An article about Toronto free school Anarchist U in the Globe and Mail homes in on AU’s secret sauce: it’s organization.
“We’re not an anarchist university in the way that the Marxist Institute teaches Marxism; we were not trying to teach anarchism,” says Dr. O’Connor, a Trent University professor who left Anarchist U shortly after its birth to write a book on punk record labels. “We were organized on anarchist principles” — consensus decision-making, decentralized organizing and a non-hierarchical structure in classes and meetings, according to the school’s website.
“Our classes have a fair amount of structured content,” Mr. Stewart says. “This tends to give a higher quality of experience in that it forces the facilitator to seriously consider precisely what they’re teaching, it gives people at an Anarchist U meeting the chance to review and make suggestions, and it allows people coming to the class to know what they are going to learn.”
Accompanying that structure is the dismantling of the traditional relationship between teacher and student.
“There’s less of an idea that one person is an expert and other people are there to have their empty heads filled with the boundless knowledge of one expert,” says Jason Dippel, who has taken seven courses with Anarchist U (including the Psychedelic Century and Radical Perspectives on Media), and this term is teaching Questioning Masculinity at Bike Pirates, a communal bicycle-repair space on Bathurst Street.
(Thanks, Possum!)
See also:
Toronto’s Anarchist U open for enrollment
AnarchistU, Toronto’s wiki-based free school
AnarchistU: Toronto free school