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.
One can read more deeply into the philosophy motivating the Lyceum Institute in Education and Digital Life [via Amazon – Print] [via Newsletter – Digital].
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.