What's in a "School?"

University.Look at the name. It means universal! So, what should a place like that be all about? Ask yourself this: Is your school a university?

universe ~ cosmos ~ kosmos

connection maybe?

“universitas magistrorum et scholarium” - in the academic definition. a “community of masters and scholars.” now, the word master in this context is one who is highly proficient and skilled with scholarly work. and, what does scholar mean? “Of a school.” So we have a general definition that we basically already understand.

A place where individuals learn to be masters of the intellect. Where our minds are taught to be highly proficient. Ask yourself this: Does a “university” assist in teaching us how to cultivate self-reliance, autonomy, not only good reason but an overall dynamic and intelligent mind? Intelligence has various definitions, lines and stages. A good school then, would attempt to cultivate multiple forms of intelligence. To develop scholars, masters across many different kinds – all kinds of intelligence. Universal intelligence. Hence, a university.

Now, ask yourself this one more time: Is your school a university?

"Alas, drudgery."

While on the D train to Brooklyn, I was reading One Taste. Lately I've found myself bogged down by academia, and my taste for literature has slowly diminished to a trickle, squandered by the sheer boredom and density of essay language. Bless their cognitive intelligence, bless their rational minds, but their writing is so dry and incomprehensible you wonder if they have any communicative intelligence. Coincidentally, Wilber writes,

Wednesday, August 20th

"... I've now gone through around five hundred books, with as many more to go- on anthropology, ecology, feminism, postmodernism, cultural studies, post-colonial studies- and the vast majority of them are, alas, drudgery. To add insult to the injury, the style is ponderously indecipherable; you can read entire chapters possessing not a single understandable sentence; the prose suffocates you with insignificance. The best it gets up to is a type of rancid torpor, where the prose drags its belly across the gray page, always on the verge of a near-life experience."

I just grinned and looked out the window.