The School of Exception
see our manifesto | vision | keywords
these notes are intended for use in writing future funding applications
(1) The Big Context
As the global meta-crisis is a super-wicked problem we cannot expect to find clear or obvious solutions. Nor can we depend on governments to face up to the enormity of the situation. They are susceptible to manipulation by special interest groups and prefer to make small incremental reforms rather than to apply measures that could change whole paradigms. It is ironic that the UK government sees the university system mainly as a driver for 'economic growth'(★), given that so many students and universities are experiencing financial hardship. We therefore applaud UNESCO's vision of the university system as a potential agent of change.
(2) Our Vision
- We envision the future University system as an Indra's Net of local 'Micro-Schools'.
- Tuition would be free of charge (i.e. repayable on completion or pay-it-forward).
- It would act collectively as a citizen-led framework of micro-local initiatives.
- It would welcome exceptionality rather than standards or commonalities.
- Learners would develop their personal situated awareness and presence.
- Learning would follow the learner's curiosity and creative aspirations.
- It would emphasise team-learning rather than educating individuals
- There would be less need for a top-down curriculum or syllabus.
- A diversity of diversities would inspire a synergy-of-synergies.
- Some unthinkable ideas would be seen as opportunities.
- New forms of creative democracy would emerge.
(3) Our Aims
Inspired by UNESCO's vision we aim to offer applicants a radical alternative to the prevailing model of university education. This will foreground creative and co-creative thinking. WHY? The current economic order is still based on the logic of extraction (e.g. oil, mining and AI) which inevitably work according to the Law of Diminishing returns. Creativity offers society a Law of Increasing Returns. (See our forthcoming article on Co-Creation).
Subject to funding we will run the first pilot Saturday class from September<?> to September<?> 2027.
- Our aim is to help learners
- to value exceptions
- to think more creatively
- to manage their curiosity
- to learn how to learn better
- to redefine wisdom in their own way
- to think beyond disciplinary boundaries.
- to contribute to the survival of our species
- to manage their career ambitions and options
- to value learning via the Head (e.g. critical thinking)
- to value learning via the Hand (e.g. manual skills / dance)
- to value learning via the Heart (e.g. emotional understanding)
- to value learning with Humour (e.g. ability to play / make mistakes)
(4) A learner-centred summary
- What is it?
- an experimental part-time foundation course
- Who is it for?
- What's its point?
- What would I learn?
- How would I learn this?
- Who designs the syllabus?
- Where would it be located?
- How much would it cost me?
- When will the course take place?
- What about my specialist knowledge?
(5) What is a University?
(5a) Unmixed Messaging
What we might recognise as a 'mainstream' university has its roots in Ancient Greece and elsewhere. It was only after the Coldstream Reports of the 1960s that British Art Schools were formally absorbed into the University system. While the two systems may appear to have coalesced at the organisational level (e.g. when ratifying grades in joint Examination Boards) their ideologies have yet to be reconciled. This is a missed opportunity for learners and society as a whole. One obvious cultural difference is how creativity is understood and applied. For example, whereas scientists traditionally tend to seek predictable ‘laws’ of Nature, artists are more likely to look for exceptions rather than norms and rules (Ljubec 2022).
(5b) The University's 'DNA'
The traditional University evolved from the mediaeval monastic culture of books. As this still remains the dominant paradigm for higher education it may be hard for many of us to imagine The University without the primacy of alphanumeric writing. Ironically, although the Latin word 'universitas' implies a fully comprehensive syllabus, the first European University (1088) was a cloistered environment designed for priests to study the written and oral arts of theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic and the law. At this time, books were revered for their rarity. It was before the advent of printing, and the need to copy texts painstakingly by hand may explain some of the idiosyncracies of scholarly writing practice that linger on in the modern classroom. Some stylistic conceits, such as consistency, comprehensiveness, detachment, explicitness and completeness, remain, even though their purpose may be inappropriate for many contexts. (c.f. Panofsky, 1968).
