View source for Hello/Why do we study

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<h1>Why <u>a place</u> to study?</h1>
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<p>Don't we get enough education? Most everyone ''has been educated'' in a worldwide system of formal instruction — some to succeed, others to fail. Helping more to succeed in the system and fewer to fail is important, but not the aim in creating {{apts}}.</p>

<p>What we get from our formal education is important, but far from sufficient. Our lived experience assesses our education in the school of life. That goes on till death and it's up to us to make it good enough, personally and collectively, to suffice for our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.</p>

<p>Our personal circumstances provide each with a base, a unique mix of abilities, limitations, and resources. We don't know exactly what they are, but nevertheless we have to work from that base within a larger world, a world that wobbles, fortuitously shaking up the circumstances in which we each live, continually forcing us to use our judgment in coping with things uncertain and unexpected. In seeking to live well, that larger world requires that each pays it some attention as each prepares to act within it. And the wobble is pretty bad.</p>

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* We harbor a pervasive racism, resentment, and complacency in our civic life that subjects large groups and many persons to persistent indignity, degradation, and abuse.  

* We celebrate an economic system that is chugging out of control, over-producing, remunerating unjustly, distributing product inefficiently, and fouling the habitat with destructive bi-products.

* We stoke technical innovation as the highest source of good in the world, beneficent in all its consequences, even the unintended.

* We compete blindly in politics with weak, hard to manage rules, shirking the tasks of governing the civic whole and ripping ourselves apart through blind battling for power, heedless of its use.

* We communicate by contagion with novel affordances, oblivious to the potential effects on who says what to whom for what reasons and with what results — a chirping babel passing as voices to make us great again.

* We educate "universally" through a monoculture normed to serve and reward those who most closely conform to it, as if that system truly and fully anticipates all the vicissitudes of life.</div>

{{WideOut|Outer=<h3 class="cent">Henry Adams on<br>educational accountability</h3>
<p>The picture of Washington in March, 1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good. . . . Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country could recover its balance and movement.<ref>[[Adams/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams#CHAPTER_VII:_TREASON_.281860-1861.29 | <i>The education of Henry Adams</i>, Chapter VII: Treason (1860-1861), (¶183)]]</ref></p>}}

<p>We live at risk, each and all in a condition of substantial ignorance. The affordances of culture, which provide us with a precarious agency in life, adjust and re-calibrate as the scale of complexity actually at work in the encompassing lifeworld ratchets up.</p>

<p>This emergent complexity does simply add to culture a new layer of sensitivity and skill as a tree adds a new ring of growth to its trunk. Rather the significance and use of all the parts of the culture change with unannounced actuality. We perceive the cultural dislocation taking place through the discernible wobbles, but we feel it in our inner sense of life as an intensifying doubt, both tacit and explicit, that we are condemned to live our lives without meaningful agency, isolated specs of awareness buffeted into incessant motion by forces independent of our will.</p>

<p>Recognizing that, how should we make wise choices? That's the question we can and should examine, each personally and together, in common. That's why we study, and to facilitate that purpose, we construct a place to study.</p>

<p> {{apts}} offers no solutions, no packages, no planned and vetted paths. It offers each a place to reflect, to inquire, to think, and to study as each sees fit in the company of others with resources that suit the task.</p>
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<p>{{apts}} exists as a starting point for any person trying to make wise educational choices while living and working in failing civic systems — instructional, economic, political, and cultural. To decisively exert significant effort on unconventional possibilities despite substantial self-doubt, we must incubate our powers. The scale and intensity in contemporary communication renders most persons mute, and the few who speak, stupid. Each person deserves and merits full opportunity to form their say in life, to grasp the sustained, meaningful opportunity to speak that say in receptive settings of constructive, interpersonal interaction. That's the reason for a place to study.</p>

<p>As a workplace for that effort, {{apts}} does not offer quick gratification, no going viral. We enter it as if we are going alone to a large, complex city where the language and texture of life differs from down-home. Moving about with the navigation map above to the right, we continually explore it, recursively reorient ourselves to both the spirit and the particulars of the place. Even the most jaded among us will find the place filled with the unexpected, occasions for wonder, reflection, and response. When so moved, use an "Add comment" link, not to grunt a Like or Dislike, but to think out your thinking as the matter at hand might occasion it, <i>and to express it to yourself and others</i>, the why, what, and how of it. By placing it there so that others can engage and recognize your well-considered presence in a common sphere of thought and action, we form and exercise our powers of judgment within a community of peers.</p>

<p>Politics, journalism, education, commerce, and philanthropy have become hollow chambers where most of us are silenced and a few don roles, spewing memes, talking points, well-crafted manipulations with neither substance nor conviction. Without a place to study, we feel silenced by all the noise, unable to form what we have to say and to speak our thinking for others to see and hear. Add your comments, not prefab opinions, but what you think and feel, what worries and interests you, what you wonder and doubt, hope and fear about the matters of meaning to you. Let's do that as well as we can, to the best of our ability: that's how we build a place to study.</p>

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