The Allure of Puzzlement: Pretty Much Pop #34 w/ Adal Rifai on Escape Rooms and Other Puzzling Pastimes

The com­ic and the trag­ic are well-estab­lished modes with­in enter­tain­ment, but what about the puz­zling? Rid­dles may have been a chief pas­time in days of yore (well, they’re fea­tured in Oedi­pus and The Hob­bit, any­way), but does this way of being enter­tained have a place in today’s age of mass media?

Impro­vis­er and pod­cast­er Adal Rifai joins Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss his love of escape rooms, rid­dles, and oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for puz­zle­ment. We dis­cuss lat­er­al vs. algo­rith­mic think­ing, group dynam­ics, com­par­isons to impro­vi­sa­tion and triv­ia, rid­dle types, video games, and more. Some puz­zle-rel­e­vant films we touch on include Escape Room, Cube, The Game, and Mid­night Mad­ness.

Some resources we used to pre­pare include:

Adal’s two oth­er pod­casts are Hel­lo From the Mag­ic Tav­ern and Sib­lings Pec­u­lar. Fol­low him @adalrifai. He per­forms reg­u­lar­ly on Whirled News Tonight at Chicago’s IO The­ater.

Every Pret­ty Much Pop episode includes bonus, post-episode dis­cus­sion, and this time Adal stayed around for a lit­tle more on escape rooms (can they engage all five sens­es?) and quite a bit more on pod­cast­ing, includ­ing the paraso­cial rela­tion­ships that lis­ten­ers may have with pod­cast hosts. This was suf­fi­cient­ly fun that we’d like to share it with all of you, in hopes that you might then want to hear this for all our our episodes by sup­port­ing us at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.

This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast (prettymuchpop.com) is curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

See How Traditional Japanese Carpenters Can Build a Whole Building Using No Nails or Screws

If it came down to it, most of us could ham­mer basic shel­ter togeth­er with enough wood and nails. But what if we just had the wood? And what if we need­ed to make not just a hut, but a full-fledged build­ing: a liv­able house, or even a house of wor­ship? That may well sound like an impos­si­ble task — unless, of course, you’ve trained as a miyadaiku (宮大工), the class of Japan­ese car­pen­ter tasked with build­ing and main­tain­ing build­ings like shrines and tem­ples. With­out a sin­gle nail or screw, miyadaiku join wood direct­ly to wood — a method of join­ery know as kanawat­su­gi (金輪継)  — and in so doing man­age to build some of the world’s longest-last­ing wood­en struc­tures, just as they’ve done for cen­turies upon cen­turies.

Back when this style of car­pen­try first devel­oped in Japan more than a mil­len­ni­um ago, “it was dif­fi­cult to acquire iron.” And so “peo­ple tried to build build­ings only with wood,” mak­ing up for what they lacked in tools with sheer skill. So says Takahi­ro Mat­sumo­to, a miyadaiku car­pen­ter based in the city of Kamaku­ra, in the Great Big Sto­ry video above

Japan’s de fac­to cap­i­tal from the late 12th to ear­ly 14th cen­tu­ry, Kamaku­ra is still filled with Bud­dhist tem­ples and Shin­to shrines, some built more than 1,200 years ago. To build new tem­ples and shrines, or to pro­vide the exist­ing ones with the repairs they need every cen­tu­ry or two, a miyadaiku must mas­ter a host of dif­fer­ent­ly shaped wood­en joints, each of them devel­oped over gen­er­a­tions to hold as tight­ly and solid­ly as pos­si­ble.

