Random Johnnies in Cambridge--and A Program which Shall Remain Unpublicized Here

The information session for Cambridge College program in the Humanities: I was late, but I made it. They seated me at the head of the table next to the Englishman whose idea this all was. Evidently the idea is to run a Johnnie-type program as part of an Education degree aimed at middle and high school teachers. It isn't clear how many people with "credentials" they will need; it was hemmed & hawed about. So it isn't clear that I can in fact work there. (It's difficult, too, because I'm currently trying to put off getting my Masters, since I will need money to live on next year. Though if they hire me, I'll have it. But I can't graduate until August at the earliest, so my credential would be an immediately impending Masters; that is, if I decided to pass 2 exams in May.) There was one person who looked familiar--a big lionlike man with a beard whom I've sure I've seen at events at St. John's before. At the end, the Englishman had us read out loud the opening 2 pages of The Republic, and then as a group try to determine the seating chart. Some talk followed about the origins of sitting in circles for educational purposes versus sitting in rows (the giving of grades was attributed to a frustrated Cambridge tutor impressed by the quality control stamps at a shoe factory).

He said something very epistemologically beautiful: that the facts we learn in school, when we are just learning facts, are "ungrounded," and it's not until we have a text in front of us that what we learn is grounded.

(I had just been puzzling over how naturalizing anything goes with agreeing that we are always in the middle of whatever it is; naturalizing turns practices into facts, and thereby places us outside of them.)