Texts:Rom-E-18c-LPLLA

Let’s Put
Liberal Learning into Action

¶1

Thanks to Lagemann, Mathews, Roosevelt, Feinberg, Bruce, and Mintz for your generous recollections and thoughtful discussions. Your recognition of my teaching and writing signals to me that my efforts have had meaning in the world. And becoming aware that others find meaning in them evokes a sense of fulfillment in life. Thank you!

¶2

Recognition overcomes the loneliness that builds up in a life of teaching and writing. Both require intense effort to communicate with others. But we live and work in highly commodified circumstances. It’s hard to sense an effect, as Mathews puts it. In common parlance, we teach courses, not students, and the quest for objective measures formalizes interactions within the courses. And weirdly, the connection between writers and readers breaks down. The incentives—publish or perish, research funding, and the lure of the advance—drive sky high the number of things published. And specialization sweeps many readers into narrow enclaves while celebrity culture draws those with more general interests to a shortened list of over-sold works. Trump notwithstanding, public discourse becomes incoherent, not because those speaking spout nonsense, but because so many say so much that collective attention shatters and fails to cohere intelligently. Your recognition communicates to me that thoughtful communication does still take place.

¶3

You trigger a sense of fulfillment by signaling that what I am doing merits my efforts. That sense of fulfillment, of course, differs importantly from one of completion. “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over!” Your essays assert this truth, a cheer of encouragement as we keep running—running to the end, when the baton will pass. And importantly, your recognition affirms our common spirit, all working together, as we strive to bring shared values to fruition. It incites joint effort.

¶4

To extend our shared values, I want here to address the current juncture that challenges our hopes and efforts. To do so, I will start with something your essays pass over lightly—my turn in prime years to working with digital technologies. Then I can best reciprocate your recognition with a prospective step, proposing a collaborative effort to advance the study of education, the condition of humane learning, and the education of the public.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

¶5

One comes to have a sense of purpose, I think, never really knowing where it came from or how it arose. “The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him; he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise.”

¶6

As a college junior (1959-60), seriousness surprised me. I found myself feeling that I could pursue deepening concerns by cultivating critical intellect. I started studying independently and hard on a course of inquiry oriented loosely by a fascination with the life and thought of exemplars who caught my attention—Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, and especially José Ortega y Gasset. I formed an existentialist humanism—aspirational, perfectionist in the manner of Emerson and Nietzsche. After 60 years, I hold to it still.

¶7

I gave myself two mantras. The first I wrote almost daily in a journal, rather secretively for fear that others might not understand what it meant to me—

We must quest perfection [self-overcoming] for in our world of abundance it is perfection that we most sorely lack.

¶8

The second, in various formulations, conveyed the general purpose, the commitment to humane learning and education, embodied in the more particular efforts I have consistently sought to engage in through my life:

Humanism holds that the animal, man, makes himself human by using mind to order the universal flux that he finds both within and about him.

¶9

In the years since, I’ve seen no reason to give up trying to live by these maxims, the one the discipline and the other the purpose.

¶10

A child of good fortune, I pursued my perfectionist humanism single-mindedly, undeterred by missteps, into the 1970s. I had a keen ambition to exercise intellectual agency in the service of my perfectionist humanism. “Our home” as Ellen Lagemann reminisces, “was Division I: Philosophy and the Social Sciences—which was coterminous with ‘THE Department,’ and which enshrined values and orientations that profoundly shaped our sense of vocation and aspirations as teachers and scholars.”4 Joining it as a student in 1961, I quickly came to believe that “THE Department” provided an excellent base for my aspirations. I went all in with a tacit assumption that through it, I could work to infuse a place for study, a pedagogy of perfectionist humanism, first into Teachers College and via it into the world of education. Through the 60s and into the 70s I barreled along with an unusual sense of harmony between my inward aspirations and my outward condition.

¶11

Good jobs came to me, Johns Hopkins and back to TC, and with a strong publication record, I received tenure young. Two powerful patrons, Larry Cremin at Teachers College and Jacques Barzun at Columbia University, were cheering me on. But by the mid-70s I began to wonder, On to where? Life as an Ortega specialist wouldn’t work. Could TC become a place for study? My audience as writer and teacher seemed small. I felt a growing disharmony between expectations and outcomes. Can a theory and practice of education based on a perfectionist humanism suffuse TC and other schools of education and the system of schooling they serve?

