Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Welcome to Not Being in School


The No School University of School has just flung open its conceptual doors, and is willing to acknowledge the concept of students for its inaugural not having of classes. The No School University of School is not a formal school, offers no promises of learning, and shrinks from the responsibility of your betterment.

The No School University of School does, however, have this blog. No one else has this blog.

And also, we (I) have some ideas. To be more exact, I have one idea: walking. Walking is the current curricula of The No School University of School. By walking, I mean getting from one place to another in a leisurely, open-air, and hopefully observant manner. So, the first (and likely only) class offered by The No School University of School is about walking.

The class on walking shall proceed as follows:
  1. Anyone may enroll. To enroll, you need not do anything. You are enrolled.
  2. Anyone may dis-enroll. No one cares if you dis-enroll. It's up to you.
  3. If you enroll, you should consider reading the two course texts: Charles Baudelaire's "The Parisian Prowler," and Bruce Chatwin's "The Songlines." These books are about walking. The first one is a key text in the flâneur movement. The second one is not. If you do not want to read these books, that's fine. No one cares. If you want to read other books, feel free. You may share the names of those books on the blog, or you can keep them to yourself. It's up to you.
  4. The course will run for one month, and will consist of reading (or not reading) the somewhat assigned books, and then going on four walks. You may choose not to walk if not walking suits you better than walking. Who are we to say.
  5. After each walk, you are invited to post your thoughts on the blog. We understand that you might forget to do this. Our policy on forgetting is to look the other way.
  6. What should you write about? Anything. We encourage you to be exploratory, discursive, randy, self-reflective, garish, philosophical, concrete, anything. We'll get you started, though, with four prompts, which you may choose to address or ignore completely.
  7. The blog will be ready to accept posts on July 6, 13, 20, and 27th. After that, however, the class won't necessarily be over.
You might have some questions about being affiliated with The No School University of School. We probably won't answer them. But we can say that we are operated by an actual instructor of higher education. This instructor has taught quite a few classes over the years, but would rather read a couple of books and go for 4 walks. You are invited to join in. So begins The No School University of School.

Welcome to having to do what you want.

7 comments:

Walser and Company said...

"I have to report that one fine morning, I do not know any more for sure what time it was, as the desire to take a walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street." Walser, THE WALK

Josh Bolton said...

I am "signed up" for this university. Books were ordered, but are exceedingly delayed in their arrival. Otherwise, I walked by myself to the edge of a small pond two days ago. And then the next day--yesterday--I went and swam in the lake.

B.B. said...

People may be interested to know that the famous Romanian-Jewish-American singer, Art Garfunkel, is an avid walker. He walked across North America in a number of trips over the years, and hired an assistant to drive him to the next motel at the end of the day. If the nearest motel was ahead of him rather than behind, he very scrupulously insisted on closing his eyes so he wouldn't see anything from a car. Then, the next morning, his assistant drove him back to the spot where he stopped walking the day before, Garfunkel's eyes still closed. Once on foot, he'd look at the scenery again. He's now walking across Europe in sections.

Check it here:
http://www.artgarfunkel.com/poems/america/walk.html

Unknown said...

I gobbled up 100 pages of "The Songlines" last night. I am ready to go Walkabout right now! Went for a beautiful seven mile walk around Crystal Springs Reservoir (a few miles south of San Francisco) on Saturday, with a dramatic sky of fast moving clouds and fog. Followed that up with a rich wooded stroll through a Redwood-infused forest on Sunday in Woodside (a little further south). The air had the pleasant aroma of lingering morning campfires, from the grassfires raging in a wide ring around the Bay Area.

Catherine Lacey said...

Werner Herzog once said, "The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot."

B.B. said...

Herzog, as always, knows his feet. Thanks, Lacey. Sorry I didn't see your comment sooner. This blog has been in a resting state for a good long time. But who knows.

B.L.S. said...

I can see I am ten years late to this simple yet profound ambulatory learning experience. Nevertheless, in the same spirit of respect for the learner’s process with which it was originally designed, I have decided henceforth to enroll.

Maybe there is a roundness to the fact that almost exactly ten years have passed. I do hope, with all the innocence of a child dancing for the camera and waiting for applause, that I can still get credit for it. I am sorry to have missed the opportunity to develop mutually inspiring relationships with my classmates. Still, I do not eliminate the possibility that I could incidentally set off a No School University of School revival.

Why have I decided to enroll in this class? (I have also decided that I should answer this question, as instructors often prompt such reflection at the beginning of a semester, and I can see that I may need to be my own instructor here.)

First, I am enrolling because I miss school. Or perhaps what I miss is being able to contrast Not Being in School with the School-ness of life. You see, I thought that upon completing my formal education, I would have more time to wander carefree through the meticulous and heartbreaking details of the world, bending the structures that would contain these details until they blow and twirl in the breeze, like an Alexander Calder sculpture (http://www.calder.org/). As it turns out, the not-school part of life is more like school than school is, yet it is harder to put your finger on it and resist it. It is harder, when there is no school as such, to wriggle free of school-ness and go leaping into soft, dark nights and strident, dewy mornings as you laugh (or weep) at your freedom from Schools and Universities. In short, I have found very little time for the kinds of soul-filled activities of Not Being in School that the No School University of School proposes.

Second, I am enrolling because the course focus is fundamentally supportive of my core values, which include the value of walking everywhere you can as often as you can, and the practice of loving attentiveness. At the same time, it challenges my habitual actions, which include allotting only certain amounts of time to walk, and driving for the sake of efficiency even when it’s not absolutely necessary to drive, all of which reflect my self-defeating tendency to attempt to control the wild flourishing of life. I believe that any good educational experience should do both of these things: support and challenge us.

Third, I would like to know how No School University of School, as a “we” or an “I,” whichever it may be, has fared over these past ten years in their quest to live out this deep practice of walking in no-school-ness. I hope that if you are willing, you will share with me in turn.

I plan to loosely follow the dates of the original curriculum for both my walks and my reflections. I may just be writing into a void, but even if so, I trust that the song of my walking will not be lost.