In the 1820s, a Connecticut man and Yale graduate called Josiah Holbrook set up a 'lyceum' in Massachusetts. It was a local study group which met once a week. From this spawned a movement which was known as the Lyceum Movement. It's aim was to educate in the broadest sense. To that aim, lectures and debates were run for people of any age and education. The movement also promoted the foundation of museums, libraries and schools. In 1831, he attempted to found a National American Lyceum, but it folded after eight years. 
The context is now very different. We are not in the business of colonising or constitutionalising. In Britain today, we have an education system that fails too many people. I speak as someone who the education system failed. Oh, I got reasonable grades and went through all the relevant motions. I even managed, after a bit of existential wrangling, to get in to university to study philosophy. My education was marked by continual systemic failures of imagination. There were a handful of teachers at my school - numbering no more than single digits - who, if I met today, I would say thank you to, or buy a drink for.
Similarly, outside of the academy, though we have something of a thriving culture of public lectures, it is marred by a lack of quanity and a lack of engagement. A lecture can be so much more than we give it credit for. It can and should engage new topics, new challenges as well as enrich old debates. It needs to be more than a method of promotion for new books.
And so, I propose that we need to rekindle Josiah Holbrook's dream. We need to build a New Lyceum Movement.
Although we do not need to 'build' anything. We have everything here, and we just need to add a few fluid ounces of ideas and a stir in some time, and we can build this thing.
Through the website Upcoming.org, I already promote public lectures that go on in London. I get emails from people I know inviting me to things. But these things are all one-off, and we are sitting on the sidelines simply pointing people to things they are interested in. University lecture here. Debate there. Book promotion here. Talk from a scientist there. Similarly, another website, Lecture List does a pretty good job of keeping tabs of public lectures that go on in London.
We need to build as well as promote - think as well as link. We've got all the tools here. We will need a website, with a mechanism for proposing ideas and railroading them through a rapid process of public consideration on the scope of the topic, through location of a suitable venue and finding of a few volunteers. The website, of course, can be an international effort. One website can serve many cities. Ideas for discussions, lectures and debates can flow. If London is thinking that a debate on Palestine is a good idea, New York could pick it up too. And if Boston is considering a series of lectures on Hegel, then Edinburgh can be peering through it's notes.
I say the 'series' of lectures, because that is something that the current public lecture circuit doesn't do well. A one-off talk about globalisation (or art history). That is doable. A series of talks is not. Experts, of course, are not required. As Dave Winer says, "Come as you are, we're all just folks". Amateurisation is nothing to be scared of, unless you're a professional. I've given two lectures last year - one on aesthetics and one on the failings of Intelligent Design - and they were enormous fun, and hopefully enlightening too. I also have to give such a lecture, on Nietzsche this time, next week.
What sad idealism accompanies my plea for a New Lyceum Movement? Well, as John McWhorter pointed out in a book on the subject, oratory has died a sad death. We now have people stand up and "give a few words" or have a chat. But the art of public speaking is a lost one which, in all seriousness, we ought to do our best to revive. Blogging has done much to revive pamphleteering, or something approaching pamphleteering (the difference being that, compared with my laptop, pamphlets have better battery life). Blogging has also, in some instances, scared the bejeezus out of the newspapers.
Podcasting has begun to do something similar with radio, though, of course, the monological block (whether of the meandering, expressive kind or the bullshit-piercing, blistering, critical kind) will have limited appeal compared to the all-singing, all-dancing kinds. But at some point, we need to step out and do it live.
For the technologist, there is much to get excited about. First of all, I want the whole lot recorded and podcast. I want blogging, vigorous discussion, community voting (not quite as simple as "I digg this topic!", but close enough) and the use of wiki transcriptions and notes, OPML and much more. For distribution, we'll need to think about using the Internet Archive, using BitTorrent and much more.
If you want a mission, rebuilding a public intellectual culture where great ideas can be experimented on with the underpinning of a "we're all just folks" philosophy, a healthy distrust of co-opting (a movement such as this would be a remedy for a culture who's education has been ransacked by the government's feeble and anti-intellectual desires) and, most of all, a belief that mankind can better himself.