¶12

Through a sabbatical in Germany, followed by a fast-paced time perched high in Washington, as David Mathews describes, I sensed intimations of scale and how the world of instruction embodied vast inertia and a global scope. My sense of agency wound down as I began to suspect that even with Larry Cremin then at the helm of the whole college, THE department would fast become, not an agent of change, but one of its objects. Through the late 40s, the 50s and 60s, up to the early 70s, a period of steady academic expansion had made plausible an initial assumption that universities and their schools of education would support high scholarship in education as a good-in-itself. In the first of my forays into faculty politics that Lagemann mentions, I circulated two documents, “Thinking about the Budget: An Informal Report on the College's Financial Condition” and “Possible Strategy for Developing the Department.” With lots of numbers and graphs, these showed how the college was entering an era of budget constraint in which THE department would lose luster as a prestigious intellectual flagship and come under pressure as a costly enclave of resented privilege. Twenty years later, the department had been disbanded and was progressively being erased from institutional memory.

¶13

By the end of the 70s, I had formed a very pessimistic assessment of the prospects for liberal learning, specifically in schools of education and more generally in the world at large. In 1979, I published a taut article, “The Dynamics of Decline: Why Education Can No Longer Be Liberal.” Influenced by Max Weber and many others, I set out disquieting thoughts, acknowledging sociocultural changes that had long operated to undercut the life purposes that imbued liberal learning with human meaning. I won’t recapitulate it all, but will quote the ending:

An abstract division of activity has been successfully imposed upon public life. In acting within it, the whole person does not participate, for each is subject to the limitations of his or her office, his or her job, his or her function. With no alternative to participate, with no alternative but to perform, people are no longer free persons; and with no free persons, there is no one for whom a liberal education might be appropriate. What passes for liberal education in this civic environment is a sad vestige, and a renaissance of the real thing will be possible only with a profound change in the way people conduct their lives, somehow renewing their capacity for complete, integral involvement in the pursuit of the commonweal.

¶14

In coming to this conclusion, I joined many others worried by the impersonality of modernity, its commodification of perception and action. As autonomous experience has contracted, reduced to conformity to abstract roles, many humanists have feared information technologies as the very forces responsible for it. Indeed, computers have served to type and formalize behavior, devaluing humane learning in modern life. I too railed righteously against punch cards, subversively folding, spindling, and mutilating whenever I could. But as Roosevelt observes, contingencies occur, often triggering significant self-formative effort.

¶15

Through the 70s, I regularly made Marx the topic of one of the five-week mini-courses I offered, at first from curiosity, but then with growing conviction, not adopting Marxism per se, but recognizing with Marx that people could shape historical development only by working through powerful historical forces. Didactic action alone has little effect in historical life. The plight of humane learning arose from the way people organized their material environments into compelling forces depersonalizing action. To counter that required mobilizing some sort of counter force.

¶16

In the midst of such reflections, I naively replaced my typewriter with a Vydec word-processing console, a personal gesture defying cost-effective calculation and a prosthetic compensating for clumsy keyboarding. One thing started to lead to another, from the Vydec to experimenting with email on the college’s DEC 20, to becoming a decent Pascal programmer on an early microcomputer, to exploiting how the constraints on the production, copying, and dissemination of text in digital form differed radically from text on paper. Through direct experience, quite without argument and discussion, I began to perceive digital information processing as a protean force that is unleashing emergent energies of great power and scope. With these, people are shaping many alternative lifeworlds, spanning a wide spectrum of human possibilities. Soon my humanist fear of information technologies seemed deeply misdirected. We could and should work with them to make possible “a profound change in the way people conduct their lives, somehow renewing their capacity for complete, integral involvement in the pursuit of the commonweal.”

¶17

I don’t want here to rehearse the different texts and projects through which I have hoped to participate in revitalizing liberal learning by using information technologies as an historically significant force. It seemed evident to me that digitizing cultural assets and working with them over networks, at first local and then global, could help to develop a world of study. I reflected on “the computer as a system,” the ensemble of fast-growing computing power, ever-improving software, all linked together reciprocally by high-speed networks. The computer as a system—the whole historical process of digitizing assets and action—is augmenting human “powers of selection, memory, perception. and calculation, potentially amplifying the intelligence that each and all can bring to bear upon the panoply of questions that life puts to them.”

