a tradition of curriculum scholarship that was simultaneously practical and foundational, that took seriously the classical philosophical question of how we ought to live when facing uncertainty and pluralism. In educational philosophy, conceptual analysis won the day. Eventually instruction swallowed curriculum studies. But this is only part of the story. As I said, the path to my point is necessarily a winding one.

materials had returned with a vengeance, and what had seemed to be a brief progressive moment was already fading into memory. To this day I regret my comment.

Paul started to speak but said nothing, and his countenance dropped. Mine was the sin of ingratitude, stapled to an immature belief that a change is a change only if it is monumental, sweeping--a big bang. I will now make my point.

Sitting in his living room overlooking the Walhalla ravine, I once asked Paul what he enjoyed most about his work, what made it worthwhile. Without hesitation he said, "the students." To profess, for Paul, was to cultivate, care for, sometimes tend and gently challenge his students--always respectfully. To be with us in the way comprised part of his own quest for meaning, part of the answer to the question of being--of what it means to be human. He published comparatively little, although among his writings is an essay that still stands as the best exposition of the Reconceptualist Movement: "Emerging Foundations for Curriculum Theory," Educational Consideration, fall, 1978). But he edited a lot: My first publication, my dissertation, and many, many others' first pieces of writing. He took us to our first professional conferences and paid our expenses through consultation fees. He introduced us not only to books, some of which he purchased as gifts, but to people and most especially to ideas. He sought to open us to ourselves and to the world in ways that would expand our ability to feel and to speak ourselves, and in doing so he honored the currere of our lives. Erik Erikson aptly calls this way of being with and for the young "generativity," creativity across generations. Paul helped open us to experience, which is a gift that the young in their selfishness, have difficulty accepting from those they deem old. He helped open the curriculum field to alternative voices, and like our lives it was forever changed in small ways that added up to big ways. Ours is a time when truth and opinion are easily blurred, when civility and decency quickly give way as one person or group seeks to silence another; when retreat into sameness is in evidence everywhere from television to tribalism; when expressions of excellence are confused with expressiveness; when fear of discrimination makes knowledgeable discriminating fearsome; and when ever-so-privileged professors have slipped into privatism and complaint. An age of heroes, of the "Greatest Generation," as Tom Brokaw has written, has passed into an age in danger of "whatever"-of indifference on one side and desperate rigidity on the other, both sides giving evidence of an intellectual and spiritual hardening of our collective arteries. Paul Klohr is part of the "Greatest Generation," and in living his answer to the "who" question, whether battling for the University School or supporting the challenge of the young in the formative period of the receptualization of

Paul Klohr's mentor was Harold Alberty ( photo at left ). His dissertation committee included Harry Good in history of education, Laura Zirbes in elementary education and H. Gordon Hullfish in the philosophy of education. He conducted a study of resource units which was of sufficient importance that Alberty drew on Klohr's work in the 1953 and 1962 editions of Reorganizng the HighSchool Curriculum. Both Alberty and Hullfish had been students of Bode's. Klohr returned to Ohio State after a brief stint at Syracuse University, where he had been involved in work associated with the American Council of Education and after serving as Director of Curriculum for the Columbus, Ohio, public schools, an important leadership position. He served as an Associate Dean in the College of Education and later was Director of the University School. He knew curriculum, he knew philosophy and history of education, and he understood how to work with people to encourage innovation. Like his mentors, he read extensively and deeply, and he relished the free play of ideas, recognizing that successful curriculum work calls for broad participation of those affected by educational decisions and wisdom from those who are charged with designing educational environments. He took democracy seriously, Dewey's method of intelligence, and championed efforts to broaden participation in the academy, in schooling, and in the wider society. For instance, he was and is a member of the NAACP and a supporter of the AAUP. Both were and are remarkable expressions of commitment for a young man born and raised in Mattoon, Illinois, on the prairie. But even more remarkable were his responses to the twin challenges to the Ohio State faculty that so profoundly shaped the quality of my graduate experience: closure of University School and the student uprising.

Since the 1920s when Bode arrived on campus and George F. Arps was Dean, the College of Education was founded on the idea that a good faculty would be in some ways conflictual. Arps intentionally hired faculty members who represented differing points of view. He took seriously the paradox that stimulating and lively educational settings are simultaneously charged and hospitable, as Parker Palmer would assert. In Arps' view, any faculty worth its salt had a good fight going on. The battle over closure of the University School would not count as a good fight, however, because it

curriculum studies against those who would silence their dissent, his life presented and still presents a compelling argument for openness, respect, and courage of conviction as the hallmarks of the academic life and of the education professoriate.

References Butche, R. (2000), Image of Excellence: The Ohio State University School. New York: Peter Lang.

Alberty, H. (1947, 1953, 1962 with E. Alberty).

Reorganizing the high-school curriculum. New York: Macmillan Polyani, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press.

Reich, C. (1970). The greening of America. New York: bantam.

Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions.

Chicago, Il; University of Chicago Press.

Klohr, P. (1978). Emerging foundations for curriculum theory, Educational Consideration, pp.3-6.

Mooney, R. (1957). The researcher himself. In A. Foshay (chair), Research for curriculum improvement (pp. 154-186). Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

was not a battle over ideas carried on openly and respectfully, but a battle over questions of power and influence. It was conducted in bad faith, and nothing positive ever comes from bad faith. University School parents organized under a "SAVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL" banner and succeeded in stirring considerable media attention along with administrator ire. While many of his colleagues resigned themselves to silence and closure, Klohr and a very few faculty supporters began a concerted effort to make a case for keeping the school open. They sought to be heard, but discovered in presenting their case that there was no intention on the part of upper administration, from the Dean to the President to the Board of Trustees, to listen.

Still they persisted. Klohr's actions were driven by cherished principles as well as by a firm belief in the value of the School. His actions cost him dearly. It was he who presented the case for the University School to the Trustees and to a committee of legislators. Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, Dean Cottrell never forgave him, and Klohr became persona non grata to the President and to some fellow faculty members. Yet Klohr, along with a few others, left the battle ground with his integrity in tact.