For anoth­er view of kanawat­su­gi, have a look at The Join­ery, a library of explana­to­ry ani­ma­tions pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. You can see exact­ly how each of these joints are cut and assem­bled for real-life projects — as well as every oth­er aspect of how miyadaiku put togeth­er a build­ing — at the Youtube chan­nel Japan­ese Archi­tec­ture: Wis­dom of Our Ances­tors. The chan­nel is apt­ly named, for only with a high regard for the car­pen­try knowl­edge grad­u­al­ly built up, test­ed, and refined by their pre­de­ces­sors could today’s miyadaiku do their work. “Advanced skills are need­ed, but we work with the old build­ings built by our ances­tors,” says Mat­sumo­to. “Today, we also learn from the ances­tors’ skills, since the old build­ings them­selves are stand­ing doc­u­ments of those skills.” Each and every one tes­ti­fies to how, for want of a nail, some of the most admired archi­tec­ture in the world was born.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Meet the Liverbirds, Britain’s First Female (and Now Forgotten) Rock Band

We nev­er ever got as famous as the Bea­t­les. But we start­ed as friends, and we end­ed as friends. —Sylvia Saun­ders, The Liv­er­birds’ drum­mer

John Lennon (a mem­ber of a band who in a par­al­lel uni­verse might’ve been billed as the male Liv­er­birds) announced that the all-female quar­tet would fail, a deeply inac­cu­rate pre­dic­tion.

The band got a lot of atten­tion, toured with The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, dis­missed Bri­an Epstein when he pooh-poohed their desire to play in Ham­burg, reject­ed an offer to play top­less in Las Vegas, and were sought out by Jimi Hen­drix, owing to their bassist’s joint-rolling skills.

They also learned how to play the instru­ments they had opti­misti­cal­ly pur­chased after see­ing The Bea­t­les in Liverpool’s famed Cav­ern Club.

Respect to any grand­moth­er with brag­ging rights to hav­ing seen The Bea­t­les live, but it’s heart­en­ing that these 16-year-old girls imme­di­ate­ly pic­tured them­selves not so much as fans, but as play­ers.


As bassist and for­mer-aspi­rant-nun Mary McGlo­ry recalls in Almost Famous: The Oth­er Fab FourBen Proud­foot’s New York Times’ Op-Doc, above:

“Oh my god!” I said to my cousins, “We’re going to be like them. And we’re going to be the first girls to do it.”

Mis­sion accom­plished, in trousers and neat­ly tucked-in shirts, but­toned all the way to their col­lars.

It’s not ter­ri­bly hard to guess what put an end to their six-year-run.

Moth­er­ly, wife­ly duties…

Sylvia Saun­ders, who became drum­mer by default because sticks were a bet­ter fit with her small hands than frets, got preg­nant, and recused her­self due to com­pli­ca­tions with that preg­nan­cy.

Valerie Gell, the Liv­er­birds’ late gui­tarist and most accom­plished musi­cian, mar­ried a hand­some fan who’d been en route to Ham­burg to pro­pose when he was par­a­lyzed in a car acci­dent, devot­ing her­self to his care for 26 years.

The oth­er two mem­bers car­ried on for a bit, play­ing a Japan­ese tour with a cou­ple of female musi­cians they’d met in Ham­burg, but the chem­istry couldn’t com­pare.

The dream was over, but for­tu­nate­ly rock and roll star­dom was not their only dream.

Unlike the fourth Liv­er­bird, Pam Birch, who descend­ed into addic­tion after the band broke up, nei­ther Saun­ders nor McGlo­ry seems angry or regret­ful over what could have been, smil­ing as they men­tion their long, hap­py mar­riages, chil­dren, and grand­chil­dren.

They were awful­ly tick­led by Girls Don’t Play Gui­tars, a recent West End musi­cal that tells the sto­ry of the Liv­er­birds.

And McGlo­ry is admirably san­guine about Lennon’s famous diss, reveal­ing to the Liv­er­pool Echo that:

He had a smile on his face when he said it—he wasn’t being mali­cious. But it would have been nice to have bumped into him a few years lat­er and for him to say, “Well done, you proved me wrong,” which I’m sure he would have been hap­py to do.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Record­ings by Great Female Jazz Musi­cians

