Mission Statement
The Lyceum Institute provides a digital environment dedicated to fostering the philosophical habit–of questioning the truth of things and the good of life–in all its members, as we collectively pursue the never-ending education of a truly mind-liberating nature. Much of education depends upon the atmosphere in which we immerse ourselves, and, in the twenty-first century, we all inhabit a digital atmosphere. The Lyceum Institute seeks a continual, communal, and thoughtful ennobling of that atmosphere.
Our Vision
The educational institutions of the modern period are inadequate to the needs and opportunities of the 21st century. While there remains a place for the university (namely as a locus for research and dedicated, advanced study) the contemporary college experience—from the structure of courses, majors, the mitigation of liberal learning, the battleground of cultural strife and weaponized ideologies, to the ever-declining standards and ever-increasing costs—not only falls short in providing the foundations which students need, but fails to affect a habit of education as an integral part of life. The digital environment provides the means for establishing a new educational paradigm beyond the university.
The Lyceum Institute operates under the principle of subsidiarity—that every issue should be dealt with at the closest-possible level of decision making, and that financial support should be given at the level that one can, particularly to aid those who cannot afford as much—exhibited in the maxim that small is beautiful. The kind of education through which citizens are able to function well within their respective polities (especially in a democratic republic such as the United States of America) should not require going into debt.
Anyone serious about gaining, maintaining, and developing a liberal education—one that truly frees the mind for understanding and thought and which indeed allows citizens to flourish—should be able to find the means, particularly today, when digital technology has enabled such to be always at our fingertips. But this education itself suffocates whenever the student becomes lost, just another face in the crowd. We strive therefore to facilitate a familiar community of persons committed to truth and ensuring everyone may add his or her voice to its articulation.
Inquirere, Ordinare, Memorare
This unique digital environment emerges from the practice of the three parts of the Institute Motto: Inquirere, Ordinare, Memorare – to inquire, to remember, and to order.
Why these three actions?
The Lyceum Institute, being a digital environment, is adapted to fit and fructify the habits enabled by the nature of networked digital technology—which, at its core, is archival. That is, the very nature of digital architecture is to receive and retain bits of information that can represent nearly anything. Anything done online can be archived: captured in an arrangement of data and saved for posterity; it thus extends our memorative habits and capacities.
But consequently, for this archivality to be rightly leveraged, digital technology demands a habit of categorical consideration—a habit of ordering: as any good archive must be well-ordered, and approached with an ordered mind, for it to be used properly.
Furthermore, this demands of us an improved capacity for questioning; that is, no quantity of archived information, no matter how well it is organized, can tell us what we need to know if we do not even know how to ask the right questions. Moreover, what to do with that information requires not simply “the” right question, but a habit of knowing how to formulate those questions and pursue the answers. See our approach to digital life for more details.
Digital Life
Much concern has rightly been given to the advent of the internet and its evident displacement of the human mind into a digital landscape. But although the concerns are real, a Luddite regression only hides from problems that will continue to grow.
We must, instead, rise to this as a challenge.
The Lyceum Institute seeks to aid its members pursuit of better habits, especially of careful thinking, and not just the preservation of truth, but its strengthening. This is not a program, a course, a certification process, nor simply a place to find content for passive consumption, but rather something to become a part of one’s life: a digital medium that directs one towards the development of perfective human habits, rather than deviant ones; habits of humility, generosity, insightful interpretation, willingness to hear, ardor for the truth and deepening one’s understanding, security in forming one’s beliefs, contentment, and worldly detachment. It is an enclave for thinking, differentiated from the world “outside” not by viewing it through a lens of gnosticism, but by instilling and maintaining a dispassionate devotion to the truth. It is where one may go after having observed the chaos, the disorder, the blind ideological adherence, and the sophistical machinations of the wider “intellectual” world, to learn, study, think, and most of all converse with others following a common path. It seeks the improvement of individual understanding through communal effort in fostering philosophical habit.
Digital life allows for unique educational opportunity. For one needs to do more than merely read books or blogs or articles to become educated: education always being a matter of a certain training, which entails not only reading or passive consumption of information, but the interpretative processing of that which is received and—perhaps most importantly of all—a critical conversation with others through which that interpretation may be refined and improved. No mind lives and thrives all on its own, and while reading the works of great writers is an encounter with their minds, it is one-directional only. Something more is needed—other persons, who bring not only their own minds, but all the minds they have read, all the minds they have encountered, in some way to your own.
More about this unique approach of the Lyceum Institute can be read in our Founding Document, Education and Digital Life [via Amazon – Print] [via Newsletter – Digital] [Purchase – Digital]
Restoring Technology
to Humanity
