The Global
Commons

What is Education?

Education embodies our ideal of humanity, and it is the means by which we become ourselves. When we have forgotten who we are, or no longer agree as a culture, we cannot educate. Education requires clarity about what we believe humans are, for education is the process of becoming human.

Our confusion has led us to conflate schooling, job-training, and certification with education. For a democracy to flourish, its citizens must be offered the skills needed to participate fully in economic and civil life. That is a demand of the common good, a requisite of our republic.     

But training is different than education. Schooling stops at a certain age; degrees end and are restricted to those with the power to pay. True education only ends when we do; it is a life-long process and should not be restricted to the privileged and elite.

At the heart of every educational venture must be a clear answer to the question: what does it mean to be human? Humans are philosophers, destined to achieve the freedom to understand themselves and determine the kind of person they wish to become. Philosophy is a way of life, not an academic discipline; philosophers are a species, homo sapiens, not a professional class. Education is thus a philosophical enterprise. The wisdom required for living life well comes from seeing the whole.

The Becoming Human Project

An ancient innovation made new, the Becoming Human Project revives the philosophical school, the revolutionary birthplace of our greatest ideas and most enduring institutions.

We live in the most complex society in history. Enduring questions about the meaning of human life, the nature of society, and the pursuit of happiness are increasing in importance as the institutions and people devoted to answering them become ever more separate. Insights fragment as the need for unity and coherence increases, specialization intensifies as we face problems whose only solution lies in communities of cooperation and shared understanding.

The dimensions of culture we might expect to find addressing these problems—religion, the university, politics, business, and the arts—often deepen the gaps instead of closing them. Each tends to increase the narrowness, partisanship, and fragmentation in our culture even as each possesses unique resources for addressing our common questions and serving the common good. They all provide pieces of the big picture we need to live well, but the pieces are scattered across the seemingly unbridgeable divides that scar our society: science vs. religion, capitalism vs. socialism, facts vs. values.

If only these separated spheres were connected. If scientific knowledge, religious insight, political practicality, entrepreneurial innovation and artistic vision were brought into conversation with each other for the public good, what would be possible?

The Becoming Human Project gathers the pieces we need to become ourselves into a a shared space, curated and cultivated by an image of the human that is both ancient and new, still arriving from a future we can only build together.

Building the Future: A Global Commons

The Becoming Human Project is a new global commons and a philosophical community based on the conviction that the most transformative experiences of learning occur in personal relationships, face-to-face contact, and small groups of people who gather to learn together, it is aimed at making philosophical education accessible to professionals in one-on-one and small group settings.

At the core of the Becoming Human Project is the belief that philosophy is a way of life and that education is the process of becoming human, a process which requires the articulation and pursuit of the ideal, the fruit of which is the capacity for self-guided education, and the ability, desire, and discipline to help other achieve the same.

The results of such an education, pursued with discipline and rigor, are remarkable: high-level writing, speaking, and analytical skills matched with broad-ranging historical and conceptual knowledge serve as the capacity base of a person who is flexible, innovative, and demonstrably capable of independent learning. The capacity to learn new skills and adapt to shifting demands is essential in the global economy but is best achieved as a by-product of voluntarily undertaken learning. The Becoming Human Project offers an economically viable source of continuing education whose basic model can be adapted in widely different contexts, which supports and utilizes the new technological resources for training while simultaneously emphasizing the distinctive and irreplaceable value of personal mentoring, face-to-face contact, and small-group learning. It supplements traditional learning by providing a community for the life-long pursuit of wisdom.