Ven­er­a­ble Female Artists, Musi­cians & Authors Give Advice to the Young: Pat­ti Smith, Lau­rie Ander­son & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s com­pa­ny The­ater of the Apes in New York City for her book-based vari­ety series, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, and the world pre­miere of Greg Kotis’ new musi­cal, I AM NOBODY., play­ing at The Tank NYC through March 28 Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch Scenes from Czarist Moscow Vividly Restored with Artificial Intelligence (May 1896)

In May of 1896, Charles Mois­son and Fran­cis Dou­bli­er trav­eled to Moscow on behalf of the Lumière Broth­ers com­pa­ny, bear­ing with them the new­ly devel­oped Lumière Ciné­mato­gaphe cam­era. Their pur­pose: to doc­u­ment the coro­na­tion of Tsar Nicholas II—the last Emper­or of Rus­sia, though no one would have known that at the time. The coro­na­tion was an extra­or­di­nary event, soon to be over­shad­owed by even more extra­or­di­nary events in the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary years to come. An enor­mous cel­e­bra­tion fol­lowed, with gifts, bread, sausage, pret­zels, beer, and a com­mem­o­ra­tive cup to rev­el­ers. The promise of these gifts led to what was lat­er called the Kho­dyn­ka Tragedy.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands descend­ed on the city. Rumors that food was run­ning short—and that the cups con­tained a gold coin—sent crowds rush­ing for the Kho­dyn­ka Field. Over­com­ing 1,800 police offi­cers, they caused a stam­pede that killed 1,389. That evening, Nicholas and the Empress Alexan­dra attend­ed a ball, then vis­it­ed wound­ed in the hos­pi­tal the fol­low­ing day. One of the Tsar’s valets, Alex­ei Volkov, who sur­vived the Rev­o­lu­tion and lived to write his mem­oirs, described walk­ing “along the Khondin­ka” and meet­ing “many groups of peo­ple com­ing back from that site and car­ry­ing the Tsar’s gifts. The strange thing, though, was that not one per­son men­tioned the cat­a­stro­phe, and I did not hear about it until the next morn­ing.”

The stam­pede seems a tes­ta­ment to the pover­ty and des­per­a­tion among ordi­nary Rus­sians at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. That his­to­ry does not enter the frame in the minute of footage shot by Mois­son and Dou­bli­er, which you can see recre­at­ed above in stun­ning detail—with both col­or added and in orig­i­nal black and white—by Denis Shiryaev. The footage is sim­ply dat­ed May 1896 and might have been shot either before or after the coro­na­tion. As Peter Jack­son has done with footage from WWI in the fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary They Shall Not Grow Old, Shiryaev makes the grainy, blur­ry past come alive with the help of an “ensem­ble of neur­al net­works,” as he writes on the video’s YouTube page.

The enhance­ments to the video trans­fer of the orig­i­nal film include:

1) FPS boost­ing – to 60 frames per sec­ond

2) Image res­o­lu­tion boost­ed up a bit with ESRGAN (gen­er­al dataset)

3) Resort­ed video sharp­ness, removed blur, removed com­pres­sion “arte­facts”

4) Col­orized (option­al) – due to high request I have decid­ed to include both ver­sions of the processed video: col­orized and black and white.

Boost­ing the frame rate to 60 fps espe­cial­ly gives these bustling and/or saun­ter­ing Moscow denizens of Tver­skaya Street a life­like appear­ance. (See here for a com­par­i­son of var­i­ous frame rates). Whether you pre­fer col­or or black and white, it may be easy to imag­ine strolling down this cob­ble­stone avenue your­self, dodg­ing the dozens of horse drawn car­riages pass­ing by.

