A ’70s Self‑Portrait (At my desk at Southern Illinois University.) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
In the early 1970s, I worked on a grant program called Career Development for Children Project (CDCP).
The project’s core theses were founded on the concept of an educational serving the community through direct
attention to individual citizens’ needs and goals. It intended to refocus the learning and related services
of public education toward the individual’s development.
— kenne
Flashback, 1972 at SIU — The Pipe Smoking Days
In the early 1970s, I worked with Dr. Larry J. Bailey, my friend, and mentor, on the Career Development for Children Project (CDCP). Several of us worked on the project to produced a career development curriculum for elementary school children. In 1973 I went to work at McKnight Publishing Company to help produce project materials. Career development is not obtaining knowledge in preparation for living, but rather it is a process of experiencing living.
Before leaving CDCP, I prepared a paper titled, “A Theory of the Functional Self.” The paper reviewed self-theory that explores self a being a product of social interactions. From this theory, we have seen that self-information is a developmental process that takes place within the social system. A social system may be a peer group, a single classroom, school, community, occupational establishment, or any other organized group of individuals.
It is also assumed that a social system has two dimensions, the individual and the institution, and the patterns resulting from the interaction of these dimensions are social behavior. The individual’s inferences from his behavior define his self-concept, and a self-concept that has career relevance is the functional self.
The functional self, like the self-concept, is a self-process, a process of being and becoming. It is the functional self’s developmental process that should enable educators to develop a process career developmental curriculum, rather than a content occupational information curriculum. Career development is not obtaining knowledge in preparation for a living; rather, it is a process of experiencing living.
— kenne
“I think every man is his own Pygmalion and
spends his life fashioning himself. And in
fashioning himself, for good or ill, he
fashions the human race and its future.”
— I.F. Stone (1971)
Becoming is Superior to Being 