Early History
Goddard College began in 1863 in Barre as the Green Mountain Central Institute and a year later was renamed Goddard Seminary. Royce S. "Tim" Pitkin, the first Goddard president, a progressive educator and follower of John Dewey and other, similar proponents of educational democracy, earned a doctorate at Columbia and returned to Vermont where he started Goddard College from Goddard Seminary in 1937, moving it to Plainfield in 1938. Pitkin conceived of the college as a place for "plain living and hard thinking."
Having narrative transcripts instead of traditional letter grades, as well as learner-designed curricula, Goddard was one of the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities, which also included Franconia, Nasson, Antioch, and several other educational institutions.
Goddard College advocates innovation in higher education as its expressed objective; in 1963, Goddard introduced the first Adult Degree Program for working adults.
In 2002, after fifty-four years, the college terminated its traditional age on-site experimental bachelor degree program. Today its more than six hundred adult students attend residencies in either Plainfield, VT or Port Townsend, WA. Only two programs are available at the Port Townsend site: the MFA in Creative Writing and the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, which was new to Port Townsend in the fall of 2007. Also new for the fall of 2007 was the first low-residency Bachelor of Fine Arts program in creative writing.
The History of the Goddard Experiment Exhibit, 1949-1959
The History of Goddard College Exhibit, 1960-1969: An Era of Growth, Expansion, and Transitions
Read more about this topic: Goddard College
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)