Behind the name:

Firelight Akademia

According to W.B. Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” This premise of education as an emotionally situated experiential process with critical transformational potential is core to the teaching and learning philosophy of the founder of Firelight Akademia. As the story goes, he was first introduced to this quote by his first “Level Leader” teaching partner and mentor at Columbia University’s American Language Program (ALP), the first program of its kind in the United States.

Fire has come to symbolize a myriad of ideas for humans across cultures and time. It can signify passion, lust, survival, heat, safety, and danger. It can serve as a metaphor for breath, life, death, creation, destruction, rebirth, and transformation.

Fire has also played a vital role in our evolution as a source of warmth, protection, light, vision, and a means to transform the raw ingredients of nature – through cooking – into nutrition, sustenance, growth, and even excess. Throughout our history, fire has also been associated with language through images of storytelling by the campfire. These acts of passing down generational wisdom and engaging in knowledge and cultural transmission have become indelibly seared into our collective human consciousness.

And like fire, language is a powerful tool that can be controlled, shaped, transformed, and deployed for a variety of purposes and ends. The goal at Firelight Akademia is to provide our students, clients, and partners with optimal skills and strategies for their particular needs, and to help sharpen their toolkits so as to create and sustain their own fires within.

Light has also come to symbolize a myriad of ideas for humans across cultures and time. It can signify clarity, visibility, and illumination. It can serve as a metaphor for breath, God or gods, nothingness, transcendence, or enlightenment. Its meaning is often also gleaned from association with the opposing or complimentary notion of darkness: good vs evil, sun vs moon, masculine vs feminine, or yin vs yang.

Light has also played a vital role in our evolution as a source of warmth, heat, and energy. As the main source of light on earth, the sun – through photosynthesis – provides virtually all the energy used by living things. And when the sun goes down, darkness falls, and the absence of light prevails, the other core element of our name – fire – can be harnessed to provide any needed light.

The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement where reason and the evidence of the senses were respected as the primary sources of knowledge. Enlightenment thus represents the full comprehension of a situation and though ignorance can be bliss, we believe in the process and movement of education, the meaningful noun translated into a verb of action, like the lighting of a fire.

During the Enlightenment of the early 18th century, Salons (salonnières) were places where civilians of all social classes could gather to discuss ideas, headed by an inspiring host. During the gatherings, the participants amused one another, discussed various topics of the day, and increased their knowledge through conversation.

Women played a central role in the development and proliferation of salons. For a marginalized class who was often denied access to formal education, the salons provided women with a valuable forum to engage in the discourse of ideas. This movement thus helped to facilitate the breakdown of social barriers and posed direct intellectual, moral, and philosophical challenges to the prevailing social constructions and hierarchies of the day.

The Firelight Spacelab salon pays homage to this tradition and represents our attempt to foster a meaningful sense of community, with appropriately universal paroxysms of enlightenment, joy and levity.

The Akademia (Academy), a school outside the city walls of ancient Athens, was founded by Plato in 387BC. It is believed that at least in Plato’s time, the school did not have a particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato likely posed questions to be studied and solved by others. In modern academic settings, we can see a continuation – or extrapolation – of this tradition in the Socratic method and the pedagogical idea of teaching how to think rather than what to think.

Though there was some evidence that lectures were given in the Akademia, it is thought that dialectic methods were most likely used. The truth was therefore sought by two or more individuals engaging in discourse, or reasoned argumentation. The evolution of the academic tradition itself is a complicated and convoluted story worth studying, but at the heart of it all – and what motivates the educational mission at Firelight Akademia – is the spirit of inquiry and the human search for knowledge, truth, and meaning.

The idea behind Firelight Akademia is thus to respect the past while understanding the present and anticipating the future, reconciling the passions of human emotion with the discipline of academic rigor through language, communication, stories, art, humor, understanding, empathy, growth, and transformation. Firelight Akademia aims to create a creative and critical space for personal, academic, and professional development through curiosity, wonder, collaboration, and global communication.

The lighting of a fire is just the beginning.

Sustaining that fire and is a lifelong art and craft, an often painstaking process of continual reflection and renewal, but we believe that true mastery of controlling that fire is when and where the journey really begins.