It may be hard­er to imag­ine that per­haps days or hours before or after this slice of Moscow city life, the last tsar of Rus­sia was crowned, and a crowd of some­where around half a mil­lion peo­ple rushed through the streets for a glass of beer and a free bite to eat. See more of Shiryaev’s AI-assist­ed film restora­tions at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

How Peter Jack­son Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Doc­u­men­tary, They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Paris Had a Moving Sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison Film Captured It in Action

It’s fair to say that few of us now mar­vel at mov­ing walk­ways, those stan­dard infra­struc­tur­al ele­ments of such util­i­tar­i­an spaces as air­port ter­mi­nals, sub­way sta­tions, and big-box stores. But there was a time when they astound­ed even res­i­dents of one of the most cos­mopoli­tan cities in the world. The inno­va­tion of the mov­ing side­walk demon­strat­ed at the Paris Expo­si­tion of 1900 (pre­vi­ous­ly seen here on Open Cul­ture when we fea­tured Lumière Broth­ers footage of that peri­od) com­mand­ed even Thomas Edis­on’s atten­tion. As Pale­o­fu­ture’s Matt Novak tells it at Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine, “Thomas Edi­son sent one of his pro­duc­ers, James Hen­ry White, to the Expo­si­tion and Mr. White shot at least 16 movies,” a clip of which footage you can see above.

White “had brought along a new pan­ning-head tri­pod that gave his films a new­found sense of free­dom and flow. Watch­ing the film, you can see chil­dren jump­ing into frame and even a man doff­ing his cap to the cam­era, pos­si­bly aware that he was being cap­tured by an excit­ing new tech­nol­o­gy while a fun nov­el­ty of the future chugs along under his feet.”

Novak also includes hand-col­ored pho­tographs from the Paris Exhi­bi­tion and quotes a New York Observ­er cor­re­spon­dent describ­ing the mov­ing side­walk as a “nov­el­ty” con­sist­ing of “three ele­vat­ed plat­forms, the first being sta­tion­ary, the sec­ond mov­ing at a mod­er­ate rate of speed, and the third at the rate of about six miles an hour.” Thus “the cir­cuit of the Expo­si­tion can be made with rapid­i­ty and ease by this con­trivance. It also affords a good deal of fun, for most of the vis­i­tors are unfa­mil­iar with this mode of tran­sit, and are awk­ward in its use.”

Novak fea­tures con­tem­po­rary images of the Paris Exhi­bi­tion’s mov­ing side­walk at Pale­o­fu­ture, found in the book Paris Expo­si­tion Repro­duced From the Offi­cial Pho­tographs. Its authors describe the trot­toir roulant as “a detached struc­ture like a rail­way train, arriv­ing at and pass­ing cer­tain points at stat­ed times” with­out a break. “In engi­neers’ lan­guage, it is an ‘end­less floor’ raised thir­ty feet above the lev­el of the ground, ever and ever glid­ing along the four sides of the square — a wood­en ser­pent with its tail in its mouth.” But the his­to­ry of the mov­ing walk­way did­n’t start in Paris: “In 1871 inven­tor Alfred Speer patent­ed a sys­tem of mov­ing side­walks that he thought would rev­o­lu­tion­ize pedes­tri­an trav­el in New York City,” as Novak notes, and the first one actu­al­ly built was built for Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Expo­si­tion — but it cost a nick­el to ride and “was unde­pend­able and prone to break­ing down,” mak­ing Paris’ ver­sion the more impres­sive spec­ta­cle.

Still, the Columbian Expo­si­tion’s vis­i­tors must have got a kick out of glid­ing down the pier with­out hav­ing to do the walk­ing them­selves. You can learn more about this first mov­ing walk­way and its suc­ces­sors, the one at the Paris Exhi­bi­tion includ­ed, from the Lit­tle Car video above. How­ev­er much these ear­ly mod­els may look like quaint turn-of-the cen­tu­ry nov­el­ties, some still see in the tech­nol­o­gy gen­uine promise for the future of pub­lic tran­sit. Mov­ing walk­ways work well, writes Tree­hug­ger’s Lloyd Alter, “when the walk­ing dis­tance and time is just a bit too long.” And they remind us that “trans­porta­tion should be about more than just get­ting from A to B; it should be a plea­sure as well.” Parisians “kept the Eif­fel Tow­er from the exhi­bi­tion” — it had been built for the 1889 World’s Fair — but “it is too bad they did­n’t keep this, a sort of mov­ing High Line that is both trans­porta­tion and enter­tain­ment.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear the Sound of the Hagia Sophia Recreated in Authentic Byzantine Chant

Audio tech­nol­o­gy has made many excit­ing advances in the past few years, one of which enables record­ing engi­neers to cap­ture the sound of a spe­cif­ic space and recre­ate it else­where. Through a process called “con­vo­lu­tion reverb,” the sound of a con­cert hall or club can be portable, so to speak, and a band or group of singers in a stu­dio can be made to sound as if they were per­form­ing in Carnegie Hall, or inside a cave or grain silo.

