Dr. Neil Robertson, director, pens the annual FYP letter to students as they embark on their own intellectual journey in the Foundation Year Program.
Dear readers,
Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian media theorist, once said, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”
Like the fish, we swim in our own culture, made up of a whole series of assumptions—assumptions that we need to step away from in order to see and understand. The Foundation Year Program (FYP) offers you the chance to take a year, to join a community of thought and imagination in trying to “see” the water in which we are all swimming.
In FYP, our stepping away takes the form of a journey that begins in Ur (the very first city known to humanity) and arrives, by the end of the year, in the place we all start from—the contemporary world. As with any journey, this means encountering perspectives and standpoints that are not ours, allowing ourselves to be enlarged in mind and feeling by facing this challenge.
And, as in any journey, we are called upon to notice what is different, to think new thoughts and imagine other worlds—and in so doing, come to experience our own context differently, with greater insight and a sense of possibility. Yet we will, in so doing, “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”—for in a way, what we are studying is our own place: the sources, cross-currents, springs and eddies that make up the water in which we live.
There is a deep paradox at the heart of the King’s Foundation Year Program: in looking at an ancient statue, reading a medieval poem, proving that the external world exists with Descartes, you will be doing something radically different and new to you (we guarantee that) and yet FYP will teach you nothing that is not, in some way, already there in your thinking, already known to you. Almost too familiar. Like the fish, we are already in the water: we just need to come to see what this water is.
But this is something we cannot do simply on our own: that is why we read and discuss the books together. If you had only one eye open, you would be able to see everything, but only its surface. In FYP, we are trying to help one another see with both eyes, as a community to begin to grasp some of the depths beneath the surface.
A year spent reading and thinking about these books can transform the way you see your world. I hope you will join us on this journey!
Neil Robertson
Director, Foundation Year Program