Education Intentions

Education is about building Character, and learning about the actual structure of our Universe and how the physical energy and matter literally dance in such beautiful and intricate and lovely ways is one of the basic modes of developing the respect for life and for each other that leads to such character.

The highest known expressions of "just" matter/energy are what we can dryly call "biological systems". That's you and me buddy, and all the living critters on the globe, from the lava to the hard vacuum.

One fascinating aspect of these (us!) living systems are that they are made wholly of people. When we look around, each plant and animal and human being we see is breathing, and is a sentient being.

Only through ignorance can you escape this fact, and to dispel such ignorance is surely the use of activity, burned calories, over priceless time, called Education.

When we created lens that allowed us to examine living beings on a very small scale, we discovered something outlandish. All these living beings we see, ourselves not excepted, are again themselves made of living beings.

Now, a bit further down the line, we have a much greater knowledge of these tiny people, and it turns out they've had a civilization going for a couple of billion years. If you find this cool, check out "Microcosmos" by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, it could be the first time you will have seen the true dimensions of life on Earth.

My friends, you and I and all the multicellular beasties are latecomers. The tiny ones rule here and have for millenia out of mind. They are powerful beyond conception, immune (as a gestalt) to anything and everything we could ever possibly think to throw at them, and we depend on them utterly, we'd die in an instant without their constant intimate symbiosis.

One of the best ways to think of us macroscale beings, anything large enough to see, is as "toys" or "artworks" in massive energy and fluid (matter in life is almost always in the form of some slime or goop) dynamics. We are art collectives of cellular lifes.

Applied Ecology

When you are in the garden, and by garden I mean Permaculture garden and Living Machine reclaimation and production plant, natch. When you are in the garden, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics become visceral experiences.

These dry bodies of knowledge come alive and find their fulfillment in a garden as easily or more so than in a lab.

The perfect setting for education is in the garden.

My primary education in Ecology as a science came from reading Paul Colinvaux's Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare, a fantastic book I learnt (sic) of from the Next Whole Earth Catalog, itself a piece of incredible work. It was nigh onto my bible for awhile there in high school.

Not coincidentally, now that I think of it, that catalog is where I first learned of Permaculture and Dr. John Todd and co.'s Living Machines (back when his outfit were still called "New Alchemy Institute" I believe.)

Now Permaculture and Living Machines are nothing but applied Ecology-- literally living in harmony with Nature "plus science". Both are done with a profound reverence for the living beings involved, without respect even to their kingdom, and both are founded on and informed by science.

To have a school and a garden coextensive with each other is the most natural thing in the world. It builds character and it provides the prefect "matrix" for a grounding (pun intended, sorr') in scientific aspects of wholistic learning.

This integrates "food" and "education" nicely, but what about "cleaning up the GPGP"? (Those are the "triune goal".) And what about the dynamic web apps? and the TriGalactic game?

That's a whole 'nother blog post's worth, but this is long enough, so here's just the outline and I'll make the actual post later.

We want to teach Physics, Chemistry and Biology. That means math, which means computers. To me that means Xerblin but also you (the "students" of the "school") need to know real world systems too.

To learn to use computers to help you learn to deal with complex dynamic systems is the whole point of Xerblin, and the whole "Private Goal" of the TriGalactic "Game".

And just BTW, Languages, lots of them