All the News That's Fit(ball) to Print

Introduction by Sean/iNoodle.com:

Below is an email I sent earlier today to the thirty-odd wonderful folk with whom I shared twelve months of round-the-clock inquiry into the various strains of thought of India, China and Japan. They were fellow students at the Graduate Institute at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When I say these men and women are wonderful I mean it both in the common-usage, and literal, sense — that is, they are full of wonder, the prerequisite for philosophy. They stand in awe of the universe and question the world in which they live. In short, they are seekers of truth, philosophers.

Interested as I am in philosophy of education, and philosophy generally speaking, I have thought much about what I mean when I speak of a critical, or liberal arts, education. Recently, while discussing my fourteen-year-old daughter's schoolwork with her, a thought arose which I shared with Luka, then, and which follows, below:

"To the extent that you question the question you will be [liberally or critically] educated instead of trained [by the state or whomever]."

Both the thought and my discussion with Luka arose because her Year 9 (8th-grade US equivalent) classmates were asked to decide whether Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke were patriotic or unpatriotic poets of the First World War.

Not surprisingly, the class consensus was that Brooke was patriotic and Sassoon and Owen were unpatriotic.

I asked Luka if her class had discussed what was meant by the term patriotic before coming to their conclusion.

Again, not surprisingly, they had not. Clearly, if Owen and Sassoon wrote critically of the Great War, they must have been unpatriotic, period.

Luka and I continued our conversation, leaving the relative warmth of our kitchen, having, as we were, our afternoon tea, to make our way to the New Forest mare which we care for. Lulu (not Luka) lives at an organic farm, just up the road from us.

Always trying to serve as an antidote to her state education, whether the state is Texas, Massachusetts, Maryland or the United Kingdom, I talked with Luka along the way about the importance of always questioning the question. Having radical parents who have shared serious, adult conversation with her since she was a pipsqueak (in size but not significance) she understood.

This — questioning the question (as well as proferred answers) — is a key pursuit for a student at St. John's College. The thirty-odd recipients of my below email shared in this process for twelve jam-packed months. We lived, read, wrote, argued, partied, danced and, literally, wrestled with, and loved, one another for a year uncommonly spent. A year in which we made room for the spiritual as well as the intellectual, and during which we tried to find a way to bring these too-often dichotomized pursuits together, to create a whole.

From January, 2002 through December, 2003, I shared much the same pursuit with another group of wonder-ful St. John's students in Annapolis, Maryland, where the College's original campus, established as King William's School in 1696, is located. In Annapolis we delved into various strains of thought of the Western tradition. But, still, the emphasis was on open-ended intellectual, and spiritual, inquiry.

St. John's is not the end all when it comes to a critical education, but to the extent that students and tutors, alike, are encouraged to question the question, the school comes as close as I have seen. However, to the extent that considerations which may underlie the educational philosophy at SJC go unsaid, unquestioned, the College stands, like any other such institution, in defiance of its publicized aims.

At any rate, below is the aforementioned email, written, as will be apparent, as a reply to an earlier email.

*****
A brief note (though perhaps not brief enough for some) to all and sundry that I concur with the lovely Ms. Vlcek that yoga fitballs make fine office chairs.

Rebecca and I used one in our home office back when we were helping corporations to conspire against society in their quest for maximized shareholder value. We did this with a clear conscience, for a number of years, because we knew, sort of, that "enlightened self-interest" served society. We now know the catch-phrase to be oxymoronic.

We bought a new fitball this past autumn, an early birthday purchase for yours truly. Now, instead of conspiring with CEOs and CFOs -- call me a conspiracy realist -- I'm raging against the machine atop my fitball, blogging throne. It's a bit wobbly, requiring continual small corrections, but so, too, does my thinking, writing, blogging, political activism and life in general. Indeed, the continual small corrections are part of the joy inherent in the process.

Continual small corrections are just the thing when, in essence, things are right.

Continual small corrections are not the thing when, in essence, things are wrong.

As I observe the US and UK slip-sliding away into fascism, I think it incumbent upon us, if we are to sustain life, goodness and our sanity, to make major corrections to our fundamental way of being and to the fundamental institutions which govern our lives: corporate capitalism, anti-democratic political systems, a mass media which has poisoned our collective consciousness, an education system which has done the same, and all the many other aspects of our society which are included, already, within the first in the list, corporate capitalism.

Thank you, Nico, for compiling this email list before we hatched and flew our separate ways. I am always very happy to hear from all of you, and to know you're all always easily accessible, just a few clicks away, in thought if not in person.

Love to all,

Sean