¶18

To use the affordances of the computer, I first pursued projects within schools and universities. Those efforts had a Sisyphean character, for they involved working with fast developing technologies in specific, transient situations within material institutions, ones well-structured to resist change. Results, if tangible, become immediately obsolete. The projects met promised deliverables well and grew in scope, but all along I thought that the educative power of information technology would become manifest, not through the existing institutions of education, but after it broke free and became independent of those institutions.

¶19

In the mid-90s with the sudden emergence of the world wide web, the infrastructure for projects outside formal education and culture started emerging, and many new forms of cultural activity, high and low, have been appearing there. From the start of the web, I’ve tinkered and reflected on how web-based initiatives might help us improve the prospects for humane learning. It is proving, of course, much more complicated than anticipatory expectations suggested. But my experience leaves me, not sanguine, but still game.

¶20

Now, Chip Bruce’s reflections on Enough: A Pedagogic Speculation, particularly embolden me by breathing life into a work that I thought had bombed, evoking no response. I had framed my thoughts in a risky way, hoping to expand our sense of possibility by seeing how present-day things might look when viewed from a century and a half in the future. The imagined future from which I wrote had consigned the political economies of our time to the dustbin of history, instead managing human interactions with urban-based, communitarian principles. I tried to avoid spelling out particulars about that future in the text, instead using their principles as tacit assumptions from which to interpret our own present-day lifeworld. What were those principles? I found them in developments taking place around us in the digital commons, principles essentially characterizing a gift economy in which people pool their productive resources and labor for the mutual benefit of all. Wikipedia works as a nearly pure example.

¶21

Referring to his engagement with educational reform in Nepal, Bruce notes a similarity to my reaching for perspective in a distant future: we are both manifesting the value of thinking globally. He then closes, rightly insisting that such global thinking calls for local acting as “critical, socially aware, and engaged citizens who participate in creating their own world.” I agree. And I think we must recognize that in our own world, here and now, like it or not, digital networks have become a crucial locus for action, potentially destructive, potentially creative. No one controls action on them. What will take place through them has not been predetermined. The outcomes are emerging from the historical net effect of what people like us in multiple generations try to do on, for, and with those networks. Nothing can stop us from trying but our own inertia. Let’s join in starting a Collaboratory for Liberal Learning, a recursive effort to self-organize a place for advancing the proper study of education, the condition of humane learning, and the education of the public through a collaborative innovation with information technologies.

A Modest Proposal

¶22

Here at the outset, I do not really know what scope I am proposing for this Collaboratory as a means for advancing the proper study of education. I agree with almost all of Walter Feinberg’s illuminating analysis of Homeless in the House of Intellect, including his observations about the complexities of imagining how contemporary universities might actually fit the study of education into the system of arts and sciences. I doubt they will try. I wrote Homeless quickly during the summer of 2004 to clear my head in response to a nutty tenure decision. I considered it more an ideal-type speculation—if sanity ruled—and less a nascent proposal for academic reform.

¶23

Here, in contrast to the speculative bent of Homeless, and of Enough, I want to advance a real proposal, but one for an initiative that stands apart from existing universities, both their schools of education and their faculties of arts and sciences. I think Feinberg’s analysis of all the imponderables about how education as an academic study can or should fit into the contemporary university illuminates how we cannot predict the path an initiative on the web for education as a liberal art will take. In substance, the Collaboratory for Liberal Learning might come to deal with the matters dealt with in THE department in which Lagemann and I began our careers. Or conceivably it could come to span many or most of the generative concerns informing the full range of arts and sciences in modern universities. Or it might flop among the many quixotic tilts at windmills. With emergent, self-organizing activities, we can’t predict what will happen at the outset.

¶24

For that reason, I must resist the temptation to try to explain too much. I will simply state the initial form for a Collaboratory for Liberal Learning, and then reflect briefly on a few matters I would want to keep in mind during its development. The Collaboratory will be an effort in the wild, so to speak, free of familiar forms and structures operating in brick and mortar academe. It will be open to persons interested in its purposes, self-organizing itself in the digital commons.

¶25

What’s that? It is a recursive phenomenon defined by itself. The digital commons is emerging as a self-defined subset of the web, and as a commons, it comprises resources and activities created through volunteer effort and open for use and improvement by all persons. It takes shape as, in, and through extensible, interactive activity on digital networks. In principle, insofar as we self-organize activities through volunteer effort with the results open to all for common use, the digital commons emerges free from enclosure, developing from within toward the fulfillment of its functions. As part of the emerging commons, the Collaboratory should work to disclose how the affordances and constraints of the web can strengthen liberal learning in thought and practice.