Also being recre­at­ed are the sounds of goth­ic cathe­drals and Byzan­tine churches—acoustic envi­ron­ments being pre­served for pos­ter­i­ty in dig­i­tal record­ings as their phys­i­cal forms decay. This tech­nol­o­gy has giv­en schol­ars the means to rep­re­sent the music of the past as it sound­ed hun­dreds of years ago and as it was orig­i­nal­ly meant to be heard by its devout lis­ten­ers.

Music took shape in par­tic­u­lar land­scapes and archi­tec­tur­al envi­ron­ments, just as those envi­ron­ments evolved to enhance cer­tain kinds of sound. Medieval Chris­t­ian church­es were espe­cial­ly suit­ed to the hyp­not­ic chants that char­ac­ter­ize the sacred music of the time. As David Byrne puts it in his TED Talk on music and archi­tec­ture:

In a goth­ic cathe­dral, this kind of music is per­fect. It doesn’t change key, the notes are long, there’s almost no rhythm what­so­ev­er, and the room flat­ters the music. It actu­al­ly improves it.

There’s no doubt about that, espe­cial­ly in the case of the Greek Ortho­dox cathe­dral Hagia Sophia. Built in 537 AD in what was then Con­stan­tino­ple, it was once the largest build­ing in the world. Though it lost the title ear­ly on, it remains on incred­i­bly impres­sive feat of engi­neer­ing. While the struc­ture is still very much intact, no one has been able to hear its music since 1453, when the Ottoman Empire seized the city and the mas­sive church became a mosque. “Choral music was banned,” notes Scott Simon on NPR’s Week­end Edi­tion, “and the sound of the Hagia Sophia was for­got­ten until now.”

Now (that is, in the past ten years or so), well over five cen­turies lat­er, we can hear what ear­ly medieval audi­ences heard in the mas­sive Byzan­tine cathe­dral, thanks to the work of two Stan­ford pro­fes­sors, art his­to­ri­an Bis­sera Pentche­va and Jonathan Abel, who teach­es in the com­put­er music depart­ment and stud­ies, he says, “the analy­sis, syn­the­sis and pro­cess­ing of sound.”

Now a muse­um, the Hagia Sophia allowed Pentche­va and Abel to record the sound of bal­loons pop­ping in the space after-hours. “Abel used the acoustic infor­ma­tion in the bal­loon pops to cre­ate a dig­i­tal fil­ter that can make any­thing sound like it’s inside the Hagia Sophia,” as Week­end Edi­tion guest host Sam Hart­nett explains.

Pentche­va, who focus­es her work “on rean­i­mat­ing medieval art and archi­tec­ture,” was then able to “rean­i­mate” the sound of high Greek Ortho­dox chant as it would have been heard in the heart of the Byzan­tine Empire. “It’s actu­al­ly some­thing that is beyond human­i­ty that the sound is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate,” she says.” That mes­sage needs a larg­er-than-life space for its full effect.

