Some Interesting Educational Experiments

Here's a UPenn professor with ideas about how to shake up education (NY Times). First, a class based on monastic practice:

On the first day of class — officially called “Living Deliberately” — Justin McDaniel, a professor of Southeast Asian and religious studies, reviewed the rules. Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him. . . .

The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men; women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.) Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,” Sophie Ouyang, who also took the class and just graduated with a major in nursing, said. “We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”

And then this, which really intrigues me:

Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair: Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and José Saramago’s Blindness. Then they stay up late discussing it. “The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad; in the middle they’re sad; they stay sad.”

As this article notes, many more professors are trying to reach students through their phones, with class Discord channels and what not. But McDaniel's anti-tech classes both have long waiting lists.

There is among some students a hunger for old-fasioned education, cut off from the world, intensely diving into intellectual activity. I don't know how many students would want a whole college like that, but I think many more would sign up for a taste of it if it were offered. Those one-month short winter terms some schools offfer seem like perfect opportunities for this; what about a one-month philosophy retreat focusing on one topic like personal ethics? Or, following McDaniel, a one-month immersion in difficult novels? Or poetry? Or how about a six week monastic retreat over the summer? I see a lot of possibilities here.