The physical structures once home to MT provided participants with a singular pride of place in the midst of a rapidly changing world. Gone now, both South Elementary School (sold and razed) and Village School (re-purposed as an Administration Building) survive today in memory alone. Meanwhile, those longing to touch or be touched by the people, influences and architecture of ideas that made all the difference in the direction and purpose of their lives continue to process their insights in light of their experience.
What follows here are links to commentaries affirming the lessons of MT in the present. Each commentary traced from that time (1974 -1983) is grounded in works by Abraham Maslow, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, George T. Land, or borrowed from books by Howard Gardner, Dr. Sidney Jourard and Carl Rogers. The decades since have contributed additional breakthroughs in cognitive sciences that provide a deeper understanding of how the brain works and learning occurs.
ABRAHAM MASLOW
HOWARD GARDNER
ALVIN & HEIDI TOFFLER
KENNETH MOSS
KELLY HAUGH DURKIN
Today, if one superimposes Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs over Toffler’s Age Wave, a striking observation can be made. The Agricultural Age can be seen as a basic needs building period where people spend a majority of their time satisfying basic needs of food, shelter, survival. In the Industrial Age people continued devoting their lives to satisfying deficiency needs -- safety, security, and stability -- focused on finding and holding jobs, attending school, and maintaining steady incomes.
The Information Age beginning between 1955 and 1960 didn't witness the advent of personal computers until after M-T appeared in the mid 1970s. The Digital Age continues to advance despite broad economic inequalities in our culture. More people today are unquestionably using the Internet and devoting increasing time to satisfying higher-order needs like pursuit of knowledge as they grow toward self-actualization and spiritual fulfillment. George Land’s Transformation Theory, overlaying them both, identified three Stages of Growth he called Accretive, Replicative, and Mutuality. They were delineated in his book Grow or Die published in 1973 where he showed how organic growth occurs through a process embracing all of human experience past, present, and future.