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had time to follow the development of individuals over several years, was not only to ensure the hiring of women and minority members. This was hard enough to do from the dean’s office, but what was even harder was to turn Amherst College into a place where all young men and women hired to teach (as well as all students) could thrive, whether they were promoted and asked to stay on or not, a place where whatever talents and strengths they brought from childhood could be fostered and they could go from strength to strength. Such a place would have to be challenging as well as supportive, like Joan’s Activities Program at Austen Riggs, providing room for criticism and discipline as well as indulgence. But it could not be belittling.
    The need to sustain human growth should be a matter of concern for the entire society, even more fundamental than the problem of sustaining productivity. This, surely, is the deepest sense of homemaking, whether in a factory or a college or a household. For all of us, continuing development depends on nurture and guidance long after the years of formal education, just as it depends on seeing others ahead on the road with whom it is possible to identify. A special effort is needed when doubts have been deeply implanted during the years of growing up or when some fact of difference raises barriers or undermines those identifications, but all of us are at risk, not only through childhood but through all the unfolding experiences of life that present new problems and require new learning. Education, whether for success or failure, is never finished. Building and sustaining the settings in which individuals can grow and unfold, not “kept in their place” but empowered to become all they can be, is not only the task of parents and teachers, but the basis of management and political leadership—and simple friendship.

FOUR
OPENING TO THE WORLD

    H UMAN BEINGS TEND to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred. One of the great steps forward in history was learning to regard those who spoke odd-sounding languages and had different smells and habits as fully human, as similar to oneself. The next step from this realization, the step which we have still not fully made, is the willingness to question and purposefully alter one’s own conditions and habits, to learn by observing others. If a particular arrangement is not necessary, it might be possible to choose to change it. Still, aristocratic Chinese ladies of the old regime, crippled for life by the binding of their feet, looked down on peasant women with unbound feet. Exposure to other ways of doing things is insufficient if it is not combined with empathy and respect.
    I grew up a beneficiary of openness to alternatives of belief and custom. All four of my grandparents were atheists, which meant that they had dissented from beliefs taken for granted by those around them, living lives of conscious choice. For my mother and later for me, taking an interest in religion was rather venturesome, involving the notion that belief is not a given of growing up in a particular family but a matter of choice. In some ways, my grandparents were chauvinistic about their chosen nonconformities and felt rather superior to those who had less education or enlightenment. But in other ways, I see them as open to the imagination of alternative ways of being.
    My father’s father, who crusaded ferociously for his convictions against various kinds of spiritualism and Lamarckianism, thought of his own vocation of scientist as lofty but lower than that of artist. He collected the paintings and drawings of William Blake, Japanese prints, embroideries and old-master drawings. As I see them now, these are very different choices. To collect old-master drawings was to choose an economical and attainable form of a familiar excellence, but to immerse himself in the visions and prophetic writings of Blake was to embrace a different