Black Mountain College — a visionary paradigm of learning we need to revisit

I’m not an educator, nor do I have kids in school.

But throughout a long career in tech, I’ve consistently been the Liberal Arts majorin a room of technologists tasked with understanding how new platforms of tech touched people’s behaviors in ever-evolving cultures of work and play.

My advantage was not literacy, it was literacy grounded in an eclectic multidisciplinary approach to learning as a framework for creative thinking and problem solving.

I had the good fortune to participate in an experimental undergrad experiment at Ohio University that was built on the Black Mountain College curriculum and educational ideals.

A belief that the arts exists as the expression of our behavioral and cultural uniqueness represented through an intermixing of human expression. An idea that in arts and life, you needed diversity of thought and form.

It was an experimental, short-lived program built on this then bold idea.

I didn’t just study Hart Crane, but also Antonin Artaud to understand the gestalt of the theatre as a reflection of a parallel world of expression through poetry.

I didn’t just learn to appreciate the creation of new forms of movement in Merce Cunningham’s approach to dance, but also its connection to Philip Glass’s restructuring of sound in his hearing of what music could be.

I was challenged to find the connection between Buckminster Fuller and his livable shapes and the crazed brilliance of Charles Olson as a philosopher poet and his offshoot of disciples like Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley and Jack Spicer.

Today, we are obviously at the cusp of a completely shifting world. Literally everything is in flux and every discipline is being leveraged and catapulted to fluid new forms.

Community itself is finding a rebirth as a new type of market reality on the blockchain. Token economies are being built as a tangible representation of social value expressed through transactional gestures. Nutrigenomics as a codable baseline of our health itself is redefining aging and the very nature of work.

Smart cities are reconceptualizing how the culture of hyper density can be both the cause and the answer to our ecological dilemmas.

And wellness, mindfulness and transformative technologies are being understood as something that is equally as disruptive as drone delivery systems or autonomous transportation.

This is truly it — the time– I think.

The largest opportunity in my lifetime. Larger certainly than the virtual revolution we all worked on bringing our world online two decades ago.

This is change where tech and science will literally recode our world on our very streets we walk on and in each of our bodies genetic maps.

Black Mountain College was a bold idea on a napkin in a coffee shop that had a brief blip of existence.

It was short lived, burned bright and went away. Pundits see it as part of an interesting but failed experimental educational moment. They are wrongx.

The vision of cross pollination, the instinct that to build better buildings we need to understand the soul of the community that live in them is exactly right.

To create art that naturally expresses our need to harness freedom of movement from dance, resonance of sound from music and unshackled thinking where concrete philosophies can be encapsulated in a phrase that can resonate cross a world flattened in time and space.

The reality of today is that it has already happened. Or maybe the limits of tech and science are begging for this human factor with not only arts but architecture, open space planning and community building to surface as needed missing links.

To incorporate driverless cars into our urban areas, we need to rethink the grid of how the very cities we live in are structured and experienced by the people that live there.

To incorporate new platforms of work, we need to compartmentalize our psyches, being equally able to design and control machines to do our bidding while embracing expression and diversity in all of us.

We need to re-up our support of a redefinition and broadening of what arts are at the same levels that we have lionized our business and tech gurus. We need heroes in all of these areas on the same dais, together as the epitome of who we can be collectively.

We have all grown up in the entrepreneurial world stripping away distractions to learn focus as a prerequisite to drive success. This makes sense as that is how you move mountains and reroute our lives.

But now, with the possibilities of new platforms for work, for currency, for transportation, we need to reengage with this idea that interdisciplinary is simply an acknowledgement of needed interdependence. A needed building block in a more varied stack of capabilities.

A coworking, codependent amalgamation that incorporates all of these elements to make a better and more workable whole.

That today, unlike back then at Black Mountain, tech through software and community and new forms of connections are part and parcel of who we are culturally.

The circle here is not closing, it’s opening. A Mobius Strip of sorts, maybe exploding rather than reconnecting.

I’m all in on this.

All in where tech makes possible the leisure time and the tools to entertain and plumb the emotional depths of who we are.

When I travel around, I am blown away by the expressiveness of what we are beginning to build.

I am also aware that tech or even science alone is only part of a true solution.

We have a model or maybe an inspirational ideal in what Black Mountain College was about at its multidisciplinary core.

It isn’t a working blueprint certainly, but it is true that what those early visionaries could only imagine, we have simply inherited as the status quo of possibilities that is here to be made our own.

I’m in to be part of this in some way.

Anyone else?