(5c) The Art School
Today's Art School system owes less to the book-oriented traditions and more to mediaeval crafts guilds rather. Loosely speaking, scholarship was part of a 'truth-centred' and contemplative culture. By contrast, the Art School offered a more hands-on, situated and co-creative culture of being, doing and making. The hegemonic status of the book explains the long-held disregard for Art Schools as an inferior mode of education. It was therefore widely assumed that the Coldstream Reports (Ministry of Education, 1960; Department of Education and Science, 1970) insisted on granting honours degrees to art and design students only if a written component was included in the Art School syllabus. Art school heads therefore began to recruit ‘complementary studies’ lecturers who were au fait with the arcane conceits of 'scholarly' writing (Raein, 2004). However, there is no mention of ‘writing’ in the Coldstream report, therefore writing has never been a mandatory component within honours degrees (Lockheart, 2018; Lockheart, 2016). This almost universal oversight is an indicator of the lack of attention given to the Art School legacy. As Sir Ken Robinson says, we have learned nothing from the last few hundred years of University education.
- "Conformity continues to triumph over individuality. Curriculums are still arranged in tiers, with mathematics at the top and the arts at the bottom." (Robinson, 2026).
Now that neurodiversity across society is belatedly becoming valued as a natural asset for humanity as a whole, the reconciliation of Art School and Mainstream University pedagogies now has become an imperative.
(5d) What is the Purpose of Universities?
What began as a lofty Socratic pursuit of self-awareness, altruism and moral development has descended into expedient concerns for institutional brand value, attainment targets, and assessment procedures. After 1945, education in the UK was made free for all. This gave less privileged learners a greater chance to reach their full potential. Affordable tuition fees were introduced in 1998, but increased to £9K over the following decade or so. With it came a Quality Assurance culture in which concerns for accessibility and fairness risked eclipsing the idea of learning for its own sake. As students could now regard themselves as paying customers, exam grades acquired an inflated importance . Unfortunately, this is likely to create anxiety and unlikely to encourage better learning outcomes. (Chamberlin et al., 2023).
- "If the purpose of education is to score well on a test, we've lost sight of the real reason for learning."
- (Richard Feynman)
A recent report★ predicts that, over the next 5 years, one in six 16-24 year olds are likely to become 'NEETS' (neither in training, further education or job-seeking). It attributes this partly to the way we educate young people. Some believe that universities lost touch with their primary purpose long ago (Hitz, 2019) and that the financial causes are recent.
(6) 100% Human Creativity
Until recently, most of our political leaders were products of a classical education. They were steeped in the fact-based logic of history, philosophy and in the ancient arts of rhetoric and debate. Many had been taught the dogmas of macroeconomic theory but had not acquired the creative skills to reinvent them. The system seemed viable when politics was characterised by codes of decency, ballot boxes and the rules of law. Today, however, a few authoritarian leaders and tech oligarchs are 'gaming the system' with the aid of digital toolkits. Some believe that their tools are influencing, or even contaminating the human values that underpin social relationships, how we learn, and what we mean by 'learning', 'education', 'qualifications' and 'learning'. Meanwhile, revolutions in cognitive science and digital engineering had begun to challenge traditional distinctions between 'education' and 'training'; 'knowledge' and 'information'; 'information' and 'data'. As generative AI systems became freely available to all, universities had an opportunity to reconsider their long-term purpose and to reinvent their modus operandi accordingly. Instead, they chose to embrace AI on a 'wait and see' basis. As a result they have become impotent bystanders in an arms race between the artificial simulators of learning and the gadgets designed to detect them (c.f. Wood, 2024, AI v. Ecological Wisdom).
(7) Teams and Creativity
(see 'genius'). Arthur Koestler's term 'bisociation' is based on the assertion that all creative thinking is combinatorial. Here, several seemingly incompatible frames of thought are forced together to produce a creative leap that may surprise all. This challenges the myth of the lone genius. If acts of creation are always co-located, 'co-creative acts' might equally well derive from different regions of one brain, or from different individuals within a group.
(8) POSSIBLE Workshops
Outlines of suggested workshops (yet to be agreed with the relevant parties)
(9) Our Methodology
We will draw upon some of our previous methods in metadesign. Although it emerged from a specific academic subject (i.e. design) it was conceived as a generalised superset of the subject. Where professional design is a methodology for shaping individual products, services or strategies, metadesign is a creative framework for re-scoping design itself. We describe it as an emerging framework of practice intended to enable designers to create, behavioural paradigms (c.f. Wood, 2024).
