Another chance to talk about New School history - what turned out to be the only faculty-led session at "family weekend." Scheduled in the very pleasant but very non-classroomy Faculty Lounge, I had to do without visuals but this turned out fine. The organizers promised an experience of a New School class, so I put the good people who showed up to work in groups interpreting and then updating the 1918 "Proposal for a New School of Social Science for Men and Women." Thinking of the who, what, where, when, why and how of the "Proposal" gave us a template for thinking of the future New School: Who, what, where, why, how is demanded today? (Between those assignments we had a crash-course in how The New School came to look so completely different from what its planners envisioned, and why that frees us to think boldly about how its future might need to be different again.) We didn't have heaps of time - five minutes in groups, and five minutes to hear from all the groups (!) - but it was enough to get some rich suggestions for creating an accessible, diverse and idealistic space that nonetheless prepares students for a non-ideal world riven by misogyny, racism and xenophobia... This is unpretty 2025, after all.
At the end, it being 2025, I also thought it only fair to bring in what I'd advertised on my schedule as a "surprise guest" - Claude, my AI of choice. Given the same prompt I'd given them, it came up with an impressive list of reasons for new thinking (including "AI disruption"!):
You need to know that this is how the writing of most college essays starts these days, I quipped, exaggerating perhaps less than I thought I was. There's nothing wrong with using the best tools available to you, I added, but even our short time together today showed what AI can't give you: the reality that human meanings are many, and that we learn best and think most creatively when engaging with diverse others. The small group pedagogy which has always characterized The New School is perhaps even more urgently necessary today. A little pat, but what the occasion demanded!
Chatting afterward with some parents, including the parents of one of my students (who was there too), I found myself building a whole pedagogy out of going on tangents - something AI can't give you but something our students do very well indeed. I always start with Dewey's idea that we only really absorb new knowledge if we can connect it to knowledge and concerns we already have, but today it seemed that it's precisely in tangents that we see that connecting happening.
And it's not just about how individuals learn. The magic of a seminar or discussion-based curriculum is that you get to see other people making connections with the same new knowledge you're grappling with, which might lead you to course-correct your tangents, and will also surely set you off on new tangents together. AI definitely can't do that!
The only thing better than this social dance of tangents would be if you could do it in a structured way and more than once, engaging other new things together - perhaps once or twice weekly for a semester? What a community this would be - and of course the more accessible and inclusive the better. Would it prepare students for success in a frightened and suspicious world reeling from algorithmically charged atavisms? It shows there are alternatives...
