New weekly event starting in april 2023, every sunday from 6 till 8pm, Radical Sunday School. First edition on sunday 2nd april 2023, Introduction // On Teaching.
As students are protesting the university, calling for the democratisation, decarbonisation, and decolonisation of their education, the Radical Sunday School is opening weekly to discuss the failings of our current educational system and imagine new ways to learn. As Paolo Freire believed, education can be an emancipatory tool, liberating consciousness, and widen the options for action – and of course, it can take place anywhere, and at any time. In this ‘school’, everyone, students and not-students, is invited to participate. We will decide on the content and form freely. The options for things to discuss are endless: What is the point of today’s educational system? What is it promising, what does it deliver? How is it funded? What counts as education? What would an abolition of the university entail? How do you actually decolonise education? Or democratise it? What is the history of the university? How do fossil fuels inform our beliefs on learning? Let’s follow whatever sounds interesting and worthwhile – whatever seems important enough to be learned.
The first session will be introductory, and we will gather ideas collectively on how we would like to run future sessions. This is not intended to be a course that you would have to follow all the way through. Jump in and out whenever you like. Sessions will be held every Sunday, except for every second Sunday of the month (when Joe’s Garage is having an open assembly). Come through, and let’s educate ourselves in ways not possible inside the silly institution that is called university.
If it so goes, there is one thing already planned that we can discuss for the first session, if we choose to do so, and it is a bit of an unorthodox mesh of things. Centering on the question of whether teaching is even possible, we can discuss the role education plays in our lives, the moments we teach and are being taught, and how different educational theories view teaching differently. It might be interesting to look at Danish Folk High Schools, their history and emergence as voluntary “schools for life”, their use of myth, story, and practical labour. It might even be interesting to think of Christian mystic and anarchist Simone Weil’s ideas on education and the practice of attention. Or Paolo Freire’s emancipatory and dialogical education aiming to stimulate a critical consciousness. Attention might drift elsewhere and we needn’t discuss this necessarily. It is merely a suggestion. Let’s see where we land together!
