Founded 1868 · Augusta, Kansas
A course of study for the people no institution was built for.
The C. N. James Institute is a guild of the liberal arts. Seven arts, three ranks, one masterpiece judged in the open by your peers. Twenty dollars a month, and no application to fail.
Photograph by Art Davis, CC BY-SA 4.0
News & Notices
Announcements from the Institute, the Register, and the circles.
The Course of Work
Three arts give the key to language. Four give the key to the natural world. Members may take them in any order, at any pace.
How meaning is assembled and taken apart.
Argument before ornament; audience before either.
Reasoning, evidence, and the resemblance that misleads.
Reasoning from what you know to what you do not.
Measure, space and proof.
Proportion and harmony, placed last by the old schools.
Observe, measure, comprehend, calculate.
Preparation for the GED® test, in four subject areas.
The work maps onto the GED® test and onto CLEP® and DSST® examinations for members who want portable proof. Members who simply want to write a better sentence never have to hear about any of it.
Standing in the Guild
A guild confers rank, not paperwork. Yours never expires, and nothing earned is taken back if you stop and return.
Apprentice
You are admitted, you choose a course of work, and a member of longer standing is entered in the register as yours.
Fellow
Earned by work completed and payments made, not by a calendar. Competence in an art, recorded publicly.
Master
A masterpiece judged in the open by peers and a sitting Master, and evidence that you have taught another member.
In a working craft guild a journeyman became a master by making a thing and submitting it to judgement. We do that literally, with a published rubric, named judges, and no fee at any stage. It is the one part of this Institute that will never be handed to a machine.
Calendar
Circle meetings, recognition, and examination windows.
Membership
Open to any adult, anywhere, regardless of sex, religion, or whether anyone in your family ever finished school.
In 1883 the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle asked its members for about eight dollars a year, books included, and half a million Americans took them up on it. Adjusted into current money that is almost exactly twenty dollars a month.
We are not being clever. Twenty dollars is what a serious course of adult study has cost, in real terms, for a hundred and forty years. What has changed is that we can now teach one member or ten thousand for close to the same money, so we do not have to charge you for a building.
Membership is billed monthly at $20, or $200 for the year. You can cancel online in one click, at any time, with no telephone call and nobody asking you why.