Sarasota+Free+Skool

Sarasota Free Skool is a radical approach to education, seeking to build communities, remove barriers to knowledge, and foster free and voluntary association in education. Yet it is not alone or the first in this, as it stems from a rich history of free skools throughout the years and across the world.

We are looking to build a decentralized network of people who are both teachers and students, and collect our knowledge in ways that are meaningful and lead to the flourishing of ourselves and our community-at-large. We want to encourage self-reliance, raise consciousnesses, and make education a horizontal-not-vertical experience.

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 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 Sarasota/Bradenton 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.

We in the Free Skool truly believe that Sarasota and Bradenton possess an amazing potential to be a leader by example in our nation. We believe that our city, with us taking an active part in it, can become a national example of a fair, just, and conscious political system, of real Community, and of green and sustainable growth. Our hope is to manifest these things in any way we can, and we believe that the Free Skool will facilitate the growth of these already-existent ideals. We are all teachers, we are all students; we all have something to share with our friends! Won’t you join us on our journey toward Community?

http://sarasotafreeskool.wordpress.com/ (outdated) https://www.facebook.com/groups/285662858131690/