Sophianic Pedagogy in the Era of the Polymath:
Cultivating Interdisciplinary Innovations in Higher Education, Values, and Finance
December 21, 2024 8 AM — 3 PM PST Free & Live on Zoom
Introducing Our Inaugural Academic Conference!
Focusing on the exciting innovations in higher education and associated concerns our school champions, this conference is also an opportunity for us to introduce our core faculty, contributing scholars, and all-woman leadership team.
Statement of Purpose
On the one hand, it seems important that an enlightened society comprised of adequately educated freethinkers should come into being now because only such a society is empowered—philosophically, psychologically, and emotionally—to meaningfully correct the course of human evolution toward the light of truth, love, and beauty.
It is, however, not an exaggeration to observe that the world of higher education, particularly in America, has become a convoluted tangle of bureaucracy, political discord, ballooning student debt, overworked faculty, unmitigated inequity, and misaligned value systems that do not ultimately serve the higher purpose of learning: free inquiry.
Students and teachers alike are subjected to economic and other pressures that undermine what by rights ought to be joyful, provocative, and wisdom-enhancing learning experiences. These problematic pedagogical conditions have a direct result on the quality of society as a whole and affect collective experience in myriad ways.
Wishing to be part of the growing movement of innovators addressing these issues, we are celebrating our first birthday with a free interdisciplinary conference in which we hope to come together and midwife a Sophianic Renaissance in higher education, offering practical solutions and posing vital questions. Together, we will explore questions like: "Why do we go to school in the first place?" "Out of what type of philosophical ground should wisdom-based pedagogical models grow?" and "How (and why) can we forge innovative pathways to financing both the wisdom-based education of the global student body and the ground-breaking institutions that are bringing this type of education forward?"
To this end, our leadership team and core faculty will give presentations to reflect our visionary and groundbreaking partnership-based approach to liberating learning from outmoded pedagogical, financial, and bureaucracy-driven imperatives. Focusing instead on a model centered on partnerships between executives, professors, administrators, students, and patrons, Kosmos Institute aims to incorporate diverse perspectives and foster dynamic coalitions among those similarly inspired to accelerate the path of change.
Suppose you are interested in joining us on this revolutionary quest. In that case, we encourage you to attend the conference to learn more or get in touch to explore ways of deepening your involvement with the virtuous circle of innovative thinkers we hope to forge, in keeping with our collaborative ethos to inspire future change.
We will also be launching our newly enhanced series of comprehensive curricula for the 2025-2026 school year and beyond.
Schedule
8 AM
Welcome
Conference Overview; New Website & Enhanced Curricula; Faculty & Staff Introductions; First Speaker Introduction
9 AM
Paper (20 mins)
Gelareh Khoie, PhD
Introducing Kosmos Institute—Why I Started This School
For over twenty years, I have dreamed of opening a “school for the poetic arts,” a kind of training academy growing out of beauty and truth created for students who wish to go beyond the dry academic systems of traditional higher education into a style of pedagogy with a spiritual dimension capable of infusing rigorous academic study with experiential wisdom. Having spent the last ten years in higher education obtaining two MAs and a PhD, I came away from the experience with the distinct sense that the time had come for this school to come into being. In this talk, I will explain my deeper purposes for starting this school and discuss the steps I have taken during the first year of operation to meet these objectives.
9: 20 AM
Discussion & Break (40 mins)
10 AM
Second Speaker Introduction
10:10 AM
Paper (20 mins)
Adina Bezerita, (FRSA)
Classical Ideas and Modern Practice: Towards a New Model for Higher Education and Finance
We may have glimpsed into the philosophical vision, but do we have the means, policies, and resources to support innovation and transformation in higher education? Platonic thought emphasizes decoding the causes of human problems to find real-world solutions to enable our flourishing (eudaimonia). In The Presocratics, Philip Wheelwright writes about Protagoras's "profession of expertise" and business principle to charge a fee in exchange for education, regardless of students' circumstances. In response, Socrates exposed his sophistry (Plato, Sophist) and explained that holiness is in 'right giving and receiving' (Euthyphro 14d, trans. Reginald E. Allen). What we can draw from classical ideas is that our modern academic system is an outgrowth of sophistry, not philosophy. Thus, we need adequate policies to enable us to invent a new, sustainable, and evolving financial structure and model for higher education, crafted by the Logos, to recalibrate economic access and provision to promote human excellence (arête) towards the realization of the Self.
