Greetings, Friends,

I enjoyed the reminders provided by the following quote from Carl Rogers. As you may know, Marshall Rosenberg studied with Carl at the University of Wisconsin when he was working on his Ph.D. Rogerian ideas seem to me to be foundational to NVC.

I found this today on the the NVC Education Group, courtesy of (I)An-ok:


The Fundamentals of a Center for Person-Centered Learning

(taken from the article Beyond the Watershed: And Where Now? By Carl
Rogers from the book A Way of Being)

1. Precondition. The leaders, or persons who are perceived as
authority figures in the situation, are sufficiently secure within
themselves and in their relationship to others that they experience an
essential trust in the capacity of others to think for themselves, to
learn for themselves. If this precondition exists, then the following
aspects become possible and tend to be implemented.

2. The facilitative persons share with the others – students, and
possibly also parents or community members – the responsibility for
the learning process. Curricular planning, the mode of administration,
the funding, and the policy-making are all the responsibility of the
particular group involved.

3. The facilitators provide learning resources – from within
themselves and their own experience, from books or other materials, or
from community experiences. The learners are encouraged to add
resources of which they have knowledge or in which they have
experience. The facilitators open doors to resources outside the
experience of the group.

4. The students develop their own programs of learning, individually
or in cooperation with others. Exploring their own interests, facing
this wealth of resources, they each make choices as to their own
learning directions, and they carry the responsibility for the
consequences of those choices.

5. A facilitative learning climate is provided. In meetings of the
class or of the school as a whole, an atmosphere of realness, of
caring, and of understanding listening is evident. This climate may
spring initially from the person who is the perceived leader. As the
learning process continues, it is more and more often provided by the
learners for one another. Learning from one another becomes as
important as learning from books or films or community experiences.

6. The focus of the learning center is primarily on fostering the
continuing process of learning. The content of the learning, while
significant, falls into a secondary place. Thus, a course is
successfully ended not when the students have "learned all they need
to know," but when they have made significant progress in learning how
to learn what they want to know.

7. The discipline necessary to reach the students' goals is a
self-discipline, and is recognized and accepted by the learners as
being their individual responsibilities. Self-discipline replaces
external discipline.

8. The evaluation of the extent and significance of each student's
learning is made primarily by the learner himself or herself, although
the self-evaluations may be influenced and enriched by caring feedback
from other members of the group and from the facilitator.

9. In this growth-promoting climate, the learning tends to be deeper,
proceeds at a more rapid rate, and is more pervasive in the life and
behavior of the students than learning acquired in the traditional
classroom. This comes about because the directions is self-chosen, the
learning is self-initiated, and whole persons, with feelings and
passions as well as the intellect, are invested in the process.