¶26

Initially, the Collaboratory will support online activity through three web sites: www.liberallearning.org, www.educationalthought.org, and www.educationalthinking.org. The line between end user and active participant will blur for real persons. As end users of the Collaboratory’s resources, we can call ourselves sojourners who can consult the three sites as we wish, free of fees and advertising and comment on materials there as we wish. And as active, self-appointed participants in the Collaboratory, we act as commoners who will continuously create and improve the content of the sites, volunteering our activity to the Collaboratory and the digital commons, guided by a set of self-managed policies and guidelines akin to those for Wikipedia. The Collaboratory will not offer courses, certify competencies, or advance careers as educational institutions do, but through it people can convene educative activity, making use of its sites to join as sojourners and commoners in study groups on matters of shared interest—with no tuition, no salaries, just cooperative work done for its own sake.

¶27

Initially, the three web sites will have distinct yet overlapping functions.

• Liberallearning.org will start serving two main purposes. Activities will take place there to facilitate the self-organizing interactions among commoners, the contributing participants in the Collaboratory, as they develop all three web sites. In addition, more substantively, the commoners and sojourners will advance ongoing research, scholarship, and criticism concerning the idea and practice of liberal learning.
• Educationalthought.org will serve as the locus for research and scholarship on past educational thought, presenting the work of past thinkers and interpreting the significance of it relative to humanistic strivings. Commoners will do the editorial work anonymously but contribute critical interpretation with the public attribution of their authorship. Sojourners make use of materials as fits their purposes and they can stimulate further inquiry through comments and criticisms. Over time, the site should develop into a highly usable, comprehensive digital library of original texts and interpretative scholarship about educative experience.
• Educationalthinking.org will concentrate on contemporary reflection about educational purposes and practices, understanding education as a formative process that each person undergoes 24/7 in the concrete circumstances of her life and that she tries to manage, as best she can, for purposes which she accepts and bears responsibility. Again, commoners should put forward their considered views, short or long, with sojourners as their active auditors. The practice of liberal learning will unfold as persons work together to build their confidence in their own powers of judgment.

¶28

At its start, the Collaboratory will have initial operating procedures and a mechanism by which commoners and sojourners can adapt and develop the procedures and the activities they self-organize in the light of experience.

¶29

Wikipedia provides extensive experience on which the Collaboratory can piggyback, running its web sites on MediaWiki, the open source software developed for Wikipedia and its associated projects. The Collaboratory differs in purpose from Wikipedia: the one “a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project” and the other a multilingual, web-based, free content project to advance the theory and practice of liberal learning. Given this difference of purpose the core policies of the Collaboratory will differ from those of Wikipedia in some specific ways. Nevertheless, the Collaboratory will follow Wikipedia in using “a model of openly editable content … written collaboratively by … volunteers who write without pay.” Most operational guidelines from Wikipedia will apply to the Collaboratory, although the differences in scale and maturity of the two projects will enable the Collaboratory to proceed without all the complexification of Wikipedia’s guidelines.

¶30

Over time, Wikipedia’s core policies have boiled down to three: Neutral point of view, Verifiability, and No original research. Given the Collaboratory’s purpose, the policy of Verifiability can probably transfer without significant modification. The Neutral point of view, essential to an encyclopedic project, would need to change for the Collaboratory to allow purposeful interpretation and constructive advocacy essential to liberal learning, becoming instead Responsible point of view. The most significant change would alter Wikipedia’s stricture, No original research. Contemporary academe has inflated the domain of research in chasing external funding and managing recruitment, promotion, and tenure. The Collaboratory will eschew all that and prize the full range of intellectual inquiry—research, scholarship, and criticism. Hence, instead of Wikipedia’s proscription, the Collaboratory might have a policy of delimitation, perhaps Relevance in research, comprehensiveness in scholarship, and significance in criticism.

¶31

It may take some time and effort with the Collaboratory to clarify this last policy concern. The scope and character of a project to advance the theory and practice of liberal learning in the digital commons does not have the prima facie clarity of an “encyclopedia project.” Consequently, initial commoners in the Collaboratory will have as a major task: to attain clarity about their undertaking and to imbue policies and guidelines with that clarity. Questions and comments by sojourners will greatly stimulate this process of clarification.

