An Education Toward Freedom
Fortify Your Soul Before Coming Down the Mountain
If you want to design a new institution that will flourish 10 years from now, it may very well look awfully strange in the eyes of others today. MCC will be an aristocratic retreat in the mountains, where noble men will steel their bodies and minds for the tasks ahead. The sweet air of freedom, leisure, and repose will permeate every inch of the grounds.
But before we breath this good air, let’s take a look at the fetid air and cramped conditions in which even a well-motivated student at an ordinary university will find himself.
Bad Air: Life Under Stress
Today when you talk to university students they present themselves as “stressed” and “really busy.” Many of them work part time; some to make ends meet, others because they want to seem like the kind of people who have trouble making ends meet. They will miss some class sessions because of it and if they face any classroom penalties because of this, they will fiercely and indignantly say that they had to miss. Some highly motivated students will try to take 20 credit hours a semester so that they can graduate early. As they say, “it’s a lot.”
And it is a lot. A student faces distractions from within and without. Social media and destructive social lives--the famous and useless "college experience"--keep students from focusing on what's important. Studies show again and again that modern students are depressed and feel harried. This leads students to look for shortcuts and even if these shortcuts sometimes work, they aren’t psychologically satisfying.
Life under these cramped conditions of stress turns out differently than life that finds itself with room to roam. You don’t have time to really soak up what you are supposed to be learning. Your vision is constrained as you myopically perceive the next task in front of you. You look for streamlined paths through which you can escape this condition so that you can find yourself on a comfortable and respectable perch.
An Interlude
Something that a friend sent me while I was writing this helped me see a way to describe the difference between an MCC student and a well meaning prestige chasing regular college student. Samo Burja utilizes a helpful abstraction, “live vs. dead players”:
A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.
The dead player fits our description above of the student looking for a streamlined path through life into the arms of say, the medical profession. It’s a script and many people have lived happy lives with this script. But part of what many people have started to realize is that even those comfortable scripts contain increasingly ideologically driven lines; lines that can cut against the core imperative of doctors to do no harm.
It is difficult not to be a dead player. So many incentives all point that way: your family wants you that way, your schools from k-12 to college want you that way, your friends want you that way. People praise you for reading your lines correctly. It feels comforting to know what it is that you should be doing. (And one of the cool things about the script is that sometimes you get to read lines about how you are a rebel and outside of the script, so that you feel like a live player) You are constrained and almost entirely enframed by existing formal structures that green light certain pathways for you. If those pathways are good then such so-called deadness might be a blessing. Our pathways are increasingly not this way. (Burja’s thinking on this sees companies and even nations as being thinkable as live / dead players).
On live players, Burja adds:
“What are signs that a player is alive? One strong sign is a player doing things outside of their expected domain — in a new, unexpected domain — which indicates that they can figure out new things for themselves.”
At MCC, students are becoming live players as individuals and they are joining an institution that promises to be a live player and to do unexpected things. Some students will come for the political philosophy but will then become obsessed with what makes architecture beautiful and through their independent studies will leave with plans for a revolutionary new way to create buildings of staggering beauty. In other words, MCC is a place where you go to reinvent a “living tradition of knowledge.”
Good Air: Freedom and Self-Respect
At MCC, the students will accomplish more by having to do less. That is, rather than taking 4, 5, or even 6 classes in a semester they will be asked only to take two in addition to the question or problem that they tackle in their independent study.
Why only two? Because we respect our students and because we have higher expectations of them. One mistaken assumption that many have about education is that the most important part of it happens in the classroom. The classroom conversations are of immense importance; but, those sessions should be a starting point for the serious person who actually has a burning desire to get to the bottom of something. That is, a student can become too reliant on the professor or the classroom to give them the answer or to provide some semblance of order to the text they are reading. But if you are taking too many classes what else can you do but move on to the next assignment? What if by taking fewer courses you find yourself in a position to re-read what you just discussed in class? What if when Nietzsche mentions Bizet’s Carmen, you go watch it instead of asking your teacher to summarize it?
And I know that MCC students will use their time well; they know what time it is. They have the courage to try and take hold over the future. They have already liberated themselves from the rat race for prestige and they want an education in what really counts.