How the Lifelong Learning Program Was Born and Grew Up

Published November 23, 2021

By Jo Sanders

“San Miguel is a fantasyland for people with a good mind.”

I met someone who said that shortly after I moved here eleven years ago, and she was right.  I had come here for the culture:  there was so much art and music and theater.  There was only one thing I wanted that San Miguel didn’t have:  courses for adults to take just for the fun of learning and intellectual stimulation.  Knowing that no one would teach only me, I started a program.

I went to several places in town searching for a venue.  It was simple:  I needed a classroom, legal services, and financial services.  I found them all in the school half of the Instituto Allende.  The Instituto became the perfect home of the Lifelong Learning Program in 2012, and the Fernánadez family my family.  At the beginning, I was the entire staff.  Now we are eight, all volunteers.  As are the instructors.

For me, a great joy has been shaping the courses with the instructors, whom I meet by accident or who are sent to me by students or other instructors.  Over dinner one night with Jeff Blustein, a philosopher who specializes in justice and memory,a conversation became a four-class course, “Memory, Forgiveness, and Justice:  How Countries Deal with Past Atrocities.”  Class 1 was on the best approach, that of Germany, and Class 4 on the worst, outright denial — Turkey and Japan.

All the course ideas didn’t all work out so well.  I met a fisheries expert years ago who told me that climate change was causing adaptations in the fisheries industry, which would be a fascinating angle to make climate change “real.”  But the man just could not get past what he knew best, the fisheries industry as traditionally practiced, and no one would take a course on that.

There have been sorrows too.  Jim Purdy, the Canadian filmmaker, taught brilliant courses on Call Me By Your Name and Roma.  Students told their friends, and he agreed to teach a last-minute extra course on Roma.  It sold out in an hour.  We were heartbroken when Jim suddenly died this April.

We’ve prided ourselves on offering an extensive variety of courses, helped immensely by the expertise of our residents and visitors.  Courses dealing with Mexico, law, architecture, and the introductory course to the February Pro Musica opera are always popular, and also Greek plays, physics, women’s history, computing, psychology, climate change, poetry, food, geology, music, WWII, gay history, astronomy, foreign policy, film, geometry, Clarence Darrow, medicine, refugees, all sorts of history, the Harlem Renaissance, unconscious bias, politics, Jung, stagecraft, interior design, and so many more.  Some are sellouts and some are niche courses, which is fine with us.  We’ve had thousands of students.

November 2021 will bring course #168, with many others to follow January through March.  You can see this year’s lineup and enroll in courses on the website, https://instituto-allende.edu.mx/eng/lifelong-learning-program/  Social distancing, masks worn properly, and proof of vaccination will be required.

See you in the classroom!

Jo

Announcing the 2020-2021 Lifelong Learning Program Courses