Buckminster College: Education for Complexity

Education is a resource-intensive, intelligence-intensive, and heart-intensive undertaking, even when done according to the traditional formulas and knowledge cultures and sustained by public funding. Initial phases of novel concepts, aiming to reinvent these formulas and radically expand the horizons, are even more resource-hungry. Yet, we do need such new concepts and initiatives, new ways of learning and teaching, so that we can assist the new crew of Spaceship Earth the best we can.

Buckminster College, a growing international educational initiative based in Belgium, is calling for your support. The idea of the college is dreamy and ambitious, resembling something between the wizardry school from Ursula Le Guin's 'Wizard of Earthsea' and the mysterious Castalia in its first, good decades (from Herman Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game'). We are preparing to launch an independent international secondary school for ages 10-18. The school will be partly remote (to ground the rhythms and habits of intrinsically motivated self-regulation and self-care) and part-boarding (with regular, immersive get-away sessions in a few magical places). We are developing spaces and courses suited for fast, challenging, acutely sensitive learners: young people, whose unique learning trajectories and styles demand interdisciplinary big-picture thinking, require a psychologically savvy holding environment, and call for polymaths as mentors and guides.