The Slow Schoolhouse
Building knowledge as a community, instead of consuming it one by one
Small groups take one topic, work it out together over eight weeks, and hand what they found back to everyone else. There is nobody at the front of the room, because nobody is teaching.
How a circle works
Four to six people. One topic. Eight weeks. One hour together every two weeks, four times.
Between sessions you find your own way in: a book, a podcast, an article, a conversation, something from your own work. We suggest some readings, but none of them are required, and if the only thing you bring to a session is a good question, that is enough.
Each session has one question.
- What are we actually looking at?
- What do we know, and what were we assuming?
- What could be, and what holds up?
- What changed in us, and what do we do about it?
Those four questions are a suggestion, not a syllabus. Some circles will want to think a topic through; others will want to build something small and learn from having built it. Both count, and each circle decides which it is in its first session. What does not change is what the circle hands back at the end.
The four questions are our grouping of ThinkingOS, Alon Rozen's eight-layer framework for keeping your own thinking intact while using AI. He has given permission to build on it. The grouping into four is ours, not his.
The circles
Eight are open. Each one is a question rather than a syllabus — the circle decides in its first session what it actually means by it.
AI, humanity and agency
are we outsourcing our judgement?
We use these tools every day now, and most of us have never stopped to ask what they are doing to our own thinking. Where does help end and substitution begin? This circle starts from Alon's ThinkingOS and tests it on itself.
Meaning and purpose
what is worth doing with the time we have
Not the self-help version. The harder question underneath it: how do you decide what deserves your working life when the usual answers have stopped being convincing?
Planet, systems and regeneration
what we keep taking, and what we could give back
Past the carbon arithmetic. What would it mean to design for regeneration rather than for less damage, and why is almost nothing built that way?
Institutions, power and integrity
who decides, and who pays when they are wrong
The institutions we rely on keep failing without anyone carrying the cost. Is that a design flaw, a drift, or the point? And what takes their place if trust does not come back?
Polarization, democracy and trust
why we stopped disagreeing well
Disagreement used to make groups smarter. Now it mostly makes them smaller. What changed, and is there a way back to arguing productively?
Attention and time
the scarcest resource we have
Everything is competing for it and most of us are losing. What is attention actually for, what does it cost to give it away, and can you get it back?
Self, embodiment and AI
who you are, before you ask what AI is doing to you
Not existential risk. The individual. What the self actually is when it extends through the people around you, through nature, through your tools and now through AI, and whether AI adds more of the same or something genuinely new. The argument this circle starts from is that you cannot think critically alongside these systems until you understand yourself as something that changes rather than something fixed, and that the understanding is physical as much as it is cognitive. Historical parallels welcome, beginning with the printing press.
Truth and authorship
who made this, and does it still matter
When anything can be generated, provenance becomes the question. Does it matter who wrote something if it is useful? Worth asking about art, about news, and about this page.
Pick one when you sign up, or up to three, and if what you want to think about is not on the list, tell us.
What a circle leaves behind
Knowledge. A curated set of sources worth other people's time, what the circle concluded, and what it could not agree on. Shared with everyone as one 4D Conversation.
A Little Big. One small thing someone actually does, in the real world, because of what the circle learned.
A practice report. What we did and what we would change, so another group can run the same thing without starting from scratch.
About recording
Most circles record their sessions. It is the circle's own decision, made together in the first session, and if anyone is uncomfortable the circle does not record.
Where a circle does record: the recording is not published and it is not the notes. The person writing the summary writes it first, from memory and their own notes. Only then is the recording used — including by an AI tool, to answer one question: what did we discuss that is missing from this summary. A person decides what to take from the answer.
Only the agreed summary is shared with the community. The recording stays inside the circle.
What a steward does
Every circle has one steward, and the job is smaller than it sounds. You book the meetings, and you keep an eye on the finish, so that week eight arrives with something to show instead of four good conversations that faded out. You are not expected to know more than anyone else, and you are not teaching. We send you a short guide before you start.
Background
This started as a three-part series on the 4D Substack: part 1 on the problem, part 2 on where this has worked before, part 3 on the first version of the proposal. What is on this page is where it got to.
This is an experiment. Our guess is that what has been missing was never the content but the format, and the only way to find out is to run it.