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The Tutorial School Page

I attended The Tutorial School (TTS) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from the middle of my junior year in high school to my graduation in 1986. I was the first graduate of TTS. The following year, I returned to TTS as a teacher. During that time, TTS moved from its original location in the house on Juniper Drive one street over to another house on Pinon Drive. The school moved to its present location, the old Brunn School complex, some years later.

I envision this page as a little virtual shrine to TTS, and particularly to its co-founder Richard Testa, and their profound impact on my life.

Assorted Stuff

"Richard Testa, Educator"

This is a brief word portrait of Richard that I wrote many years ago as an assignment. For people who didn't know him, I hope it conveys a sense of the man. For people who did know him, I hope it brings up some memories of your own.

The Dispatches

"The Tutorial School Dispatches" are four essays that I wrote for TTS co-founder Richard Testa. I stayed in touch with Richard from my graduation in 1986 until his death in September 2002. I wrote these essays in 2000-01, in the hope that Richard would share them with his current students and thereby generate an ongoing e-mail conversation.

Well, that never happened, but the essays do reflect the shaping of some ideas and concepts that have turned out to be very important for me, and they were written in the spirit of inquiry and fearless questioning that Richard instilled in me during my time at TTS.

Dispatch #1: Cause and Effect

"Any institutionalized activity -- that is, any undertaking whose structure and activities have been designed to continue operating the same way over time regardless of who is in charge at any given moment -- must be based on predictable causes and effects to survive and to interact with other institutionalized activities in a constructive manner. We take logic and rationality for granted because they make things work so well."

Dispatch #2: Ritual and Relationship

"By abandoning the preconceived notions and expectations that come from the practice of ritual, you create new, fresh relationships with an examined object each time you approach it. You can still use logic and rationality as tools to interpret what you are experiencing, but you can likewise use storytelling, myth-making, poetry, song, and any of the other beautiful and profound ways we also have to express what we experience. It is as if you are "listening" to what something has to say rather than "telling" it what you want or expect it to do."

Dispatch #3: Cognicentrism

"Cognicentrism, as used here, is a bias that assumes -- takes for granted, actually -- that our senses, and the tools we have invented to extend them into the realms of the microcosmic and macrocosmic, are sufficient to apprehend all the forces and events at play in and around us. Maybe this is so, but for all practical purposes (and for pretty much all theoretical purposes as well) this premise, this vanity, is a matter of faith; that is to say there is no sound, logical premise upon which to base an assumption that humans can perceive and understand everything."

Dispatch #4: Organizations, Authority, and Compassion

"The imposition of the institution on the individual is a form of rape. It is the use of force and power to subjugate one individual to another's will. It is exploitation. But we individuals are also guilty of delusion when we give those organizations the right to exert their influences over our lives. We are willingly seduced."

Pages of Interest

The perpetually out-of-date Tutorial School website

The dead-on-arrival Friends of the Tutorial School project

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