Hear more about how the effect was cre­at­ed in the Week­end Edi­tion episode above. And in the videos fur­ther up, see the choral group Capel­la Romana per­form Byzan­tine chants with the Hagia Sophia effect applied. Just last year, the ensem­ble released the album of chants above, Lost Voic­es of Hagia Sophiausing the fil­ter. It is a col­lec­tion of music as valu­able to our under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of the art of the Byzan­tine Empire as a restored mosa­ic or recon­struct­ed cathe­dral.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Map­ping the Sounds of Greek Byzan­tine Church­es: How Researchers Are Cre­at­ing “Muse­ums of Lost Sound”

The Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Won­der­ful Case Study of How Land­scape & Archi­tec­ture Shape the Sounds of Music

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

A YouTube Chan­nel Com­plete­ly Devot­ed to Medieval Sacred Music: Hear Gre­go­ri­an Chant, Byzan­tine Chant & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

The Summerhill School, the Radical Educational Experiment That Let Students Learn What, When, and How They Want (1966)

Among the polit­i­cal and social rev­o­lu­tions of the 1960s, the move­ment to democ­ra­tize edu­ca­tion is of cen­tral his­tor­i­cal impor­tance. Par­ents and politi­cians were entrenched in bat­tles over inte­grat­ing local schools years after 1954’s Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion. Sit-ins and protests on col­lege cam­pus­es made sim­i­lar stu­dent unrest today seem mild by com­par­i­son. Mean­while, qui­eter, though no less rad­i­cal, edu­ca­tion­al move­ments pro­lif­er­at­ed in com­munes, home­schools, and com­mu­ni­ties that could pay for pri­vate schools.

Most of these exper­i­men­tal meth­ods drew from old­er sources, such as the the­o­ries of Rudolf Stein­er and Maria Montes­sori, both of whom died before the Age of Aquar­ius. One move­ment that got its start decades ear­li­er was pop­u­lar­ized in the 60s when its founder A.S. Neill pub­lished the influ­en­tial Sum­mer­hill: A Rad­i­cal Approach to Child Rear­ing, a clas­sic work of alter­na­tive ped­a­gogy in which the Scot­tish writer and edu­ca­tor described the rad­i­cal ideas devel­oped in his Sum­mer­hill School in Eng­land, first found­ed in 1921.

Neill’s school “helped to pio­neer the ‘free school’ phi­los­o­phy,” writes Aeon, “in which lessons are nev­er manda­to­ry and near­ly every aspect of stu­dent life can be put to a vote.” His meth­ods “and a ris­ing coun­ter­cul­tur­al move­ment inspired sim­i­lar insti­tu­tions to open around the world.” When Neill first pub­lished his book, how­ev­er, he was very much on the defen­sive, against “an increas­ing reac­tion against pro­gres­sive edu­ca­tion,” psy­chol­o­gist Erich Fromm wrote in the book’s fore­word.

At the extreme end of this back­lash Fromm sit­u­ates “the remark­able suc­cess in teach­ing achieved in the Sovi­et Union,” where “the old-fash­ioned meth­ods of author­i­tar­i­an­ism are applied in full strength.” Fromm defend­ed exper­i­ments like Neill’s, despite their “often dis­ap­point­ing” results, as a nat­ur­al out­growth of the Enlight­en­ment.

Dur­ing the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, the ideas of free­dom, democ­ra­cy, and self-deter­mi­na­tion were pro­claimed by pro­gres­sive thinkers; and by the first half of the 1900’s these ideas came to fruition in the field of edu­ca­tion. The basic prin­ci­ple of such self-deter­mi­na­tion was the replace­ment of author­i­ty by free­dom, to teach the child with­out the use of force by appeal­ing to his curios­i­ty and spon­ta­neous needs, and thus to get him inter­est­ed in the world around him. This atti­tude marked the begin­ning of pro­gres­sive edu­ca­tion and was an impor­tant step in human devel­op­ment.

What seemed anar­chic to its detrac­tors had its roots in the tra­di­tion of indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty against feu­dal tra­di­tions of unques­tioned author­i­ty. But Neill was less like John Locke, who includ­ed chil­dren in his cat­e­go­ry of irra­tional beings (along with “idiots” and “Indi­ans”) than he was like Jean Jacques Rousseau. Fromm sug­gests this too: “A.S. Neill’s sys­tem is a rad­i­cal approach to child rear­ing because it rep­re­sents the true prin­ci­ple of edu­ca­tion with­out fear. In Sum­mer­hill School author­i­ty does not mask a sys­tem of manip­u­la­tion.”

