Sunday, June 29, 2008

A Doctorate degree with no silly accredited standards required

Sign me up for that doctorate degree. For that matter, throw in that masters degree too.

I wanted to learn more about the mechanics of sustainable ecology so I signed up for an open house tour at the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas CA.

After enduring 1 hour and 45 minutes of the tour I left .
I could not take the shear ennui and lack of productive learning time.
I guess I am too much of a serious student or perhaps I just like real tangible usable information provided in an articulate concise delivery.

I also appreciate non spin bullshit.
I got spin. .. WAY too much spin and stories about Gramma and Granpap and how we all need heal our childhood wounds.
It was the granola babbling that did me in for the first one hour standing in front of the chicken coup.
During that time, which I had hoped would cover some form of pedagogics I heard how one could earn a Master degree or a Doctorate degree though their affiliate Gaia University, who just by chance was offering a class at that very moment.

No silly undergraduate degree required, just hands on work in ‘self and planetary transformation’.

Take that Harvard and U.C Berkeley and stuff your 9 years and that $ 280 thousand dollars up your regenerative butt.
I can now buy a Doctorate and or a Masters for just a few thousand bucks and I don’t even have to show up for class or write that dissertation.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thats frightening.
People try to tell me that once you graduate, the institution no longer matters, but I'll take name recognition any day. Its funny how its always people from universities you never heard of that say that anyway.

Garrett Sawyer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Garrett Sawyer said...

What kind of tour was it? Was it like a "If you went here" kind of a tour? lol.

Yeah, given that you say it was a tour, do you think they're going to give you real information before you become a student? lol. I hope Cal Poly's Regenerative studies program here in Pomona isn't that bad. I might do that in a couple years. I start my Landscape Design classes this Fall. YAY!

Deviant Deziner, aka Michelle said...

Garrett,
You make an excellent point, and in the end I realize my expectations were too high and need to readjust my evaluation of this experience.

It was in fact just a tour of their facilities.

I should have not expected any real tangible education to come out of the experience.

I imagine the aim of the tour is to inspire people to sign up for their classes and to ply some of their ecology saving techniques to your every day life but I felt more like I was being spoken to as a third grader from the inner city who had never seen dirt on the ground or a bird fly overhead.

The group was made up of adults, mostly local residents who came from the surrounding bay area along with one couple from Germany and a woman from Hawaii.

I think that most all of us were more or less disappointed in the inane vacuous chitter chatter that toiled on and on for hours that held no purposeful content that one could apply to improving sustainable and or regenerative systems in and around your home.

Fortunately I'm a self starter kind of person so I was able to see the various sustainable elements that the Institute were employing on the property and deconstruct how they were working and impacting the surrounding ecology.

I would have liked to learned more about their filtration system, how the pond system works ( it was below the vegetable garden so what method do they use to pump it back up hill ? )

I saw some contour swale traversing across the hill with some fruit trees interplanted between but wanted to know about the percolation rate used to create/ calculate the contours and what method they were using to slow/ speed up the hillside water drainage pattern.

The interplanetary connectiveness of how we can all heal our childhood wounds along with the selling of the Gaia University Masters and Doctorate programs was really not what I expected from this tour.

Unknown said...

just a little bit from me, designer and primary operator of Gaia University, to correct some misinformation in here. Work a student does in pursuit of a Gaia U degree is required to pass through a comprehensive system of quality assurance that includes external review from senior people in higher education (professors). We also have an accreditation from the England based Institute of Management Centres Association that works mostly with corporate universities since 1964.

And you sure do have to generate your thesis and have this critically reviewed by peers and professionals (we call these 'Output Packets'.

It is hard, I know, in a world dominated by either/or thinking, to get your head around 'fuzzy' and edgy approaches - takes a while to unlearn those hard-man, no-nonsense certainties ...

Look us up one day on www.gaiauniversity.org ...