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Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations.
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
The Buckminster Game is an English-speaking, educational enrichment and adventure programme for teenagers from all over the world. The duration of the programme spans over nine consecutive months, consisting of weekly online sessions on Saturdays (1,5h) and three short residential periods in Bruges, Belgium (3-5 days each).
The educational objective of the programme is to equip our Players with a set of mental models, emotional capabilities and attitudes, cognitive habits, social skills, and intellectual foundations that will prepare them for individuation and thriving in the complex, uncertain, and open-ended reality. The programme is particularly beneficial for fast and challenging learners: for young people whose unique learning styles and interests demand interdisciplinary big-picture thinking and require a psychologically savvy holding environment. To learn more about our underlying philosophy and approach, please see the Buckminster Concept page.
The Ravens’ Bead Theorem
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Every morning, a powerful ancient wizard used to send his two ravens to fly over the world and report back to him. Every evening, the ravens would come back, sit on his shoulders, and whisper the news. One raven, who was also the wizard’s own mind, did all the remembering. The other, the wizard’s thought, would always bring an idea that has never been thought before… ‘They fly each day over the spacious earth’—sang their master when the birds were gone—’For the Thought I fear lest he come not home, but for the Mind my care is more’.
And indeed, one summer evening, just as the wizard feared and as you might have guessed, the ravens did not return. Something entirely different happened instead, elsewhere, and to someone who would have never expected that two birds might fly into her small attic room and give her a message to the world.
What to make of this story and was it even real? Nobody today can tell. Only the eldest people of Bruges still remember Erica and her strangely coloured bead. Sometimes they seem as if they were ready to tell you her story, but then they suddenly turn silent–and only keep smiling to themselves…
About the Game
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The Game was organised between November 2021 and February 2023, engaging 18 Players, 20 Faculty members, countless imaginary characters, even more birds, multiple strangely entangled plots, one Flying Castle, and the whole city of Bruges. The programme is already concluded and, as many good things in life, is unlikely to ever reoccur…