The School of ______
Understanding Understanding

Anonymous, 2016

The School of Understanding Understanding will change the way its students think about how others think. It only has students, who are the tutors; there is no hierarchy, and the goal is to have enlightening conversations.

It offers an unMA degree which recognises that claimed mastery of something as complex as reality (or arts) is disingenuous, arrogant and dangerous. The degree ceremony is a sparkling conversation, deep into the night, face-to-face with another student. There are two rectors, constantly in conversation: the ghosts of Gordon Pask and R.D. Laing.

The School recognises that human societies act in accordance with narratives and imaginaries and metaphors and assumptions that are often pervasive and yet tacit, private and yet normative, powerful and yet unwritten. These narratives are reinforced and reified and turned into self-fulfilling prophecies, and structure our lives, our loves, our wars, our wants. And this reinforcement is often the doing of designers, as unconscious servants of the narratives, #innovating as #disruptively as they are allowed within the limited horizon and worldview permitted by a Silicon City staffed by a hopeful precariat.

The School will enable its students to deconstruct the ways that they have been inculcated into a false dream to act as servants of a self-perpetuating regime of control. The School offers design as a way of breaking the narrative, of creating new narratives that divert and liberate and offer new metaphors. The skills developed include a progression from understanding to action: to understand how another understands, and to understand one's own understanding of how one understands how another understands, and to understand the limits of that understanding, but also to understand the systems which control, and to understand how to break them.