We will apply and, where helpful, adapt or reinvent metadesign tools.
(10) Some Unique Features
10 a) S E L F
We invented our Self Evaluated Learning Framework in 1992 to help learners to manage their predicament and options in a creative way. From the learner's perspective it makes plagiarism futile and hard to achieve.
What is it?
- It is a simple mapping tool that helps you to navigate your situation/predicament.
What can it do for me?
- It can help you to create options and opportunities you may not have otherwise noticed.
Will it answer my questions?
- No, but it will ask you some important questions you might have overlooked.
Aren't Answers more important than Questions?
- Not always. It's true that fact-based questions need correct answers.
- But SELF doesn't do this for you (sorry - that's your responsibility).
- We think it may help you to answer VALUES-BASED questions.
Does it harness the power of AI?
ChatGPT versus Gradescope
- No - it was created by actual humans with actual humans and for actual humans.
- ...and AI only scavenges the left-overs of nameless people.
- AI can't think or feel in the human sense. It has no heart, limbs, or soul.
- so your conscience cannot be converted into a LLM (Large Language Model)
- Because only YOU know how you feel at any given moment.
- Only YOU know if something feels right / wrong / creepy, etc.
- YOU are the one with the imagination, so you need to do the creative thinking.
- SELF encourages to ask yourself outcome-seeking questions.
- The same applies to opportunity-seeking questions.
- Both are highly dependent on your actual situation, values & bigger context, etc..
What Do You Want the SELF framework to do?
- Please choose one of these options:
- A) Write a summary/essay/report about your work.
- B) Write a pitch for someone you'd like to work with/for.
- C) Write a pitch for someone you'd like to work with.
(10 b) 4H
Our holistic approach to acknowledges individual differences between learners. We therefore created a fourfold model that reconciles head, hand, heart and humour. Used in conjunction with the Self Evaluated Learning Framework it should help individual learners to developing their metacognitive sense of themselves. It will mean encouraging learners to apply critical skills of reasoning to their lived experiences and ethical views. It will mean valuing the tacit skills of knowing, sensing, doing and making as aspects of one's judgment that build a sense of moral compass. We will encourage playfulness and humour as a way to embrace failure as a vehicle for unexpected opportunities and fun. We will conduct immersive experiments in ecological awareness or set philosophical quests for 'unthinkable possibles'. We will value compassion and altruism whilst helping learners to prepare for paid employment.
(10 c) Genius v. Wisdom
There are political and pragmatic reasons why universities should develop new methods of co-creativity. Enlightenment thinkers created a new excuse for exceptionalism when they popularised the idea that creativity is the exclusive hallmark of an exceptional individual. In today's competition between egalitarianism and strong leadership, a claim to genius can easily be harnessed as a bid for status and power. It is therefore useful to those who crave power without accountability. However, some research into (creative) 'genius' suggests that it naturally exists in pre-school children, but is steadily depleted by rigorous testing and specialist teaching that is standardised for reasons of 'fairness' over relevance. In an era when ecological thinking is increasingly important, it seems strange that dictionaries still define wisdom in such stridently humanistic terms. It is also customary to attribute wisdom to individuals, rather than to groups. We will therefore encourage our learners to reinvent it on a continuous basis. Where claims to genius tend to be invoked as an excuse for unilateral action, our notion of Wisdom calls for flat-structured teamwork.
Further Reading
- Chamberlin, K., Yasué, M. and Chiang, I.C.A., 2023. The impact of grades on student motivation. Active Learning in Higher Education, 24(2), pp.109-124.
- Wood, J. article about creativity and Art Schools)
- Hitz, Z., 2019. Lost in thought: The hidden pleasures of an intellectual life. Princeton University Press.
- Humphrey, N., Curran, A., Morris, E., Farrell, P. and Woods, K., 2007. Emotional intelligence and education: A critical review. Educational Psychology, 27(2), pp.235-254.
- Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S. and Auld, G., 2012. Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change. Policy sciences, 45(2), pp.123-152.
- Biely, Katharina, 2024, Paradigm changes in research: Kuhn meets socio-ecological transition theory,