Your Chance to Help Save Gutenberg

Photo Credit (via Francois Truffaut)

I would highly suggest you check out savegutenberg.com. Read below to find out why:

Are you dissatisfied with conventional modern education? Worried that most schools are failing to equip people with the intellectual tools required to be good people and good citizens? Maybe you have noticed that most modern education is designed primarily to produce passive consumerist serfs, and are looking for a way to break free from this pattern of cultural disintegration and instead, broaden the horizons of your mind and soul. Maybe you want this for your friends or children?

In most of the world, education is trending toward fragmentation and specialization. At higher levels, it is often devoted specifically to some narrow occupational training. This has contributed to a culture incapable of critical thought and doomed to repeat the forgotten mistakes of the past. We can see the results of this around us every day in the insane dominance of corporations in the food and agriculture industries, the ignorance of health care professionals, and many other things you may already aware of if you're on the alternative food wagon. 

Gutenberg College, a 4-year Great Books
Liberal Arts College, in Eugene, OR

Fortunately, its not like this everywhere. There is a school called Gutenberg College who's sole mission is to help individuals develop the education and intellectual skills necessary to think for themselves. Gutenberg is a very small Great Books college located in Eugene, OR. They award one degree - a BA in Liberal Arts - which is based a rigorous four-year study of western civilization. The classes are intimate and discussion-based. And being a Great Books school means that the entire curriculum is based on primary texts - the original works of the most influential thinkers in western history. Instead of specialization, Gutenberg's curriculum encourages a well rounded and holistic approach to learning.

Below is a sampling of the reading list at Gutenberg:

Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus, Lucretius, Matthew, Corinthians, Acts, Galatians, Plutarch, Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Copernicus, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Galileo, Kepler, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Newton, Defoe, Swift, Voltaire, Thomas Reid, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Austen, Federalist Papers, Constitution, Schopenhauer, Hawthorne, de Tocqueville, Feuerbach, John Stuart Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Marx, George, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, James, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Joyce, Aldo Leopold, T. S. Eliot, Keynes, MacIntyre, Galbraith, Hayek, Ellul, C. S. Lewis, Solzhenitsyn, Kuhn, Francis Schaeffer, Flannery O’Connor, Kafka, Foucault, et al

After four years of such intimate learning and questioning in the constant company of their classmates, students often form profound and long-lasting friendships. For many students, Gutenberg is a life-changing experience.

Maybe you find it hard to believe you haven't heard of this place before! Well, it's not easy being a tiny, counter-cultural liberal arts college, especially in a university town! While U of O builds a 42 million dollar stadium down the street, Gutenberg often struggles to make ends meet financially.

In fact, Gutenberg is considering closing its doors. And to help prevent this from happening, they are trying to raise $250,000.

If you are as interested in helping take back education from the technocrats for the sake of preserving one of the few real liberal educations still available in the US, please support the cause, and tell everyone you know about about Gutenberg!

For more info, see: savegutenberg.com

This post was co-written by my husband Clayton, a fellow Gutenberg graduate.