The Independent Scholar Movement: Ron Gross

Visit the link to download his excellent book on Independent Scholars Handbook
http://www.sfu.ca/independentscholars/isbook.htm


Excellent article by Ron Gross below - if you are serious about being an independent scholar, and start working on the steps - good luck, good research, and good success:

Independent Scholarship: Are You Ready For Your Mental Marathon? – Ron Gross, for About.com

http://adulted.about.com/od/otheradultlearning/a/marathon.htm


If you are a regular visitor to this website, you already know the value of learning and education in your life. I’m sure you’ve benefited from courses and seminars, conferences and conventions, self-directed reading and learning from your experience.

Now, I want to invite you to consider a form of lifelong learning that goes beyond these – one that is even more personal, even more challenging, even more rewarding.

I propose that you undertake your own Mental Marathon!

Just as people who keep fit through regular work-outs and exercise, sometimes go further by starting to train for a marathon run – just so, many of us lifelong learners choose to stretch ourselves with the challenge of a mental marathon. It provides a fresh focus for pushing us a little further – sometimes a lot further! It is an opportunity to stretch your mind to its limit! Intrigued?

The first step is realizing that YOU have your own contribution to make to our culture.

What kind of knowledge, understanding, discovery, or creative work would you most like to produce?

It could be a genealogy of your family, a handbook of some skill you want to share, an exploration in the natural world, an investigation of a mystery that intrigues you. It could be a creative project: a play or novel you want to write.

Taking this first step can be momentous. “For those who have experienced it, the hour of the awakening of the passion for knowledge is the most memorable of a lifetime,” wrote Colin Wilson.

Among those I’ve interviewed who have enriched their lives with such inquiries are:

· Charles Kapral, one of thousands of amateur astronomers who are playing a critical role in finding new planets.

· John Snyder, who solved a perplexing problem which had baffled the world’s map-makers for decades – “just because I found it fun to work on.”

· Coy Eklund, an insurance executive who researched and wrote a Chippewa language workbook so that his threatened Native American language would not be lost.

· Emily Taitz and Sondra Henry, who brought back to life “women written out of history” by researching forgotten Jewish women.

· Reinhold Aman, who created his own academic journal in a field which was rejected by academe but which fascinated him: obscene and scatological language and the role it plays in our lives, psychologically and politically.

· Leo Miller, a lifelong independent scholar who has made notable contributions to the study of Milton.

People of this ilk gathered this past October in New York City for the biennial meeting of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (www.ncis.org). It was a gala celebration of the love of learning. These are people for whom scholarship is their joy, not their job.

Scholars have made some of the most exciting discoveries of modern times and scientists not affiliated with universities, incuding Freud, Darwin, and Einstein. Many of the most notable researchers and writers who have made a difference in our culture are also “independents” (called “free-lancers”), such as Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, Barbara Tuchman, Lewis Mumford, Edmund Wilson, Jean Houston, Margo Adler, Tom Peters, William Manchester, and dozens of others.

So if you have kept your mind active through adult and continuing education, but have the feeling that there’s so much more you could do with your mind – independent scholarship may be for you! “The world needs your undamaged instinctive love for the truth,” declared Buckminster Fuller, another world-class independent scholar.

“Enthusiasts are changing our economy and society in fields ranging from astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives,” according to a just-released study by the Demos Institute in the U.K. “We’re witnessing the flowering of bottom-up self-organization... non-professionals in all fields who pursue their activities to professional standards, are an important emerging part of society.” Demos dubs this phenomenon “The Pro-Am Revolution” (Professional Amateurs).

I’ve written an Independent Scholar’s Handbook on how to go about becoming an inquirer -- and plans are afoot, as a result of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars' conference, to post the entire book on the Web and make it available free worldwide.

As a preview, here’s an eight step process by which a mere idea often ripens to become a work of independent scholarship:

1. You enter the idea, perhaps just a sentence or two, in your notebook.

2. Deciding it’s worth development, you strengthen it with subsequent thoughts and combine them into a memo to yourself (and, perhaps, others).

3. Fleshing out the idea, you incorporate thoughts and reactions from others, on the background, the problem or question as you now see it, the objectives of your project, how you plan to go about it, the outcome you will be seeking, the resources and contacts you will need, how you will present it, the people most interested in the results.

4. You condense your notes on the above areas into a cogent one-page research proposal, to guide you and perhaps gain the support of others.

5. You conduct the project, making mid-course corrections along the way to wriggle around problems or seize emergent opportunities.

6. You draft sections of the report as you obtain results.

7. You schedule some quality time to compose the complete report of your findings, argument, discovery, or creative work.

8. You make the work known to those who would be interested, and enjoy the feedback.