¶32

In contrast to the way the Collaboratory can piggyback on the experience of Wikipedia, it should avoid initially adopting policies and practices well established in academia. Over centuries, educators developed the institutional arrangements characteristic in colleges and universities using printed texts as the primarily medium of scholarly communication. We are starting the Collaboratory with the intent of leaving those arrangements behind in order to develop arrangements for advancing liberal learning in the digital commons. We should not incorporate existing academic arrangements without making sure that they intrinsically serve intellectual purposes in a system of digitally based communication. For instance, this probably means abandoning all forms of pre-publication peer review. Existing arrangements for it are very costly, but given the production, distribution, storage, and retrieval costs of printed communications, peer review proves cost effective. Those costs within a system of digital communication differ radically and there the costs of peer review practices will far outweigh their benefits. The Collaboratory will start up with an initial position on many such matters and refining, even reversing some, will constitute a side of its ongoing activity.

¶33

Another area that might potentially undergo adjustment after the initial start of the Collaboratory concerns its locus and that of the digital commons in the web as a whole. In 25 years, the web has developed great stuff, here and there, but it has grown too big, too fast. A depressing array of illiberal activities have long pervaded traditional cultural communication and they have whooshed into the emerging digital sphere. They are making vast fortunes, but in a commons, fortunes count for little. In developing the Collaboratory, we will need to maintain clarity about its purposes and remain careful about how its activities relate to all those that will surround it and the digital commons on the web.

¶34

At bottom, the phrase, a liberal art, indicates a techne or form of activity that suits a free, autonomous person. In seeking to express and realize her capacities for free, self-directed activity, a person will apply herself to arts that further her expression and realization of it. The autonomy of the person does not derive from the art; rather the liberality of the art derives from the reason the autonomous person has for pursuing it. Without going into a long reflection about the liberality of liberal learning, let’s simply say that liberal learning strengthens persons’ efforts to express their ideas and aspirations, to transcend their habitual routines, and to develop their possibilities. Illiberal culture consists of activities that do not support or encourage self-transcendence, suiting our static, routine, habitual needs and expectations instead. We should not stigmatize the distinction as invidious—everyone has banal needs and pleasures, and everyone has possibilities for self-transcendence. Each person must strike a balance between both forms of activity in their lives.

¶35

In starting the Collaboratory, we should respect this balance with care. First, liberal learning has borne a stigma of elitism during the democratic era. Too often, only those who enjoy the use of a surplus product comfortably in excess of mere subsistence, have been able materially to engage in liberal culture. During recent centuries, the real material benefits created through industrial democracy have greatly increased the proportion of people who in principle have the requisite material surplus to pursue liberal learning. But in the print-based communications environment, the tools of liberal learning still require a significant material outlay as a condition of participation. Consequently, many people see liberal learning as a bad bargain they do not need to make. The costs of participating in liberal learning diminish greatly with digitally mediated communications and the material entry fees for liberal learning plunge in price. The examples of Wikipedia and many other digital developments suggest that a substantial proportion of persons could engage in the pursuit of liberal learning in the digital commons, if they so choose. We put liberal learning into action by responding with substantive support and opportunities as autonomous persons freely seek it in the pursuit of their purpose. Independent persons respond from within to shared undertakings in which their independence is respected. Hence, the Collaboratory should refrain from trying to hitch the pursuit of liberal learning to purposes outside itself in an effort to inflate its outwardly apparent importance. Yet….

¶36

Other presences on the web, far more prominent and powerful, feel no compunction over forcing, enticing, manipulating, and seducing the choices of others. The web, like the world of print, abounds with a vast amount of content brought to us by advertising and subscription. These practices create strong drives to hype and hook the audience, and sophistries of consumer sovereignty have long cloaked those practices with an aura of legitimacy. As the costs of creating and distributing cultural content plummet, competition to capture attention intensifies, and the art of converting attention, however vacant minded it may be, into a tradable commodity enables a few to capture immense power and wealth. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other enterprises exploit self-organizing energies with sophisticated algorithms that manipulate persons’ attention so that service providers can monetize it for their entrepreneurial gain. The Collaboratory will need to examine the social construction of ersatz choice within its concern for liberal learning in order to prevent compulsive banalities, to which we are all susceptible, from monopolizing persons’ attention.

