After I’d run the Free Learning Exchange for a couple of years I got a call from the New School for Social Research. They wanted me to teach a course on free learning at their university! Tuition administered by a bureaucracy? degree credit? grades?! They too saw the irony.
But: I was desperately broke! They offered $1,000: one hour a week, one semester: and, they offered me a course in my regular field: literature, same price, another grand: Prophetic Novels of the Twentieth Century: the title already advertised by someone else, but they’d give the actual class to me if I’d do the free learning one. So: I wrote flyers for both. Here’s the flyer for free learning:
New School free learning flyer
I don’t know how many readers will be able to decypher the Paul Knatz biography part, but I’ll tell you: I had a fight with them on that score and I won. The New School wanted to list me in the catalogue with all my degrees etc. Absolutely not, that’s a violation of deschooling principles: show, don’t tell. Paper credentials should be taboo if not verbotten: asking someone where they went to school should be the height of vulgarity. I was the only faculty listed with a track record but with no school record. Did anyone get it? I have no idea. Quite likely not. I have little evidence that anyone ever got anything I said, or did. On the other hand, putting me in jail, blackballing me … at least they’re afraid of me.
Hell, while I’m at it, here’s the flyer for the lit course too: the gals were wowed by my description!
flyer for pk''s lit course at New School
Yeah, I like that Pound quote too.
