What is it?
Nobody knows!
Cooerwull Academy is a work in progress, along a path that will be made in the walking thereof. “A walking contradiction, partly fact and partly fiction”; simultaneously extinct and extant, tangible and intangible.
Its antecedent is Cooerwull Academy, Bowenfels, terminated in 1916 by its trustee, St. Andrew’s College within the University of Sydney. Surviving DNA from that lost species is being combined with a host species Synapse Institute; with some gene editing and splicing to allow the new Academy to flourish in any environment.
Surviving DNA is the enduring spirit of the old Academy. On its closing, Headmaster Mr. W. Saunderson wrote “the boys were to remember that the school still lived. A school is not bricks and mortar. The boys themselves, and their traditions were the school.”
Coded in the hybrid chimeric genome is guidance to provide education of the highest order, in any and all areas of enquiry; leading to knowledge, self-knowledge, independence of thought, challenging and questioning assumptions, critical thinking, the realisation of individual potential and vision to create a better society.
The Academy has been instituted to honour those linked to the old Academy at Bowenfels, and the generations of thinkers dedicated to advancing awareness. Our program is informed by a need to hone cognitive attributes essential for us to flourish in a cultural environment being transformed by AI, as well as by government funding ideology currently undermining humanistic and creative areas of enquiry.
The scope of the Academy is unlimited: Transdisciplinary, innovative, collaborative, possibly transgressive and absurd, but pursued with intellectual rigour, involving conversational and collegiate exposition and critique; Socratic examination; dialogical, discursive, and dialectical methods; all conducted within a non-judgemental and empathetic ambience.
Formats for the Academy’s activities are determined by circumstances and opportunities, and may include “conversational” programs, events, publications, exhibitions, performances and symposiums. They are premised on open-ended questioning, or in the words of poet Seamus Heaney, “staying alive in the question”.
Cooerwull Academy manifests materially as and when required
The Academy will embrace diversity and playfulness in pursuit of its objectives to advance critical thinking, thinking as a sensory pleasure, and art-thinking:
To provide opportunity for self knowledge and empathy
To enhance skill in critical thinking and intellectual enquiry
To develop and strengthen art-based cognitive processes
To flourish within paradox
To indulge in speculative rumination
To travel in polyvalent dimensions
To re-vision and transform the known
To pursue knowledge for pleasure
To move through knowledge to the other side.
To function as art.