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A Place to Study is NOT . . . .
- NOT an encyclopedic project. Like an encyclopedia, A Place to Study consists in part in an extensive collection of culturally valuable assets. But people interact with its collection, not to acquire impersonal knowledge, but to further their self-formation and liberal learning, aspiring to a personal understanding of themselves and their circumstances.
- NOT a formal educational institution. We grant no certificates, diplomas, or degrees; we charge no tuition or fees; we have no instructors or professors; we set no curriculum, prerequisites, or admission requirements. People come to study on their own initiative, striving towards their own fulfillment. All are welcome — novice, expert, and everyone in between.
- NOT a collection of on-line courses or test prep. We do NOT provide tutoring or a trot correlated to typical courses or curricula, high school or college, and we do not charge subscription fees to students, families, teachers, schools, or organizations. Persons come here, not to jump through the hoops of advancement, but to find and fulfill their unique capacities measured as each sees fit.
- NOT a library or a museum, in the ordinary sense. Here we build collections of text, documents, and other things, and provide an online workspace, but with a somewhat different spirit — less to avail our collection to a general public and more to facilitate its collaborative use advancing self-formation and liberal learning among interested persons.
- NOT a self-help or how-to site. We are NOT a resource for finding specific answers to explicit questions or help in acquiring specific skills, although we provide a listing of Self-help & how-to sites. One comes here to expand, diversify, deepen, and control the questions, to figure out what it is that one does not know.
- NOT a subordinate to a sponsoring organization. We don't generate revenue for corporate owners. We don't cater to a special demographic, we broker no commercial exchanges, and we hype neither celebrities nor influencers. We are an autonomous, collaborative community of peers seeking to find and fulfill our humane purposes and and meaning.
A Place to Study serves those who. . . .
We are those who study as persons seeking to form ourselves and learn liberally in the digital commons. We work through our first-person awareness of life, as we respond aspirationally with the ever-diversifying self-awareness of the seeker finding a way through life. In this sense, "Who are we?" evokes many responses, among them. . . .
- We are those who, through good fortune and hard effort, have benefited highly from formal instruction and enriching experience.
- We are those who, through adversity and inadvertence, have not benefited from formal instruction and enriching experience.
- We are those, advanced in age, having enjoyed the perks of the system, who worry that it can no longer nurture the values and abilities that drew us to it.
- We are those who feel consumed by the stresses of high consumption, and wish to assert, "Enough!"
- We are those who prefer the examined life to the packaged life, and those who want to start examining packaged lives that are failing to deliver on their promise.
- We are those who are young in years or spirit and who want to sustain consistent, meaningful purpose through the complexity of circumstance.
- We are those who see the admission of ignorance as the threshold of wisdom.
- We are those who recognize ourselves as spanning both advantages and adversities and work to realize our possibilities without taking pride in the advantages or feeling resentment at the adversities.
- We are those who see ourselves as unique variations on a common theme and wish to realize that uniqueness for the benefit of all.