Social Counterpoint: a theme is established, either chosen, discovered or forced on us. Then multiple agents of creation construct the theme in proximity to one another, at differing timings, creating a oneness of spirit from a diversity of voices. Corvid College is social counterpoint. This is the best kind of anarchy for the times. It is full, overflowing, distinct. It preserves and advances.
Anarchic: self-managed in spirit, horizontal in structure, inventive in economics, self-replicating. A place where you can experiment with and experience do-it-yourself community.
… for philosophers, artists, musicians, activists, inventors, poets, and social tinkers, providing pure education for cooperators, do-it-yourself-ers, initiators, creatives, the curious, the seeker, the self-starting, the reflective, the wonderer and wanderer
… offering diverse, liberating educational experiences in the Boston area
… for current homeschoolers, un-schoolers, and de-schoolers, but also for graduates of homeschooling, Sudbury schools, Waldorf schools, Montessori schools—you can direct your education here as well
… for anyone who was or is unsatisfied with the bureaucratic, hierarchical nightmare that is the education industry today
A college whose processes embody a society of autonomous and co-autonomous people. Students direct their own educational processes with teachers as educational friends. Teachers and students run their own lives. They do not await a new society; they are already the members of a new sociality.
Most classes are offered on a mutually agreed-upon financial basis. Construing economics differently in the college is almost as important as the alternative pedagogy and the non-standard course offerings.
We will practice what might be awkwardly called assisted autodidaction. We trust first in the basic notion (see the radical pedagogy reading list) that learning is anarchic, that it cannot be pre-determined by teachers, that next to nothing can be taught. We also know that it can be helpful to have a community of people at certain stages of life readily and reliably available to turn to for guidance. These are people who have been there, done that, who value learning as a way of life (unlike people who think learning is done early on). These teachers are available, in both organized course experiences and in independent studies, to assist the learner, who has primary responsibility for their education. Thus: assisted autodidaction.
NO! How we de-institutionalize the educative impulse. A Daoist philosophy of non-education
No grades, no majors, no degrees. No tenure, no rankings, no administration. No hiring, no admission. An education that is organized around competencies, projects, independent studies, and curiosity. An education that is recorded in portfolios of student work, not as GPAs, transcripts, or diplomas.
Illich reminds us that we can always “get along without” all of what follows. Let us make it true.
The full list of What we say No! to
Saying no to principles.
On not rejecting the educative impulse
Teaching is one person's act of creating a sociality through holding out something to be encountered. It occurs in classrooms, outside them, and certainly outside institutions. Without the institution, there is less danger of a teacher exercising the authority principle over a student. Yet, there is also less need to fear expressions of the educative impulse