THE GAUNTLET:
ARMOR OF GUERRA OR GARDEN ATIRE?
"let them hammer their swords into plowshares, and never train for war anymore.""never again" paul the sixth.
"no more war" boy George.
How much education do you really desire, instead of simply how much can you afford?
We throw down a gauntlet not just "can you pay the two hundred grand" but "do you really want an education in love?
We know that education is a business proposition, and that trustees only want the administration to be wealthy so that they look good..we know this.
The university of california for example may be forced by the government to require ethnic studies.
No student should be forced to know how to treat each other..we should desire to know.
But desire comes from the heart, and the heart needs education too.
but how much does the heart cost, what is it worth if we no longer have to experience violence, and what does this mean for society at large?
Why would we throw down the gauntlet in a figurative sense and send potential guests on a quest to discover the Green Man?
Is this not juvenile, fantastical and ridiculous?
Here is our line of reasoning.
One reason is, education is a quest, and a searching after wisdom, far more than a simple business contract or passive ingestion of information.
Only with this in mind can we confront the global issues that threaten our existence.
In fact the abandonment of certain medieval unities has proved to be detrimental to our mental health, social health, and ecological health even if the billionaires are richer today than they were yesterday.
This is why the leopard while teaching at a community college (where incidentally the teachers were told what to do if a shooting occured, and where she was stalked by a mentally unstable boss who again, had an ivy league education but obliged her to eat at restaurants with him, where he sometimes came unhinged then , and whose wife was bipolar and whose nephew was stowed away in the woods so that no one would no he was deranged.) When her loud phone calls in sicilian dialect with organized crime did not deter him, she finally had to accept the protection of a tough looking student with massive tattoos on his back to avoid romantic involvement with the boss--used to say "A word on attendance: no teacher should have to say this: you are paying for this and if you don't come, and you still get a degree, hten you can say you paid for the degree..but its' your loss and the loss of your fellow students and the loss to society in general.
The green man is a symbol of hte ancient unity of the garden, which reminds us of who we are: a tribe, not political agendas in carnate.
A professor of Philosophy who was a big fan of hte Socratic method, told a tale of another professor who on the first day of class, would simply sit in silence.
When someone asked, is this philosophy 101 he would answer simply, yes it is.
This began the dialogue between professor and student, that discussion that is so necessary to communication and mutual understanding.
to use an example of the socratic method whcih is even more deeply phenomenological, and which comes from everyones understanding,let's take the Fellowship, a quest in the grand medieval Arthurian sense.
While the Fellowship of the ring was not a formal school, it was very much a school all the same. The participants were drawn into it by exigencies over which they had no control--ie, the destruction of the world through the ring.
ANd the popularity of this "quest style education" speaks for itself. We want our schooling to have some greater meaning beyond a paycheck, and if that doesnt happen, we start to get "bored" (a word originating in France after the revolution did away with the Sacred Heart).
Hogworts of course which is probably as brazen a mashup of the fantasy genre as you could wish for, and which may or may not have been written by a witch, uses the school model explicitly. The readers are drawn into a school without ever registering.
If hogwors is the witch king of angmar's private academy as some fundamentalists believe, the witch king did a pretty good job of bombarding the target audience.