Community
Because of Esalen’s isolated location, its operational staff members have been residential from the beginning, and collectively they have shaped the character of the institute. The community has been steeped in a form of Gestalt that pervades all aspects of daily life, including meeting structures, workplace practices, and individual language styles. In 1966, Esalen began year-long residential educational programs, which were subsequently replaced by month-long work-study programs and year-long work-oriented extended student programs. There is a preschool on site called the Gazebo, serving the children of staff, some program participants, and affiliated local residents. Given the intensity of community involvement in all these process related activities, many staff members have developed their own forms of practice, and some of them have become well known teachers.
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Famous quotes containing the word community:
“... no community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.”
—Tennessee Claflin (1846–1923)
“Every community is an association of some kind and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)