CHAPTER 8 Judge Real (in progress)

In 1970 Federal Judge Manuel Real in a landmark decision orders Pasadena Unified School District to correct racial imbalance at all school levels. The Board of Education complies by busing students to achieve racial integration and comply with the order of a powerful federal judge.  Pasadena began busing the same year I started teaching. Pasadena was on the road to rebalance racial injustice. I arrived at just the right time to witness an entire city, Pasadena, pivot to better level the playing field for all students. 1970 was a very good year.

As an undergrad I’d majored in psychology, in grad school I specialized in Gifted Education and Humanistic Psychology, reading books like The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow. Even the title influenced the manner in which I would engage with my future students. How could I open for my students ways to access the farthest reaches of their potential? 

Maslow was the first president of the American Psychological Association at a time when psychologists only looked at what made people ill: anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychosis. Maslow however spent his career looking in the opposite direction for all that went right in the human mind. He studied the most self actualized, the happiest people he could find. How could some people have so many peak experiences along the track of their careers and along the arc of their lifetimes? His research examined the most intricate details of the positive potentials of human existence. He was doing what no other psychologist had done.

 Could we unleash this human potential

 for learning and life in the classroom?

First year teachers are at their most impressionable moment. If you want to inspire teachers toward excellence and humanistic education, this is the prime time to open the door.

My first weeks in the classroom, indeed all my years teaching were colored by this question of how to unleash human potential. Actually this question didn’t last very long. Soon I was discovering ways writing curriculum and building a classroom architecture specifically designed to advance human potential in schools.

in 1970 I thought I was just a teacher aide for Cathy Manulkin, but as the months went by she and Pat Berberich unknowingly modeled a teaching mind scape I would come to refer to as Bushido in the Classroom. Cathy and Pat illuminated the importance of a teacher’s ethical qualities. They conducted classes and moved among  their students with:

compassion, serenity, honor calmness, fairness, justice, sincerity, responsibility, politeness, modesty, integrity, loyalty, harmony, tranquility, courage, respect, honesty, and duty. (These are foundation values of Bushido: The Way of the Samurai). I know, the media only portrays samurais as warriors, but they lived a life of harmony and compassion, like Cathy Manulkin and Pat Berberich.

Into the classrooms of my future I would be taking their teacher mind scape and Abraham Maslow’s Humanistic Psychology, the psychology of  human potential. 

At this time I was a grad student in first of Barbara Clark’s Gifted cohorts at California State University, Los Angeles. In the beginning I was just a grad student a student teacher, but with Barbara Clark I had a map. She groomed us to achieve the farthest reaches of our teaching nature. Barbara’s books were really curriculum building guides for unleashing the farthest reaches of human potential. Her book: Optimizing Learning is still being used by the best educators that I personally know. Here is an example.

Never did I imagine the influence these educators and events

would have on the arc of my teaching career.

Grateful am I.

Toby Manzanares

My Personal List of Highly Actualized Human Beings

Pat Berberich

Dr. Barbara Clark

Liz Cooley

Marion Diamond

Jim Douglas

Richard Feynman

Tamaki Ishihara

Yuji Ishihara

Lillian Hagan

Leandra Kalt

Cathy Manulkin

Elisaida Manzanares

Matthew Mori

John Myers

Greta Pruitt

Judge Manuel Real

Charles Thomas

Franke Thomas

Patricia Vining

Make your list of highly actualized human beings.  Look among those you personally know for these 18 characteristics: 

compassion, serenity, honor, calmness, fairness, justice, sincerity, responsibility, politeness, modesty, integrity, loyalty, harmony, tranquility, courage, respect, honesty, and duty.

Put those closest to 18 at the top of your list.  Send the top three, I’ll add them to our central database for the Advancement of Actualized Human Beings.