The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion.
While traditional school measures intelligence by the answers we come to, leading thinkers like Maria Popova have long argued for a more expansive version of measuring intelligence. In this Practice, we'll read from Popova's Figuring, which recounts how the astronomer Maria Mitchell transformed her Vassar observatory into an exploratorium — a school built around questions rather than answers, where students kept a "Book of Questions" cataloguing the things that were coming into their awareness as yet unknowable. In this practice, we'll turn our surroundings into an exploratorium of our own, attending to our environment and identifying the knowable unknowns hiding in plain sight.