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The History of Gentrain |
In May of 1998 Gentrain completed its 24th year at MPC. The program was born in 1972, the conception of a handful of faculty members and MPC Dean Philip Nash, all of whom were unhappy with the smorgasbord approach to general education then (and still) prevalent in colleges and universities. The two formative ideas behind the program were to make it interdisciplinary, so that the relationship of, say, the French Revolution, the painting of Delacroix, Goethe's Faust, Beethoven's Third Symphony, and Kant's philosophy could be worked out in class, giving an integrated picture of an age, and to modularize the course so that community college students, many of whom worked and/or had families, could come and go as their schedules permitted. Thus the course was to be offered in fifteen two-week units, rather than in two semester-long ones. One unit of credit was to be awarded for each two-week class, since the program was initially devised with traditional transfer students in mind. The name is an acronym for "General Education Train of Courses," suggesting both that traditional students could achieve most of their general education credits in the course and that, like a train (which still appears in the biweekly ads in the GO section of the Herald), the program would stop every two weeks at an important "depot" in Western history, classical Greece, ancient Pome, the Reformation, the French Revolution.
A modest Pilot Grant from the NEH provided the initial start-up funds, and the program went into the classroom in the fall of 1974. It came as something of a surprise that the initial students were almost entirely retired people from the area, coming back to school to fill in gaps in their own education or to revisit favorite sites in the journey through Western history. A non-credit version of the class was subsequently created to free these folks from the (for them) unnecessary burden of tests and essays. Retired men and women and re-entering students have continued to provide the largest percentage of students in the class for the last two decades.
By 1985 some 1000 local residents had been through Gentrain. One of them, in a news story a local television station was doing on our program, asked whether "there was life after Gentrain." That started us thinking about what eventually became the Gentrain Society. Originally called "Friends of Gentrain" this concept was invented one summer afternoon at Alison's family compound in San Jose by Rich Kezirian, Rick, Alison, and myself. The four of us ran the (renamed) Gentrain Society for two years before we turned it over to the members, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Our symbiotic relationship with the Society is one of the happiest unexpected events in a history full of surprises, and while there are by now members of the Society who have not taken the Gentrain program, most have, and the core of the Executive Committee over the years has been composed of alumni from our program, without whose support--emotional, intellectual, and financial--we would probably not have made it this far.
The more or less traditional road to the Gentrain Society is thus still through the Gentrain program. So we invite all of you who have not as yet attended to do so, and to those of you who already have, we invite you back for another ride on the Gentrain. Its journey past and through the major moments and figures in Western history is still fueled by the same enthusiasm that inspired its visionary founders nearly three decades ago, and we'd love to have you with us.
Grant Voth