The Mission of Kepler College is to create an online learning environment conducive to the promotion of the best practices of liberal arts in undergraduate and graduate education. The College seeks to prepare students with the attitudes, skills, and habits of lifelong learning, enabling them to be useful members of a global society.
Kepler's objectives are to provide a sound, liberal intellectual basis for students to gain knowledge, to think critically, to communicate effectively, to appreciate many cultures, to achieve personal growth and to gain technology skills.
Kepler College seeks to fulfill its mission and objectives by developing an innovative and balanced curriculum grounded in the liberal arts, where the humanities and social sciences are integrated with a cross-cultural examination of cosmological philosophies and practices which endeavor to link the cosmos and human endeavors. By doing so, the College seeks to enable faculty and students to make insightful connections across disciplines, to analyze the connection between geo-cosmic traditions and the societies in which they were and are practiced, and to critically examine the intersections between minority and majority views and cultures.
With the rise of science in Western European culture over the past 400 years, practices that apply cosmological insights to events on earth, of which astrology is a common example, have been marginalized in academic and scientific communities.
The practice of interpreting cosmological events as related to human endeavors has a long history and continues to evolve today. This activity is inextricably entwined in the development of Western and Eastern cultures.Yet to skeptics and those for whom astrology is simply entertainment, exploration of these philosophies and practices have no place in academic study.
In 1991, a group of astrologers and academics decided that such a controversial and widespread practice deserved a place in academia where it could be analyzed for its historical, philosophical, and cultural significance and utilization.
Kepler College was born from the creative audacity and hard work of this group.
Why Kepler?
Because the world is subject to change...
Actively interpreting the connection between the cosmos and nature as well as between the cosmos and human being are ways that cultures worldwide have dealt with issues of change - changes in individual lives or changes in one's society or nation.
Today we would call many of these practices astrology, and for the last 400 years they have seldom been studied in depth in an academic or vocational environment. Few colleges have courses that critically examine how various cultures interpreted and applied their knowledge of cosmological events to human affairs, nor how these beliefs influenced the development of science, medicine, the arts, politics, literature, mythology and religion.
Degree-Granting Authorization
Kepler College is authorized by the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board and through March 9, 2010, the College met the requirements and minimum standards established for degree-granting institutions under the Degree Authorization Act. Students attending the college between March 9, 2000 and March 9, 2010 earned Washington State authorized degrees in:
Associate of Arts
Bachelor of Arts
Master of Arts in: Eastern and Western Traditions
The History, Philosophy and Transmission of Astrology