¶37

To close, I want to reflect a bit further on why I think we can and should venture an initiative like the Collaboratory. I do not regret having spent a long career as a professor at a major school of education in a great university. But the experience has given me the opportunity to confront a lot of problems within our educational institutions and within the populations they serve, which are not going away and seem slowly to worsen. The administrative overhead of academe thickens, specialties narrow, public support wavers, ineffectuality spreads, and morale declines. We have been acculturated to situating valuable action, change, risk, and opportunity in the large abstract problems and trends, in society, the nation, this group or that, one ism or another. We get inured to acting for purposes outside ourselves. I believe the realities of life are more concrete and inward, in the way persons feel and think, for oneself and with others. I sense in myself, and others, a longing to shape our lives as meaningful wholes taking place through our choices as we cope with the relentless flow of vicissitudes in which we swim.

¶38

I feel that all sorts of persons, the prepossessing and the very ordinary, all of us sense that we have potentials as unique persons, inwardly meaningful possibilities that we each can and should pursue, and we each can do it constructively, cooperatively, in the company of other persons who are doing the same. And I feel, and sense that others feel, that our institutions at their best are engaging us in efforts too often inimical to our inward purposes, drawing us into working at cross purposes with ourselves. But we achieve nothing by lamenting “Stop the world! I want to get off!” We need to invent better ways to act on these inward strivings, so often frustrated.

¶39

Already, Nietzsche spoke powerfully about the disadvantage for life of too much history, of having a past rich in the fruits of personal strivings completed long ago, of a present having its opportunities saturated, becoming an oppressive weight. The digital world has a short, chaotic past, one full of possibility with little history of its own. The digital commons opens opportunities, the possibility of our shedding the weight of history as it bears on us as persons. We can lighten up on the past and embrace the future as a realm of possibility, of unknowns contingent on taking risks and exerting effort in the face of improbability.

¶40

At the same time, we easily bear the burden of history, unquestioned, complacently as if a natural necessity. Then we lunge at new technologies, not as emergent possibilities, but as ways of getting ahead on the most familiar terms. Uncriticized, history recapitulates its forms and limitations. Powerful forces push this historical recapitulation, rolling the past into the future. Nietzsche also spoke in his untimely meditations of how institutional education serves four self-serving drives that work to distort a person’s Bildung, her autonomous self-cultivation, by discouraging the sense of possibility and pushing abstract needs upon the person: the selfishness of the money-makers, the selfishness of the state, the selfishness of fashion and celebrity, and the selfishness of the sciences and their specialists. And now, as the burden of history changes, we see those same self-serving drives rushing onto the web, supported lavishly by wealth, power, publicity, and prestige, creating a cacophony of confusion.

¶41

These developments should not daunt us. Look to the history of liberal learning. In times of upheaval, people have most firmly grasped its importance in their lives. Now on the web, the virtues of liberal learning—judgment, tolerance, discrimination, poise, grace, dignity, subtlety, insight, detachment, humor, restraint, empathy, vision, liberality—all are gaining urgent relevance in our lives. And we see from experience that projects in the digital commons can self-organize and succeed in the midst of confusing change by using purposeful intelligence without preconditions of wealth, power, publicity, or prestige. Possibilities can and do take place.

¶42

Does the Collaboratory for Liberal Learning have a chance? I believe that our universe consists of information, as well as matter and energy, and that life uses the power of information to organize and manage matter and energy into its cosmos, its home in the universe. I further believe that mind, Geist, our living spirit, manifests the power of information to order the flux of matter and energy within and about us. And I believe that information technologies are empowering us to act through interactive networks across a spectrum of possibilities, some better and some worse, in ways we are only beginning to understand. We have opportunities. Let us use our minds to grasp the better, to shape our lives in more humane, meaningful ways, and let us not miss our chance because we cared too little to try.

¶43

To succeed or fail, a self-organizing undertaking must first begin itself. A recursive function calls itself. As free persons, we can initiate the Collaboratory, going online, starting to address the many concerns and possibilities for liberal learning in the digital commons, and inviting others to join in. Good examples—open source software development, the world wide web itself, Wikipedia, digital libraries—point to the possibility of a digital commons in which each and all of us can participate in using our will and reason to extend the cosmos we create within and about us. Self-organizing activity works recursively on its purposes, procedures, and results as a continuously adaptive effort that has itself as its goal and rationale. Hence, without more ado, let’s do it, let’s put liberal learning into action.