One of the pivotal moments in Jack’s transformation from small-town boy from West Virginia to engaged world citizen occurred on July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. This happened to be the festival at which Bob Dylan used an electric guitar to play his folk songs for the first time. The folk-music purists in the audience were so against the use of these “nontraditional” guitars to sing “their music” that they actually booed Bob Dylan off the stage. Despite the amazing success he went on to enjoy in his career, he would wait 27 years before returning to perform again at the Newport Folk Festival.
However, the pivotal moment for Jack was not Dylan’s bold choice—which signaled a change in the world of music that would impact millions of people for decades to come— but the opportunity, purely by accident, to sit next to Pete Seeger at a banjo performance the day before. For quite a while now, Jack had been singing songs originally performed by Peter, Paul and Mary; Woody Guthrie; and other great American folk singers, including Pete Seeger and his group the Weavers. To sit next to one of his idols, and to experience how genuine and approachable Seeger was, had a major impact on Jack. He realized that touching people through song was an amazing gift that allowed him to connect, and stay connected, to others in a way that his academic studies did not.
When Jack returned to Harvard in the fall of 1965 for his senior year, he resolved to take some courses that were more closely related to that passion for connecting to other people. His conversation with Pete Seeger—and his admiration for other musicians, including folk singer Donovan, groups such as the Lovin’ Spoonful, and other musical acts singing about the important issues of the day—inspired Jack to take a course entitled Social Relations 10. That innocuous-sounding course changed Jack’s life dramatically, exposing him to cutting-edge ideas in both sociology and psychology.
Many of the human potential movement’s seminal thinkers and their theories were presented and discussed during Social Relations 10, and students were encouraged to experiment with many of these new ideas. For Jack, it was as though he had joined a human potential encounter group, where he was forced to examine his core beliefs at a level he had never before contemplated.
Although the revelations divulged sometimes made him feel uncomfortable, Jack found the exposure to this deeper level of self-examination compelling and almost addictive. For the first time, he realized the true power of ideas to alter his life and the lives of others. He decided that he wanted to explore these ideas further and focus not only on studying history, but on the field of educational psychology as well. At this point it was too late for Jack to change his major at Harvard, but he decided to pursue a career in public education anyway. He applied to, and was accepted for, graduate school at the University of Chicago to pursue a master’s degree in education.
Some of Jack’s classmates were surprised by his choice. His roommate even joked, “Well, when the rest of us are cashing in and enjoying the perks of our high-profile careers, we’ll be sure to invite our buddy the public-high-school teacher to dinner.”
Jack was not unaware of the financial advantages he might have had by leveraging his Harvard degree into a high-paying position in corporate America. But motivated by his encounter with Pete Seeger, along with his newly awakened awareness of the power of psychology to connect with and help others, he was at peace with the choice he’d made.
Jack Canfield is the co-author of the #1 New York Times best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has sold more than 115 million copies in 47 languages.
William Gladstone is best known for his international bestseller The Twelve and for co-authoring The Golden Motorcycle Gang Tapping the Source and co-producer of the film of the same name. In addition, he is a literary agent for many best-selling authors—including Eckhart Tolle and Thom Hartmann—and the founder of Waterside Productions, as well as a trustee of the International Club of Budapest.
