Universal Life University - what eloquent redundancy! - so named in recognition to the Universal Life Church in which so many of us became ministers and in which everyone is a minister, with absolutely no exchange of money. In that spirit, Universal Life University offers enrollment and graduation simultaneously: upon successful enrollment you are immediately graduated with a free BA, (no charge) or any undergraduate degree of your choice.
> Being an Online University in this day and age has a virtual legitimacy that our ULU now can smirkingly claim. Really when you are asked if you have a degree, if it's not Harvard, it better well be Universal Life University. It goes well on any application. ULU will maintain online a rectory of graduates including bios and updates. You can have a paper certificate as well to hang on your wall. Begin rather than end with a bachelor’s degree as an indication of your serious and curious commitment to the topic(s) of your study. Our opening manifesto, retitled “Priming the Invisible Insurgency of a Billion Minds”, was something gleaned from the Situationist 70s, thanks to Alexander Trocchi, an old hero from the hipster days of literature, junkies and porno. The Deep Inspiration is the Medieval University, along with its modern propagandist, Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd) and his Community of Scholars. From there it is Ivan Illich, (Deschooling Society,) priest and anarchist who migrated to Mexico to found his Institute, Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism), and Summerhill via his “pupil” A.S. Neill, John Gatto (Dumbing Us Down.) John Holt and his passion for Unschooling, Paolo Freire certainly, and quite importantly, John Dewey, against whose Democratic Educational philosophy the superCanon Great Books were launched, Jane Addams of Hull House, a direct action survival school among poor immigrants, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, a later survival school for skid row drop-outs, and not least, Alfred North Whitehead who inspires a scientific and mathematical approach anchored in poetry and imagination (Aims of Education). These are just tip-of-the-tongue examples. Free schooling- home schooling- unschooling-deschooling are required if we are to see the founding – sometime in our lives - of a free society immersed in a spirit of curiosity and spontaneity. Oddly enough, as an online school, ULU promises the kind of thing-in-itself liberal education that the non-virtual universities promote but no longer believe is worth accomplishing. ULU is an attempt to bring educational actuality to this otherwise totally commercialized “higher” education. Off-brand, on-line colleges effectively do the commercialization bit, limiting the otherwise ridiculous debt, by focusing on delivering the jobs NOW that a degree from the standard brand colleges promise but don't deliver. ULU completes the job by offering an Actual Liberal Education that has been abandoned by the campus and dorm operators, because such an education has no monetary value. ULU’s free degree leaves us free indeed – to pursue an education - with a library by the way of 9000 books! Welcome to the Real World after all. Can a campus and dorms be far behind? (no charge) (Note: A thorough reading of the links above will constitute a formidable beginning to 'post graduate' study of history, pedagogy, & philosophy)
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Decades ago John Taylor Gatto's teacher of the year acceptance speech was s shot heard around the world for progressive education reform.
Some significant thoughts: “School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.” “It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does. It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its “homework.” “How will they learn to read?” you ask, and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.” “Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents—and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850—we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.” “Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.” -John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018) |
AuthorThe Peoples Whistle- Agent of Change Archives
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