When
Where? or When? situate lived experience
(To be revised)
Actually, Where? includes When? and When? includes Where? Combined, they situate lived experience, what was, is, or will be taking place. Verbs of actualizing — to happen, to take place, to become, and all their synonyms — have greater significance for thinking and acting than the verbs of being — to be — however overused we may find verbs of being in current speech. To say that X is Y establishes nothing substantive; it merely recognizes an identity between a conceptual subject and a conceptual object. To express where and when taking place, we situate it in lived experience, the stuff of life.
As a lived experience, study starts as we sense our ignorance or incapacity, as we wonder about some mystery, or as we intuit some possibility, and study emerges as we apply intelligent effort to what might assuage, satisfy, or realize the condition we experience. As complex humans, we experience much to occasion our study, many situations to engage us in it, many resources to sustain and further it. If occasions for study pervade our lived experience, why should we build a special place for it? If each person can and should study for themselves, why should we concentrate attention on it here, our own attention and that of anyone else who might become interested? What takes place here, where and when we visit or reside in A Place to Study, beyond the possibilities that arise in any here and now in which study might occur?
To answer these questions, observe how, for many generations, people the world around have established special places within the school of life where instruction can take place through the concentrated practice of teaching. A place of instruction is a place where the art of teaching takes place. What is it that connects to study, as teaching connects to instruction? Let's respond:
To incite stands to study, as to teach stands to instruction.
On a place to study, we incite study; we urge or spur it on; we stir it up, we animate, instigate, stimulate it. A place to study is a place where we abet, arouse, encourage, excite, exhort, foment, goad, induce, inflame, inspire, motivate, prompt, provoke, rouse, spur, and urge ourselves and others as active agents of study. It behooves us to design the situations — where and when — to incite all this activity and effort to take place with care, commitment, and art.
- Study nodes — This page will be added soon.
- Study groups — A group will incite the self-formation and liberal learning of its members by supporting their distinctive, personal efforts as each expresses her own ideas and aspirations, tries to transcend her habitual routines, and develops her chosen possibilities.
- Study pages — Like the traveler's guide book, study pages inform a student's choice, particularly the initial choices to attend first to this and not to that..
- Study skills — Study requires intellectual skills, the roots of culture — speech, reading, writing, symbol and sign. Like well-used scythes, these need recurrent honing.
- Quick study — We construct lived experience with a diversity of timescales, and a lively mind will find food for thought in short bits — a quick observation, a powerful aphorism, a passing example, or some words of wit.
- Our library — A Place to Study is not a library, but we have one, starting small and imbalanced, to which we add materials, believing they may have special value to those seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons, eventually approximating a collection adequate to our purposes. Our current list.
- Studios — Each resident on A Place to Study has a personal work area to support their study, self-formation, and liberal learning. These work areas are important components of A Place to Study as a whole, spaces in which residents can develop and present their views about what they are doing and why they are doing it.