Free Universities
Here is another presentation from the Conference - Kathleen McConnell’s “Classes in Advanced Fantasy: A Brief History of The Free University.”
To see a contemporary free university in action, check out the Twin Cities Experimental College - offering 35 classes this summer, starting next week.
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A conference at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, April 11-13, 2008.
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Kathleen McConnell on Free Universities David Boehnke on Free Universities Betsy Barnum on Planning for Next Year’s… Todd Suomela on Planning for Next Year’s… Richard Ohmann on Planning for Next Year’s…
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David Cerniglia
Response to “Classes in Advanced Fantasy: A Brief History of The Free University.”
A very interesting, wonderfully concise paper!
I wonder what this topic can tell us about the way in which freedom is theorized/practiced, particularly in the context of the Vietnam War, the post WWII class deal and the class and race status of most of the original free schoolers…and the way that this is re-articulated in this paper in the neoliberal context.
The polls of relevance/irrelevance, demanding/undemanding, make the most sense to me not in the context of education per se, but in relation to the world we want.
-Are these educational spaces themselves, the world we want, the good life?
-Do these educational spaces create a relational infrastructure through which we can realize community or through which currents for social change can spring forth or be tapped?
-Do these educational spaces train us to build the world we want or figure out what that means or connect us with our fellow organizers?
-Do these educational spaces allow ourselves to articulate ourselves as individuals and as people?
The demand for non-demanding or demanding irrelevance in education, it seems to me, have more to do with a rejection of a particular work/reproduction-system, and as such create a kind of present no-place, rather than the real task of building and living out the world that we want.
It is the relation between education and the world we want that to me provides the ideal criteria for any particular educational space. Are we coming here to have a good time? Are we coming here to gain a skill that will allow us to have a better quality of life, individually or collectively? Are we coming here to gain a sense of self and self-confidence? Are we coming here to meet others or to connect with people who make us believe, again, that another world is possible? Do we come here to find others to bring into our movement? Are we coming here because we are required by law, or because otherwise we will be at the mercy of the workplace?
While obviously our goals don’t have to be singular, any particular ven diagram will have a different feel, and should be judged by different standards. As such I demand relevance and irrelevance, demanding and non-demanding education! Of course why demand education at all?
While many important social change movements have had more or less connected educational arms, education is rarely the most effective way to make social change. Again, the relation to the alternative—the workplace or prison—its existence as a highly valuable commodity, and its idealized setting as in the heart of a relatively strong community, are key factors in making education attractive.
However, this analysis treats education as equivalent to the work-relation, as a functional full time thing, again disconnecting it from the world we want. Making education political, it seems to me, is to put it in the context of living as a whole—like we see among much of the working class—as opposed to viewing it as a work-site with its own rules of struggle. The work-site itself is that which must be abolished.
The struggle for me then, is to see the University as a commons, and to articulate it as such for students and for the larger community. To challenge workers in Universities of all sorts to see themselves as tenders of this commons, which among other things means valuing non-knowledge produces as knowledge producers.
If we are to see academics as being forced from a state-based ruling class model to commodity producers in a global market, be it research, legitimation, or degrees, the commoning process will be attained by commonizing these commodities and figuring out how to do this—a deepening in seriousness of the internet for example, an attack on capitalism and other forms of oppression, and a recognition of and vitalization, in value and joy, of the knowledge produced by all people at all times. An exploding of walls, a supporting and building of social movements, a reclamation of value and control across society, are what I see as important pieces of building a fragile, educational part of the world we want.
db
dboehnke(at)gmail(d0t)com
David - I greatly appreciate your response to my paper and enjoyed reading your thoughts. If I understand, you’re suggesting a re-structuring of educational institutions that would soften the current distinctions we have for formal and informal schooling. Education may not be an effective vehicle for social change, but I believe it is valuable one because of how it _differs_ from the other institutions you mentioned. Again, I would defend the formality and institutionality of school for no other reason than it provides us a unique space in which to fulfill our social obligations - and define those obligations. This is where the analogy between school/the workplace, and education/labor falls apart for me. If we can only ever perceive those obligations as a form of labor, then I believe we will continue to use neoliberal logics to understand those obligations. I am suggesting that we begin to think of education in other terms and re-appropriate the existing institution.