Informal, self-organised global learning works!
I have helped organise a group of 10 autodidacts in Progress Studies for a weekly 2-hour online seminar on ‘21st Century Civilization’, taking place over 11 weeks, covering subjects from Civilizational Decay to The Psychology of Modern Elites.
For each seminar, we read and prepare; sharing notes in advance; ask participants to introduce topics; break into smaller groups to discuss them, and the overall theme; then reconvene to share insights and critical reflections.
Participants are all in the GMT timezone and hail from across Europe and North Africa, including Croatia, Austria, Germany, France, Portugal, Poland, Morocco, and the UK. (The idea that Brexit divided the UK from ‘Europe’ seems like a wish, not a reality.) Another group meets in-person in London. Other groups meet in the PST, CST, EST, ART, EET and SGT timezones.
This course was proposed by Richard Ngo and Samo Burja, two US-based Progress Studies thinkers and writers. It is framed by the observation that “there are many things that Western countries could do in the past that we can’t today [and] modern elites often seem unvirtuous and even unserious by historical standards”.
In my original post on this initiative (on LinkedIn), I enjoined that “new forms of informal didacticism are increasingly welcome [and it] is older than formal education”.
And I noted that “today we have the advantage of digital document sharing, remotely-enabled discussion, note sharing, and Personal Knowledge Management tools, and the ability to self-publish instantly”.
Are we perhaps at an inflection point in further and higher education?
Are we flipping the balance of forms of study back to the pedagogic and epistemic side, and away from the administrative, pastoral and financial side? (Of course, there is a long and continuing tradition of informal education, from Sunday schools to the Workers’ Educational Association, the Academy of Ideas ‘The Academy’ to U3A, the University of the Third Age, General Assembly to the City Lit.) Are students and scholars also reacting against the abandonment of the search for truth in significant parts of the academy?
Of course, this model currently lacks the credentialing of a qualification from a chartered degree-awarding organisation, or the coherence of a degree course with modules led by an instructor. But it could allow the student to demonstrate “conscientiousness”, that is, persistence, reliability and the ability to navigate demands over time.
It may be that the value of the credentials both of admissions to a school and of a graduating qualification are declining, as employers evaluate institutions and their awarded qualifications more skeptically, and start to apply their own evaluation criteria.
Either way, let’s get back to learning, and learning how to learn.
—