We think networked digital information resources will enable people to reverse this ever-narrowing professionalism. This study place exists for persons who wish to engage in philosophy and education because both have value for them, quite apart from their professional responsibilities. Such hopes call for new types of educators, or different types of educators, than the well-trained professional. Professional competence is indeed important, but however good and fine, it is not sufficient. Yet such hortations easily become empty phrases.
Misplaced professionalism is an enduring, ineradicable temptation.
And for these I write. The first ones, in a world of eternal recurrence, are not a select few at some point of historical origin. The first ones reside in each and everyone of us, who must as educators educate ourselves. Such forms are the forms of our literary, textual heritage consisting primarily in written manuscripts and printed books. We, now, in this study place and in related realms of our electronic information enviroment, enjoy a great privilege, that of inventing new forms for writing for those educators of educators, for those first ones in every person who would educate themselves.