SCN: Chautauqua

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

========================

(Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal)---Imagine a system that allows 
huge groups of people to share vast amounts of information over 
long distances simultaneously. Imagine its aim is to educate and 
inform its users. And imagine that its goal is to grow in leaps and 
bounds, spreading democratically around the globe in ever-greater 
numbers.  

The Internet, you say? That was a latecomer. Try going back to a 
small 19th-century religious and learning community in upstate New 
York, where a few people with a vision created a medium close in 
spirit to the Web without the help of technical wonders.  

It was there on Aug. 10, 1878, in a curtained pavilion by a lake, that 
John H. Vincent, a 46-year-old clergyman, introduced his idea for the 
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. A future bishop of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church, he had co-founded the Chautauqua 
community four years earlier to cultivate religion through education, 
and help people realize their potential with regard neither to 
"poverty, birth nor color," according to Alfreda L. Irwin's 1970 study 
of the history of the community, "Three Taps of the Gavel."  

The bishop's idea for the circle was to educate as many people as 
possible across the globe with a highly organized reading program 
that was the same everywhere and staggered over four-year 
periods. "Education, once the peculiar privilege of the few, must in 
our best earthly estate become the valued possession of the many," 
said Bishop Vincent about his unusual idea.  

Bob Coghill, a Toronto middle-school guidance counselor, has spent 
the past few summers sifting through the archives of this early 
experiment in creating networked communities, a theme at the very 
heart of today's Internet. He became interested in the Chautauqua 
community's history during a visit and is using his work to earn a 
master's degree in archival research. A form of the CLSC exists 
today as the Chautauqua Institution, now a nondenominational 
summer learning community.  

"The idea of creating a sense of connectedness and belonging on a 
large scale and across geographic boundaries where people can 
have a common experience reminds you a lot of the Web," he says.  

It's an idea that many in Silicon Valley and elsewhere should pay 
attention to as the Internet seeps into all parts of society and, if 
predictions are correct, becomes as integral to our lives as 
electricity.  

Its impact is already profound, of course, as we zip off e-mails, point 
and click with abandon to access all sorts of information, conduct 
digital dialogues, and buy and sell online. With all the 
commercialization, and all the chatter, it's easy to lose sight of the 
Internet's most important reason for existence: its ability to link 
people across the world.  

Mr. Vincent could have hardly imagined it. But what he did envision 
was impressive. As he planned it, each year enrollees gleaned by 
word of mouth and via newspaper and magazine ads, would start a 
four-year class and begin to read the same series of books at the 
same time in order to graduate.  

The first class of 1878, for example, would read "Old Tales Retold 
>From Grecian Mythology" by Augusta Larned and "Studies of the 
Stars" by Henry W. Warren, while the class of 1899 would ponder 
Richard T. Ely's "The Strength and Weakness of Socialism" and 
"Birds Through an Opera-Glass" by Florence A. Merriam.  

These materials were sent out, for a fee, from the CLSC's 
headquarters -- Chautauqua in the summer and New Jersey in the 
winter -- in a system run by a young woman named Kate Kimball 
(who might be compared with a modern-day router). She spent her 
whole adult life working for the CLSC, which became enormously 
successful over the years, spreading across America to Europe and 
Japan. One year, a single member joined from India. About 8,400 
enrolled in the first year, growing to more than 60,000 in four years 
and to 180,000 in a dozen years.  

In one early year, 487 male ministers, 1,737 housekeepers (all 
women) and one postmistress had signed up. Detailed statistics of 
the membership were kept in books in Ms. Kimball's spidery 
handwriting.  

The enrollees began to form local "circles" to discuss and help each 
other with their learning. Soon, there were about 10,000 of these 
circles (some even in prisons). In addition to books, Ms. Kimball 
would send all members world-wide identical poems and passages 
with instructions to read them at designated hours on specific days.  

After completing the course, some members traveled to Chautauqua 
to attended graduation, carrying banners they designed to represent 
their class. The 1916 class, calling themselves the Internationalists, 
had one that read: "Knowledge Maketh All Men Kin."  

Mr. Coghill, 47 years old, says the CLSC experience was much more 
profound than a simple book club or correspondence course. He 
found scads of letters and other information in boxes throughout the 
CLSC's building in Chautauqua from members that chronicle their 
feelings about their experience.  

One of his favorite letters is from a woman in San Francisco, writing 
just after the devastating earthquake there that she was still working 
her way through the reading.  

"She wrote that she was homeless and about how awful it was, but 
she still had time to be connected to people she never would meet, 
but with whom she said she felt a real kinship," says Mr. Coghill. 
"There were little webs like this all over the place and they were 
very meaningful to the people in them, I think."  

Within a few decades, the CLSC's membership growth dwindled as it 
became easier and quicker to communicate across distances via 
new technologies and the proliferation of libraries and institutions of 
higher learning.  

In its latest incarnation, the CLSC is more of a fun way to promote 
reading. But its origins as an attempt to create a vibrant virtual 
community is chronicled in Mr. Coghill's archives. Life after life after 
life is linked in an endless web.  

"There are hosts of them, all knowing each other, and apparently 
bound by some secret association which has a mystic power," 
Bishop Vincent said of that Internet of another time. "In all this, there 
is something singular and beautiful."  

Copyright © 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. 





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