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This project whose goal is to bring about self-tolerance and concomitant greater tolerance toward different ethnic groups was conducted in a 'workshop' of eight weeks' duration. The setting is a
New England preparatory school for girls. Class time was divided into two forty-minute periods and one eighty-minute period per week, the first being devoted to lectures on technical subjects or topical group discussions, the latter exclusively to free discussion. The students were exhorted to 'express yourselves on any matter that is a source of concern … just as long as you can put it in words, anything goes'. Such free discussions as were recorded testify, not unexpectedly, to an atmosphere of excitement filled with sarcasm, free-floating hostility, poking fun, dirty jokes, or plain nonsensical statements intended to reduce the project to absurdity. This the author considers salutary for 'self-acceptance'. About the lectures on technical subjects, we merely learn that 'the subject was … a smattering of many psychologies, experimental, comparative, social, dynamic, child, abnormal, and physiological'. After completion of the eight-week workshop, the author found a 'significant increase in conscious, expressed attitudes of self-acceptance' as well as changes 'on a deeper level of personality organization'. These findings were based on tests administered 'before' and 'after'.
As an example for greater acceptance of previously disowned feelings, the author sums up his evaluation with the following 'telling protest' from a student: 'I feel completely uninhibited now, and in a few minutes the bell is going to ring, and I have a class where it's Yes Ma'am-No Ma'am and put yourself on report if you breathe the wrong way, and that's no good for me. Psychology is supposed to help you think better. When I leave here, I can't think at all for two hours. Can you sit there and say this is good for me?' The author concludes, 'It appears that it was'. This reviewer is not