Susan Sontag proclaimed, in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1978 —
One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment... and I don’t believe it’s true... I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.
I've gone over this quote a dozen or more times now (it's in my spaced repetition system), and think I've just now glimpsed its importance to our coming school.
Is this the mistake that elite schools (college-prep and hippie-dippie alike!) are making: drawing a distinction between thought and feeling?
And is this the first step toward creating a vibrantly intellectual school: saying that "thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking"?
This is one of my hopes for our school — that we can encompass math and art, philosophy and music, science and dance — all these things which are usually thought of as opposite poles of experience. That we can explore how knowledge flows from stories, and how stories flow from physical reality. And that by incorporating these two extremes, we can show how joyous both can be.
We can be more STEM than a STEM school, and more artsy-fartsy than an arts academy.
Such, at least, is my notion.
(I'll be back from my vacation next week! The photo above is from the book-length compilation of those Rolling Stone interviews, from which the above quote is taken.)