while criticisms about joylessness, fear, mutual lack of respect among
teachers and students, the absence of spontaneity, growing alienation,
and personal disinterest have become dominant. The crisis of our
schools lies in interpersonal conditions; the changes demanded are in
the area of human relationships.

Unfortunately, the words "humanistic" and "humanized" are virtu-
ally shibboleths today; there are humanistic psychologists, humanistic
sociologists, humanistic educators, humanistic chemists, humanistic
engineers, and even humanistic real estate brokers and used car
salesmen. Despite this, we do use the words "humanistic" and "human-
ized" throughout this book because we think they still communicate
specific and important meanings and indicate most clearly the values
we want to bring to schools. We use the words "humanistic" and
"humanized" to refer to measurable social phenomena. Humanized
schools, as we see them, are those where the environment sets the
stage for successful personal encounter; where ideas, facts, and feel-
ings are openly expressed; where conflict is brought out into the open,
discussed, and worked on; where emotions share equal prominence
with the intellect; and where learning activities integrate the personal
interests of students and the learning goals of the school. Schools with
humanistic climates have new educational options and ways of relat-
ing, and different kinds of discussion from those in schools that are
not humanistic. Humanistic schools are places where, for example.
teachers and students can be more open and truthful with one another,
and where they can interact as individuals in addition to carrying out
their tasks of teaching and learning.

In this book, we grapple with ways of humanizing schools by using
theory and research available from the social sciences--social psy-
chology in particular. All of the social sciences have contributed to
our understanding of the dynamics of school organizations. However,
the concentration of social psychology has been upon the relationships
between people--our primary target for humanizing schools. Social
psychological research has demonstrated how the presence of others
can affect an individual's performance and how his ^*
self-concept is
formed and reformed through association with others. This research

-x-