Corvid College is an experiment in equalizing the place of teachers students and books in the things we do to fulfill our natural educative impulse. So, we conduct education in three ways. If conceived as circles, then each one centers on a different agent: teacher, student, text/object.
Teacher-centered: freedom of CHOICE
It may surprise you that we believe teachers are artists and needn't be subordinated to students. In this circle, the mode is courses, consistently unconventional ones offering people the opportunity to teach in their areas of interest, love, and mastery. In order actively to avoid and negate the authoritarian potentials of the teacher-centered approach, it is best to think of teachers as performers and students as researchers, in the artistic or creative sense, much like a performance artist, musician, poet, or actor is understood. In offering classes, teachers invite students to study, observe, participate in, and/or counteract and critique the work. Without obligations, regulations, standards, or credentialing, the teacher is on a stage and surrounded by people who voluntarily have come into the theater to witness and learn. The quality of the teaching performance and not the pedigree or level of degree should be the attractive force. Hence, though the courses have a strong center, these centers lack institutional authority and establishment coercion. Teachers in Corvid eschew all stink of obligation. Consequently, all courses are (art)works in progress, neither more or less creative, neither more or less justified. Functionally, each course is organized around a concept as a problem for living. In this circle the question is, how does the topic of the course provide a locus of emancipation?
The educational space of teacher-centered learning is more like an art studio and gallery than a supervised governed space, as in most classrooms. Its impetus and educative singularity comes from the energies of the teacher, but invites the collaboration of the student's energies.
Note: courses start and stop at many different times within each term. Check specific course descriptions for details.
Student-Centered: freedom of SELF-CREATION
A second role of teachers in the college is to serve as assistants and advisers for student-designed independent studies or researches, which differ from courses. Students discover what it is they want to know and then find advisers to help shape and carry out the study. These research friends sink into the background, while the researching student steps forward to define the project.
Text-Centered: freedom of THOUGHT
The Global Great Books curriculum
An all-required curriculum grappling with the foundational texts, objects and events of human life alongside classic anti-establishment, alter-cultural texts.
This circle provides a stable and conviviality-making means of fulfilling Illich's notion: educators (in the liberal education mode, not the skill-drilling mode) serve to help people with common interests meet to discuss texts of mutual interest and concern.
These courses are not organized around selected concepts, but around books, which allow for multiple conceptions and values. The critical function of each course is the facilitation of discussion, or shared inquiry. No single idea drives any text-centered course, but rather the ideas emerge from the interaction—and who can tell ahead of time the trajectory of the ideas in the lives of the participants. That's the adventure.
Enrollment
Enrollment in courses can occur at any time and is conducted online.
Setting up an independent study begins by contacting an appropriate teacher as guide.
Enrollment in the classics-dissent curriculum has not yet begun.
