Accelerated, asynchronous, divergent learning trajectories.

‘Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest star – our energy-supplying mother-ship, the Sun – is ninety-two million miles away, and the next nearest star is one hundred thousand times further away. […] Our little Spaceship Earth is right now traveling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun and is also spinning axially […]. That is a whole lot of spin and zip’, writes Richard Buckminster Fuller (1969).  ‘Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship’.

‘Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth’, continues Fuller, ‘and that is that no instruction book came with it.’ Nevertheless, generation after generation, young Earthians join the crew with no choice other than to trust the orientation classes received from those who arrived here just a few decades earlier… What should their orientation classes be like? Where are the instructions to be sourced from? We have the seemingly safe choice of sourcing the training structures from the ways in which we ourselves used to be trained. But is this choice really all that safe for the ones we teach?

Between the care for the life and future of a single young individual and the big-picture perspective of taking care of the Earth, there is a vast expanse. The challenge that our Buckminster College set out to undertake was to systematically question and evolve our educational practices in the prism of this expanse—and to dare to grow! We wanted to responsibly reinvent the educational affordances for the formative years of human adolescence. As a first step, we undertook an interdisciplinary research project and unleash our creativity in novel enrichment and adventure formats. Simultaneously, we were preparing to launch an ambitious secondary school project suitable for young people whose learning styles and needs demand interdisciplinary big-picture thinking and require a psychologically savvy holding environment. The general idea of the project was that cognitive development in adolescence must be supported (and indeed boldly inspired!) along accelerating, asynchronous, and divergent learning trajectories. The aim was good attunement to complexity: the complexity of the world — and the complexity of the mind. The underlying theoretical and philosophical approaches were sourced from interdisciplinary research in the domain of pedagogy of individuation and thriving in the complex, uncertain, open-ended world. Behind the project was an international group of academics affiliated with the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) of the Free University in Brussels (VUB) and instructors of the Postgraduate School of Thinking VUB.

Our activities started in November 2021, with an adventure and enrichment programme, The Ravens’ Bead Theorem. In 2023-24 we were organising a Springbok Trajectory: an interdisciplinary part-time secondment to be combined with a regular school. These programmes have concluded because our plan to establish a full-time school did not come to fruition. As often happens in life, we did not secure the necessary financial resources. Without them, our Buckminster’s Flying Castle could not fly sustainably. Flying castles are somewhat simpler to navigate than our Spaceship Earth, but they share a lot of characteristics, too. To keep on flying, they must be sustainable long-term.

The game is not over, however. Far from it! Our Buckminsterians have discovered that there are no passengers here; everyone is a navigator. Buckminster’s Flying Castle has entered the Self-Organization Era, and our Great Hall has become the Great Pirates Zone. Have you ever visited Buckminster’s Flying Castle? Joined any Buckminster activities? Want to collaborate with your peers on something new? Find the Great Pirates Zone at the Castle and take it from there, if you dare. Your move! The Buckminster College aisbl awaits your claim if you need an administrative engine for your next great plan. For that, Sieben the Registrar, now hereby nominated new 💫Provost, and Arjen the Registrar may have the knowledge you need. Will the new keeper of the Buckminster Owl join forces with them? Will anyone care for the Roostery? Who will be the new Enchanteresse? How many Players from the House of the Golden Goblet, the House of the Blue Frog, and the House of the Perennial Red will find the third dimension unlocking Buckminster’s Flying Castle in 3D? Will the three Ladies of the Golden Thread be joining? Will the Springbok Orchestra play ‘Learning to Fly’ one day? And will they publish the third episode of Spaceship Navigation? Meanwhile, the retired Legendary Principal has passed all her prerogatives to the former Praeceptŏr Theātrī Magicī, Orion, now hereby nominated new 💫Principal. But how does a new Principal reign over a castle in the Self-Organisation Era? Everybody can hear what happens next with their own ears, if pointy enough…

In his already seminal talk, sir Ken Robinson says: ‘My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.’ Creativity and the pursuit of knowledge are two wonderful human gifts that must always be cultivated together and intertwined. What we had hoped to achieve in our programmes, was to invoke in our learners a spirit of adventure, exploration and pursuit of knowledge. Where the future is the vast ocean of the unknown hiding both unimaginable treasures and perils and where the sciences and technology are the powerful vessels and navigation tools that will carry them into open horizons as far as their imagination can go – to infinity and beyond… We couldn’t say it better than how this forward thinker Buckminster Fuller has already said it in his inspiring ‘Great Pirates’ allegory (1969):

I call these sea mastering people the great outlaws or Great Pirates-the G.P. ‘s simply because the arbitrary laws enacted or edicted by men on the land could not be extended effectively to control humans beyond their shores and out upon the seas. So the world men who lived on the seas were inherently outlaws, and the only laws that could and did rule them were the natural laws-the physical laws of the universe which when tempestuous were often cruelly devastating. […] Their battles took place out of sight of landed humanity. Most of the losers went to the bottom utterly unbeknownst to historians. Those who stayed on the top of the waters and prospered did so because of their comprehensive capability. That is they were the antithesis of specialists. They had high proficiency in dealing with celestial navigation, the storms, the sea, the men, the ship, economics, biology, geography, history, and science. The wider and more long distanced their anticipatory strategy, the more successful they became.

Crescere Aude, Buckminsterians!