Mar 28, 2024  
2022-2023 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
2022-2023 Undergraduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HON 218 - Social Movement in the Sixties


Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. Through film, literature and direct commune-experimentation this course will be a fresh look, with beginner’s eyes, at the 60’s: that most outrageous decade, that most idealized and despised decade, that most creative and anarchic decade. The course is structured around Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter-Culture and the PBS 6-part documentary Making Sense of the 60s. We will examine the cultural trance we are caught up in, in reference to social movements and social change. As a culture, our definition of social change has been deeply inhabited by a belief in progress, achievement, betterment. Change was progress, especially economic and technical progress. The social movements of the 60’s counter-culture contested that concept of social change and have provoked a change in our concept of social change itself. We will be looking at social movements and social change on a personal, societal, and global-planetary level. We will be examining our values in reference to change and in reference to politics, democracy and freedom-particularly whether those values come consciously out of our understanding or unconsciously out of our conditioning. We will contrast the movements and forces at work in the 60’s youth with the movements and forces at work in today’s youth. Education is a journey, not a destination, hence students will be highly encouraged to integrate their formal book reading with their direct, personal, on-the-spot life experiences. There will be various “exploriments” and “exercises” designed to provoke us into doing sociology rather than merely learning about it. Our dominant, established educational tradition is that your acquire knowledge through collecting stuff and knowing it-especially for exams. We will attempt to contest the authority of that tradition and celebrate thinking, experiencing, and creating rather than collecting, memorizing, and grading. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits