Reed College

Reed College is a liberal arts college with 1341 students as of the fall of 2004 (45% men and 55% women), located in Portland, Oregon in the Eastmoreland neighborhood. In August of 2005, The Princeton Review ranked Reed number 1 in its category "Best Overall Academic Experience For Undergraduates."

Paideia

During the week before the beginning of second-semester classes, the campus undergoes Paideia (drawn from the Greek). This "festival of learning" takes the form of a week (although originally a whole month) of classes and seminars put on by anyone who wishes to teach, including students, professors, staff members, and outside educators invited on-campus by members of the Reed Community. Many such classes are explicitly silly (one long-running tradition is to hold an "Underwater Basket Weaving" class), while others are trivially educational (such as "Giant Concrete Gnome Construction," a class that, incidentally to building monolithic gnomes, includes some content relating to the construction of pre-Christian monoliths). Genuine classes (such as martial arts seminars and mini-classes on obscure academic topics), tournaments, and film festivals round out the "class" list, which is different every year. The objective of Paideia is not only to learn new (possibly non-useful) things, but to turn the tables on students and encourage them to teach.

Related Topics:
Paideia - Gnome - Monolith

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