Stu­dents decide what they want to learn, and what they don’t, with no cur­ricu­lum, require­ments, or test­ing to speak of and no struc­tured time or manda­to­ry atten­dance. Is such a thing even pos­si­ble in prac­tice? How could edu­ca­tors man­age and mea­sure stu­dent progress, or ensure their stu­dents learn any­thing at all? What might this look like? Find out in the 1966 Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da doc­u­men­tary Sum­mer­hill, above, full of “can­did moments and scenes,” Aeon writes, “that evoke the rhythms of dai­ly life at the school and give a sense of the children’s lived expe­ri­ence.”

Dis­or­ga­nized, but not chaot­ic, class­room bus­tle con­trasts with idyl­lic, sun­lit moments on Summerhill’s ver­dant grounds and hon­est crit­i­cism, some from the stu­dents them­selves. One girl admits that the free play wears thin after a while and that “there prob­a­bly aren’t such good facil­i­ties for learn­ing here, after a cer­tain lev­el. But you can always go some­where else after­wards” (though many would have dif­fi­cul­ty with entrance exams). Anoth­er stu­dent talks about the strug­gle to study with­out struc­ture to help min­i­mize dis­trac­tions. Despite Neill’s philo­soph­i­cal aver­sion to fear, she says “you’re always afraid of miss­ing some­thing.”

We also meet the man him­self, A.S. Neill, a rum­pled, avun­cu­lar fig­ure at 83 years old, who pro­claims free­dom as the answer for stu­dents who strug­gle in school, and for stu­dents who don’t. If we’re hon­est, we might all admit we felt this strong­ly as chil­dren our­selves. It may nev­er be an impulse that’s com­pat­i­ble with con­tem­po­rary goals for edu­ca­tion, which is often geared toward work­place train­ing at the expense of cre­ative think­ing. But for many stu­dents, the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pur­sue their own course on their own terms can become the impe­tus for a life­time of inde­pen­dent thought and action. I can’t think of a lofti­er edu­ca­tion­al goal.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Jeremy Bentham’s Mummified Body Is Still on Display–Much Like Other Aging British Rock Stars

Plato’s ide­al of philoso­pher-kings seems more unlike­ly by the day, but most mod­ern read­ers of The Repub­lic don’t see his state as an improve­ment, with its rigid caste sys­tem and state con­trol over child­bear­ing and rear­ing. Plato’s Socrates did not love democ­ra­cy, though he did argue that men and women (those of the guardian class, at least) should receive an equal edu­ca­tion. So too did many promi­nent Euro­pean polit­i­cal philoso­phers of the 18th and 19th cen­turies, who had at least as much influ­ence on world affairs as Pla­to did on Athens, for bet­ter and worse.

One such thinker, Jere­my Ben­tham, is often remem­bered as the inven­tor of the panop­ti­con, a dystopi­an prison design that makes inmates inter­nal­ize their own sur­veil­lance, believ­ing they could be watched at any time by unseen eyes. Made infa­mous by Michel Fou­cault in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the pro­pos­al was first intend­ed as humane reform, con­sis­tent with the tenets of Bentham’s philo­soph­i­cal inno­va­tion, Util­i­tar­i­an­ism, often asso­ci­at­ed with his most famous dis­ci­ple, John Stu­art Mill.

Ben­tham may also have been one of the most pro­gres­sive sec­u­lar philoso­phers of any age—espousing full polit­i­cal rights for everyone—by which he actu­al­ly meant every­one, not only Euro­pean landown­ing men. “In his own time,” writes Faramerz Dab­hoi­wala at The Guardian, Ben­tham “was cel­e­brat­ed around the globe. Count­less prac­ti­cal efforts at social and polit­i­cal reform drew inspi­ra­tion from him. […] He was made an hon­orary cit­i­zen of rev­o­lu­tion­ary France, while the Guatemalan leader José del Valle acclaimed him as ‘the leg­is­la­tor of the world.’ Nev­er before or since has the Eng­lish-speak­ing world pro­duced a more polit­i­cal­ly engaged and inter­na­tion­al­ly influ­en­tial thinker across such a broad range of sub­jects.”

