The School of Life

The classes you actually wanted to take in college, or how to master coolness while munching on a caramel bar.

We’re always thrilled to discover creative ways of organizing information in a novel educational experience and never omit to rave about it. Today, we’re particularly excited to uncover an educational social enterprise that aims to address the fundamental needs of the modern self.

In London’s Bloomsberry, between hairdressing saloons and restaurants — the location is an accidental metaphor for where true wisdom is found — sprouts a small, old-fashioned shop with a sign that humbly reads “The School Of Life.” Founded in September 2008 by an eclectic group of London writers, artists and friends, amongst whom the philosopher Alain de Botton, it offers night classes on a variety of topics with the unifying goal to satisfy its students’ hunger for a more meaningful life. For £30.00 and three hours of your evening, you could contemplate whether being single really is the end of the world in How Necessary Is A Relationship, find out what the mysterious virtues of coolness are in How To Be Cool, or learn to reduce the superficial chit chat of your life in How To Have Better Conversations.

The classes are centered around traditional lectures using various tools and resources, from movies to books and art to active discussions to humor. The school also offers additional weekend activities, daily curated bookshelves (selections vary from How To Enjoy Your Own Company to For Those Feeling the Credit Crunch), conversational menus (prompting you to ponder why you haven’t achieved your goals), and Sunday secular sermons, from Alain de Botton on pessimism to Barbara Ehrenreich on optimism to Ruby Wax’s brilliant, hilarious and insightful On Loving Your Ego. Oh, and Milk-Chocolate Coated Caramel bars, of course.

Most importantly, unlike the competitive and often cold atmosphere of traditional university education, The School Of Life offers the comforting environment of a community of people gathered not to memorize facts, evaluate each other or impose dogmas, but to help understand, explore and improve each other’s lives. Because, as Alain de Botton puts it:

The point of learning is not snobbery, not sounding clever, not passing an exam — it’s to help you live.”

Teddy Zareva is a young filmmaker and photographer currently located in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is prone to excessive dancing and impulsive traveling. Her favorite activities are eating chocolate, hunting for music, and shooting humans.

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Frames of Reference: Clever Vintage Film Makes Physics Fun

Saying that reality is merely a matter of point of view may be a tired truism. But illustrating it with irreverence and ingenuity can be utterly original. Such is the case of Frames of Reference, a lovely example of how cross-disciplinary creativity, blending architecture, design and cinema, can make physics tremendously more fun and digestible. The fascinating film released by the University of Toronto in 1960 utilizes ingeniously placed furniture and a rotating table to demonstrate how we make sense of space and motion.

All motion is relative, but we tend to think of one thing as being fixed and the other thing as being moving.”

The clever cinematography by Abraham Morochnik is part Hitchcock, part Lynch, part dorky Discovery Channel scitertainment — and totally brilliant.

You can download a hi-res version of the film over at the Internet Archive.

via Coudal

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60-Second Lectures: A Tapas Bar of Academic Insight

Consciousness, the unknown and why your childhood aversion to math is finally validated.

Last week, we featured BBC’s 60-Second Ideas to Improve the World podcast and it reminded us of a fantastic project from the University of Pennsylvania, our alma mater, called The 60-Second Lectures. Every semester for the past four years, the university has been inviting leading faculty to share their ideas on topics as far-ranging as poetry, pottery and political science in one-minute microlectures.

From obvious but necessary reality checks to aha!-inducing , the lectures offer a tapas bar of academia’s most compelling cultural insight. Today, we’re inviting you to sample them with five of our favorites.

PETER STRUCK ON THE UNKNOWN

Hope, fear, hubris and humility, after all, are aftereffects of the unknown. And if I need to face fear in order to make hope possible, I’ll take that bargain any day. In short: Give me ignorance, please, let me not know!”

TUKUFU ZUBERI ON CONFLICT

We have killed each other because of differences of religion, race, class, geography, wealth, education, to mention a few of the more contemporary justifications. These justifications are all based on ideas that we create.”

DENNIS DETRUCK: DOWN WITH FRACTIONS

I have a simple suggestion when it comes to teaching fractions in elementary school: Don’t. Imposing the study of fractions on kids does much more harm than good by replacing confidence and understanding with confusion and memorization.”

GINO SERGE ON WRITING NONFICTION

The important thing about writing a nonfiction book is you have to choose your story carefully and make sure it has good characters in it because you’re going to be spending a couple of years, at least, with these characters — and you better like them, you better be interested in them. Otherwise, it’s really a drag.”

SUSAN SCHNEIDER ON CONSCIOUSNESS

An explanation of consciousness cannot literally be that there’s a mind’s eye in the brain watching the show. And there’s no evidence that there’s a singular time or place in the brain where consciousness congeals — thoughts seem highly distributed throughout the cortex. So what, and when, and where is consciousness? And, for that matter, why are we conscious at all?”

(While we’re big proponents of asking the right questions, if you, like us, were a little disappointed that Schneider didn’t actually define consciousness, we have you covered with three people who did — see our recent troika on what it means to be human.)

For more micro-interestingness, explore the 60-second lecture archives or sample some more recent talks on YouTube.

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BBC’s 60-Second Ideas to Improve the World

From BBC World Service comes 60 Second Idea to Improve the World — a wonderful podcast inviting global thought leaders to propose simple, radical ideas for the betterment of humanity, followed by a short discussion in a forum of equally esteemed guests.

Part microincubator for innovation, part peek inside the minds of mavericks, the series is a lovely reminder that big ideas can indeed come in small packages.

From Clay Shirky‘s call for nudity as an environmental measure to philosopher Roman Frigg‘s push for a national Break The Routine day, the 60-second ideas burst onto your mental space as cheeky pranksters, only to peel away the layers and reveal the thoughtfulness of post-modern pragmatist-philosophers.

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