Catalyst Book Review—Something Ventured: A Story of the Block Plan
By Benedict Wright
A lot can happen in 50 years.
Looking to recent history, consider the 45 years between the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 — the height of New Deal reform — and the inauguration of the Reagan Revolution in 1980. Or consider that 50 years after the invention of nitrogen fixation (beginning the era of synthetic fertilizer) in 1910, the world’s population had nearly doubled from 1.8 billion to over 3 billion in 1960.
Or as a final example, take the 56 years from Russia’s October Revolution of 1917 to the 1973 publication of “The Gulag Archipelago,” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s searing exposition of the Soviet prison system.
A half-century can be all it takes for regimes to rise and fall, cultural values to shift, new ideas and technologies to take hold, or revolutionary zeal to be tempered by time and experience.
Although certainly less world-historical than the previous examples, academic institutions can nevertheless experience analogous changes over a period of 50 years. A case study of this fact is found in Professor Susan Ashley’s “The Block Plan: An Unrehearsed Educational Venture” published by Colorado College to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Block Plan’s implementation.