Look at nearly any online educational institution—or traditional educational institution that offers online courses—and you will see the same verbiage: save money, learn the skills employers seek, graduate faster, advance your career, “don’t worry, this is accredited”, flexible, personalized, etc., etc. Seldom if ever is it even suggested that the program will acquaint its students with the truth, foster in them better habits of thinking, or be in any way a benefit to their lives aside from a material advancement. Education is framed entirely as a means to a good independent of what it contains itself.
By contrast, the goal of the Lyceum Institute is to foster good habits of being human, attained both through a retrieval and a furthering of the classical intellectual tradition of the Western world. We aim to reinforce these habits continually through a persistent and growing community that offers something more than just a curriculum. We provide no degrees, credentials, certificates: rather, we provide a structured environment for continued study, regardless of one’s background. “All human beings desire to know”, Aristotle starts his Metaphysics—and here, we take that seriously.
Enrollment in the Lyceum Institute, and the attempt to join in the satiation of this essential human hunger, is open to all-comers: graduate and undergraduate students, professors, clergy, the philosophically-seeking general public, and so on. Experts and novices alike profit from the community of common purpose and the mutual support in the pursuit of bettered habits. It is affordable (costing less per month than most streaming entertainment services); accessible by computer, tablet, or phone, wherever one has an internet connect; and always-improving.
The Lyceum Institute seal includes—top, left, and right—the motto, inquirere, ordinare, memorare, as well as four pertinent symbols: the book upper left, in which we not only store information but provide a continued preservation of wisdom and understanding; the flowing water upper right, which continually gives life as we continually study (and which alludes to a great influence on our study, Thomas Aquinas); the inverted caducei bottom left, used in ancient Greece—prior to becoming symbols of the medical arts—to designate messengers, and thus being signs of a sign, which here symbolize through their inversion the dialectic which characterizes our inquiry; and the compass bottom right, which signifies our continued seeking of order and direction in our collective pursuits.
This is why the mission of the Lyceum Institute is so important. Its founders understand how to educate the whole person and how our most important institutions have failed us in that goal. They are building a robust online community to replace the empty halfway houses that litter our academic environment.
Dr. Mark McCullough, “Happy Exile” in Education and Digital Life
The Lyceum Institute Incorporated is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt not-for-profit public charity incorporated in the State of New York [EIN: 87-2691864].