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

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.