Ben­tham took the role seri­ous­ly, though there may be the seeds of a mor­bid prac­ti­cal joke in his last philo­soph­i­cal act.

As he lay dying in the spring of 1832, the great philoso­pher Jere­my Ben­tham left detailed direc­tions for the preser­va­tion of his corpse. First, it was to be pub­licly dis­sect­ed in front of an invit­ed audi­ence. Then, the pre­served head and skele­ton were to be reassem­bled, clothed, and dis­played ‘in the atti­tude in which I am sit­ting when engaged in thought and writ­ing.’ His desire to be pre­served for­ev­er was a polit­i­cal state­ment. As the fore­most sec­u­lar thinker of his time, he want­ed to use his body, as he had his mind, to defy reli­gious super­sti­tions and advance real, sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge. Almost 200 years lat­er, Ben­tham’s ‘auto-icon’ still sits, star­ing off into space, in the clois­ters of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don.

His full-body par­o­dy of saints’ relics doesn’t just sit in Lon­don, in the “appro­pri­ate box or case” he spec­i­fied in his instruc­tions. It has also sat in its box in cities across Eng­land, Ger­many, and New York’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. “Not unlike an aging British rock star,” writes Isaac Schultz at Atlas Obscu­ra, “the old­er he gets, the more tours he seems to go on. Some­times Bentham’s sev­ered, mum­mi­fied head,” with its ter­ri­fy­ing, unblink­ing glass eyes, “accom­pa­nies the rest of him.” Some­times it doesn’t.

The head, which was sup­posed to have been kept atop the ful­ly dressed skele­ton, was mis­han­dled and dam­aged in the cre­ation of the “auto-icon” and replaced by a wax repli­ca (sure­ly an acci­dent and not a way to mit­i­gate the creepi­ness). What did Ben­tham mean by all of this? And what is an “auto-icon”? Though it sounds like the sort of inscrutable prank Sal­vador Dali might have played at the end, Ben­tham described the idea straight­for­ward­ly in his pam­phlet Auto-Icon; or, Far­ther Uses of the Dead to the Liv­ing. The philoso­pher, says Han­nah Cor­nish, sci­ence cura­tor at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, gen­uine­ly “thought it’d catch on.”

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In his short, final work of moral phi­los­o­phy, Ben­tham shows that, like Pla­to, he didn’t quite get the point of mak­ing art, advanc­ing a the­o­ry that becom­ing one’s own icon would elim­i­nate the need for paint­ings, stat­ues, and the like, since “iden­ti­ty is prefer­able to simil­i­tude” (to the extent that a mum­mi­fied corpse is iden­ti­cal to a liv­ing per­son). Oth­er util­i­tar­i­an rea­sons include ben­e­fits to sci­ence, reduced pub­lic health risks, and cre­at­ing “agree­able asso­ci­a­tions with death.”

Also, in what must have been intend­ed with at least some under­cur­rent of humor, he asked that his remains “occa­sion­al­ly be brought into meet­ings involv­ing his still-liv­ing friends,” writes Schultz, “so that what’s left of Ben­tham might enjoy their com­pa­ny.”

Learn more about Bentham’s “auto-icon” in the Atlas Obscu­ra videos here, includ­ing the video fur­ther up show­ing how a team of pro­fes­sion­als packed up and moved the whole macabre assem­blage to its new home across the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don cam­pus. And read an even more detailed descrip­tion, with sev­er­al pho­tographs, of how the old­est par­tial­ly mum­mi­fied British rock star philoso­pher trav­els, here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

97-Year-Old Philoso­pher Pon­ders the Mean­ing of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

An Ani­mat­ed Leonard Cohen Offers Reflec­tions on Death: Thought-Pro­vok­ing Excerpts from His Final Inter­view

How Did the Egyp­tians Make Mum­mies? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Art of Mum­mi­fi­ca­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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