Bennington College

Bennington regards education as a sensual and ethical no less than an intellectual process. It seeks to liberate and nurture the individuality the creative intelligence and the ethical and aesthetic sensibility of its students to the end that their richly varied natural endowments will be directed toward self-fulfillment and toward constructive social purposes. We believe that these educational goals are best served by demanding of our students active participation in the planning of their own programs and in the regulation of their own lives on campus. Student freedom is not the absence of restraint however; it is rather the fullest possible substitution of habits of self-restraint for restraint imposed by others. The exercise of student freedom is the very condition of a meaningful education and an essential aspect of the nurture of free citizens dedicated to civilized values and capable of creative and constructive membership in modern society.