The Uncommon School.

“It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are, indeed, so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.” Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

A gathering of humans. Starting with ideas from readings about how we organize in society, we gather and talk about ideas. Over the span of a few days, we touch into the ideas, and then do what humans do: we work together. At Copper Beech Farm, we have been (loosely, uncuratedly, spontaneously…) building a timber frame cabin as we consider the ideas from the lineage of political philosophy that has lead to us-here-now.

Past schools:

UC 1 May 28-June 1, 2018: from Thucydides to St. Augustine.

Pericles Funeral Oration

Sappho

Cicero

UC 2: December 5-8, 2018: from the Magna Carta to the US Declaration of Independence

The Magna Carta, excerpts. A conversation lead by Ingrid Brunk.

the Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A conversation lead by Jeff Edmonds.

The Declaration of Independence, early version (Jefferson).

UC 3: February 13-17, 2020: From the US Constitution, through Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and judicial reasoning.

Upcoming schools:

UC 4: October 28-November 1, 2026. From the present moment forward, what is WORK, bureacracy and the nature of personhood? Who leads, who governs?

Do we have a right to meaningful work? Listen to Angel Evan in this brief podcast talk about what John Rawls thought.

Is language alive? Are we witnessing the jump of language, something that perhaps parasitized humans around 50,000 years ago in the cognitive leap, and is now leaping from us to AI? Listen to Yuval Noah Harari talk about it in July 2026.

How about this piece about amateur wrestling from Roland Barthes…

And a favorite of mine, a podcast you’ll never hear played around me because I reserve it for my alone time, is Philosophize This!‍ ‍

As we move towards gathering, I pause to reflect on 9/11/26. My oldest Ava was just over 2 months old. I was working at UVa hospital in an outpatient clinic. It was just after the first patients were brought back for the 8:30 appointments. The waiting room televisions became our beacons. As our country faced, naïvely I might add judging by our surprise when the second tower was hit, the reality of being penetrated by an enemy, the world order hoped for by liberal democratic structures was being shaken.

For a moment, I felt like the United States was unified in our national identity. This might be the last time I felt something like this that had been, prior to this common but becoming less so. Apparently the Bush approval ratings a few months after 9/11 reached 90%, an all-time high for any President of the United States.

As we entered a new era, some of the themes from Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal democracy emerged in our present reality. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” (Schmitt, 1922. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty). Consider the Bush administration’s foreign affairs actions post 9/11, in this historical review from The Miller Center.

Where do you stand on the idea of liberal democracy? Is the identity of global multiculturalism possible? Is Schmitt’s Friend/Enemy unavoidable?