1 Beginning in the Middle Ages, the traditional fields of the liberal arts were defined from classical studies in order to reveal obscured meaning in the text, symbols, doctrines, icons and mysticism of the Church. The ancient seven branches of learning included grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. All were means of deciphering the hidden codes of the Biblical text.
Since the Renaissance and its enlightenment, the core of this traditional education held that all area of human endeavor are suitable topics for inquiry, regardless of their nominal concerns. An integrated individual versed in the liberal arts loves learning and is directed by intellectual curiosity, rather than by disciplinary guidelines.
The Renaissance dawn from the a priori methods of the Dark Ages revealed the various facets of diverse fields and the common rays of humanism's enlightenment. Educators such as Vittorino de Feltre of Mantua taught men to be well-rounded individuals. In his boarding schools, princes and poor scholars mixed in a classical education. Character was shaped, along with the mind and body, through frugal living, self-discipline, and a high sense of social obligation. All was done with an eye to the practical: philosophy was a guide to the art of living, along with training for public life. "Students were expected to excel in all human existence."
2 Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 1995).
3 Davis, 181.
4 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988): 87-91.
5 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree Books, 1934, 1980):7.
6 Dewey, 16.
7 Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985)
8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the nineteenth-century thinker, is said to have been the last man to have known everything. This fact was remarkable for two reasons: first, there was much less accumulated human knowledge at that time, and second, Goethe's capacity to retain even this. Today, the genius of Goethe is suplanted by the convenience of the ability to communicate to all knowledge.
9 "As a photographer, I don't caer about photography, and have always been irritated with those who are concerned exclusively with f-stop and stop bath. For me, it is the communcation of idea to another that holds the true excitement. Photography is merely a means to an end, and if I could achieve that end in another way, I certainly would." Jonathan Lipkin (1993) One Family's Journey, MFA Thesis, School of Visual Arts, New York.
10 Jay Bolter, Writing Spaces (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erbaum Associates, 1991). Here Bolter traces the history of the effects of technology on writing. He discusses the book, the scroll, the pictographic and logographic alphabets. The computer is seen as merely the next step in long series of technological advances that interact with the culture of time.
11 Ibid.
12 Charles H. Traub "The Creative Interlocutors: A Creative Manifesto." Leonardo, Vol. 30, No 1 (MIT Press, 1997) 389-390.
13 Moholy-Nagy supported our notion of genius in his description of education at the new Bauhaus (Institute of Design) by structuring education there to place emphasis on "integration through a conscious search for relationships artistic, scientific, technical as well as social. The intuitive working mechanics of the genius give a clue to this process. The unique ability of the genius can be approximated by everyone". From New Education, p. 9. See also Minsky's reference to Papert's principle.
14 Steven Levy, "Wisecrackers." Wired Magazine (March 1996): 128.
15 MIPS is short for millions of instructions per second, a measure of computational power. A MIPS year is the amount of computing power produced in a year by a computer capable of a million instructions per second.
The Renaissance dawn from the a priori methods of the Dark Ages revealed the various facets of diverse fields and the common rays of humanism's enlightenment. Educators such as Vittorino de Feltre of Mantua taught men to be well-rounded individuals. In his boarding schools, princes and poor scholars mixed in a classical education. Character was shaped, along with the mind and body, through frugal living, self-discipline, and a high sense of social obligation. All was done with an eye to the practical: philosophy was a guide to the art of living, along with training for public life. "Students were expected to excel in all human existence."
2 Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 1995).
3 Davis, 181.
4 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988): 87-91.
5 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree Books, 1934, 1980):7.
6 Dewey, 16.
7 Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985)
8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the nineteenth-century thinker, is said to have been the last man to have known everything. This fact was remarkable for two reasons: first, there was much less accumulated human knowledge at that time, and second, Goethe's capacity to retain even this. Today, the genius of Goethe is suplanted by the convenience of the ability to communicate to all knowledge.
9 "As a photographer, I don't caer about photography, and have always been irritated with those who are concerned exclusively with f-stop and stop bath. For me, it is the communcation of idea to another that holds the true excitement. Photography is merely a means to an end, and if I could achieve that end in another way, I certainly would." Jonathan Lipkin (1993) One Family's Journey, MFA Thesis, School of Visual Arts, New York.
10 Jay Bolter, Writing Spaces (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erbaum Associates, 1991). Here Bolter traces the history of the effects of technology on writing. He discusses the book, the scroll, the pictographic and logographic alphabets. The computer is seen as merely the next step in long series of technological advances that interact with the culture of time.
11 Ibid.
12 Charles H. Traub "The Creative Interlocutors: A Creative Manifesto." Leonardo, Vol. 30, No 1 (MIT Press, 1997) 389-390.
13 Moholy-Nagy supported our notion of genius in his description of education at the new Bauhaus (Institute of Design) by structuring education there to place emphasis on "integration through a conscious search for relationships artistic, scientific, technical as well as social. The intuitive working mechanics of the genius give a clue to this process. The unique ability of the genius can be approximated by everyone". From New Education, p. 9. See also Minsky's reference to Papert's principle.
14 Steven Levy, "Wisecrackers." Wired Magazine (March 1996): 128.
15 MIPS is short for millions of instructions per second, a measure of computational power. A MIPS year is the amount of computing power produced in a year by a computer capable of a million instructions per second.
