A Passion for Connection.

This article examines how community colleges fulfill their promise of cultural institutions. There are three kinds of life-skills education and engagement offered by cultural institutions. The first, dubbed a life-skill of the highest order, is involvement with story, meaning the creation of narrative for sorting and constructing the contexts of the world. The second benefit to learners in cultural institutions may be paraphrased as stimulating critical thinking and providing a safe haven for what the philosophers call the examined life. Third is the opportunity for social connection with other people and their stories, their creative acts, made possible by the essential public spaces of cultural institutions. The three benefits, or life skills, available to cultural-institution visitors seem to overlap slightly, suggesting the integrated nature of the learning experienced in these environments. The key word is connection. Cultural institutions provide us with sacred public spaces where we can connect intellectually with previously unknown information and ideas and connect emotionally with ancestors, living loved ones, and parts of ourselves that have been ignored, forgotten, denied, or diminished by living within the confines of our structured, hyper-accelerated, technologically dominated lives.