About “Free Skool”
About Ashland Free Skool (Occupy Ashland Free School Collective):
Occupy Ashland Free School Collective (a.k.a. Ashland Free Skool) is a decentralized and experimental education project drawing heavily from the practical and direct application of revolutionary social justice to education.We are affiliated with, support, and are organized around Occupy Ashland. An experiment in community, self-expression, and self-reliance, we remain firmly rooted in direct experience. We believe that true community power resides in the peoples’ unconstrained access to knowledge and education. As such, we are striving to create a decentralized network of community citizens of all ages in the Rogue Valley area who want to both teach and receive teaching by freely sharing skills, knowledge, and information. For more on the “Occupy movement” visit our links section.
Statement of Intention:
Our intention is to encourage self-reliance in the community, develop a consciousness of alternative methods of education , and create an egalitarian learning environment outside of the widely accepted monetary economic education system in order to help individuals and communities identify and resist authoritarian tendencies . We do this for the goal of fostering stronger and deeper community roots ,knowledge, and individual self-awareness.
About Free Skool Organization:
A Free Skool is not an institutionalized structure that disseminates knowledge in a traditional academic manner. A Free Skool maintains a philosophy of non-hierarchical, open-structure collaboration and mutual aid between community members who simply find importance in freely sharing knowledge with one another. Our idea of “free” refers not only to freedom from financial payment for knowledge, but also to the freedom to participate in mindful speech, peaceful assembly, and the birth of new ideas. There is no centralized location for a Free Skool — any Place in the community can be a classroom in the Free Skool. Community members can open their homes to conduct cooking classes, discussion groups, and workshops. Free Skool teachers can also use free public spaces and parks to conduct dance classes, music workshops, or environmental education courses. Business owners in the community can open their space to host Free Skool courses. The Place does not matter — only the presence of community members, and a willingness to both offer knowledge and mindfully receive it in return.
What You Really Need To Know
A radically different approach to living and learning, Occupy Ashland Free School Collective is a grassroots educational project beyond institutional control. It is an opportunity to learn from each other and share what we know, to foster communities of mutual aid and autonomy.
We see Free Skool as a direct challenge to dominant institutions and hierarchical relationships. The project strives to blur the lines between teacher, learner, and organizer. Free Skool is decentralized. Free Skool IS dual power.
Part of creating a new world is resistance to the old one. Through this project, we want to change the way we learn and the way we relate to each other.
What does the “free” in Free Skool mean?
Free as in free expression, free thought, and liberation. We try to keep Free Skool firmly fixed in a gift economy and outside the stream of commerce. While some teachers may ask for a donation to cover materials, no one is turned away for a lack of funds.
WE are organized within the horizontal structure of Occupy Together, namely Occupy Ashland. We DO NOT speak for the movement by ANY means, we simply support and work to foster free education, community, and mutual aid within Occupy Ashland and the greater community, whether that is bioregional or geographical . ~SOLIDARITY~.
