Home › Ranks
Ranks and the Masterpiece
A guild confers standing, not paperwork. Yours never expires, and nothing you have earned is taken back if you stop for a while and come back later.
What a rank is, stated plainly. A rank is standing within a private association. It is not a qualification recognised by any outside body, no regulator governs it, and nobody is obliged to accept it. Its value is that it is earned in public, against published criteria, and that the people who conferred it are named.
The three ranks
Apprentice
Conferred on admission. You choose a course of work, and a member of longer standing is entered in the register as yours by name. You have begun.
- Earned by
- Joining, and choosing an art
- Mentor
- Named in the permanent register
Fellow
Competence in an art, recorded publicly. Earned by work completed and by membership held, never by a calendar. A member who takes four years to reach it is a Fellow on exactly the same terms as one who takes eight months.
- Earned by
- Three of the seven marks
- Expires
- Never
Master
A masterpiece, judged in the open, and evidence that you have taught another member. You can make, and you can teach. One without the other is not mastery.
- Earned by
- All seven marks, a masterpiece, and having instructed
- Judged by
- Two named judges, at least one not your mentor
Progress is counted in payments, not months
This is the one rule that matters most, and it is borrowed directly from the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, which has been running since 1878 and still asks its members for a set number of books and a set number of payments, over any period you choose.
So a mark is earned against work done and membership held, not against a date. If you stop for six months, you have not fallen behind, because there is no calendar to fall behind. You resume where you were. Nothing here expires and nothing is revoked.
The seven marks
One mark for each liberal art. Thresholds at three, five, and seven. A mark is not a badge the Institute invents and awards itself: wherever an outside examination exists for an art, the mark is that examination's result, awarded by College Board or Prometric, not by us.
| Marks held | Standing |
|---|---|
| 1–2 | Apprentice, in progress |
| 3 | Fellow |
| 5 | Fellow, senior |
| 7 + masterpiece + instructed another | Master |
The masterpiece
In a working craft guild a journeyman became a master by making a thing and submitting it to judgement. Not by sitting a test. We do that literally.
A masterpiece is a substantial piece of work: an essay or body of writing, a taught lesson, a built object, a documented project, a piece of research. It is submitted, it is judged in the open, and the judgement is published with the judges' names on it.
The five rules the review runs under
Each of these is a deliberate inversion of a documented failure of the historical guilds, which were often far worse at this than their reputation suggests.
- A published rubric, versioned and dated, available before you begin.
- Named judges, at least two, at least one of whom was not your mentor.
- A written decision with reasons, and a resubmission path that costs you time and nothing else.
- No fee at any stage, ever. Historically, admission fees averaged more than a journeyman's annual wage and were the real filter regardless of the stated standard.
- The rubric itself is reviewed annually, because guilds that froze their criteria for centuries are why the word "guild" carries the reputation it does.
This part will never be automated. Teaching and assessing the foundational work is what makes twenty dollars a month possible. That frees the only genuinely scarce thing the Institute has, which is human judgement, and concentrates it on the one question a machine should not answer: whether a person's work is good.
Service standing
Warden (leads a circle), Steward (service to the Institute), and Preceptor (has instructed) are held alongside the ranks, never above them. Every rung of the ladder is reachable by any member in good standing. There is no tier that a member cannot enter, which is a direct lesson from the Grange, whose restricted upper degrees produced years of justified internal revolt.
Begin as an Apprentice
Choose an art, and a member of longer standing is entered as yours.