10:30 AM
Third Speaker Introduction
10:40 AM
Paper (20 mins)
Roula-Maria Dib, PhD
Pygmalion's Awakening: Redefining Knowledge through Arts-Based Research
The myth of Pygmalion offers valuable insights into how arts-based research challenges conventional modes of learning: Pygmalion creates Galatea, initially viewing her as separate from himself. However, he later realizes she embodies his psyche and the world around him. Similarly, arts-based research dissolves the separation between creator and creation, rejecting the subject/object divide that often dominates conventional research and pedagogy. Where traditional methods treat art and creativity as external objects to study, arts-based research sees them as dynamic vehicles for knowledge generation. By unifying the learner with the subject matter, it reshapes the relationship between artist and craft, creator and creation, into an interconnected system. This approach transcends traditional research's boundaries, fostering a holistic process of knowledge-making that bridges the gap between the knower and the known. Arts-based research thus challenges and redefines what it means to "know."
11:00 AM
Fourth Speaker Introduction
11:10 AM
Paper (20 mins)
Sephora Markson, M.T.S., Exec. MSC.
From the Temple of Learning to the Home of the Soul: Reclaiming the "Hier" of Higher Education
The hero's journey has never been for the faint of heart. From the archetype of "The Fool" to the perils of the path to Ithaca, like Odysseus, anyone who dares to cross the threshold of discovery risks an encounter with new wisdom from which they will be unable to return to the hearth of the home they remember—the patterns of the sense-making self with which they are familiar. In venturing to learn something new, the comforts of certain memories are necessarily abandoned; a new home for the soul will need to be built.
This sacred journey, the path of learning—what we might consider the drawing out of the sacred (from hier, or sacred, and educere, or drawing out) — is intrinsic to an interpretation of the meaning of "higher education." However, it could be argued that the higher education of our time has evolved into a hierarchy of knowledge, a system of exclusion. In response to this, how might we envision a model of education that reclaims and re-centers sacred unfolding as the portal of Sophia, to which every human being is entitled by birthright?
11:30 AM
Discussion & Break (60 Minutes)
12:30 PM
Keynote Presentation (60 mins)
Daniel Polikoff, PhD
Sophianic Pedagogy in the Era of the Polymath
The concept of polymathy finds its most familiar expression in the ideal of the "Renaissance man," the individual (man or woman) who embodies a whole universe of competencies—practical as well as theoretical—in their person. In keeping with the defining feature of the Renaissance era, the ideal is an essentially humanist (rather than theistic) one, reflecting what Pico della Mirandola, in his famous oration, called "the dignity of Man." Correspondingly, in its original conception, a "university" was a place that offered students the opportunity to cultivate, through a diverse course of study, the intellectual, affective, and moral virtue inherent in the very ground of their distinctively human being.
Despite the outworn trope of "liberal education," the instruction offered at universities today is typically grounded in a STEM-dominated world view that explicitly repudiates this tradition and—on account of the ethical void thus created—invites the pervasive politicization of the project of knowledge. The deleterious consequences of this shift are written all over the face of the globe.
How did we get from there to here? And how might we (like those trailblazing Renaissance magi and artists) reclaim and renew a heritage that envisions "higher education" as a schooling in truth, beauty, and human freedom? What might qualify as the integral elements of such a pedagogy, and how might these be peculiarly "Sophianic" in nature?
1:30 PM
Discussion (45 mins)
2:15 PM
Closing Video, Thank You’s, End of Conference
