University of the Commons
= based in the Bay Area, U.S.A.
URL =
Description
Yael Chanoff:
"The University of the Commons (UOTC) dove into its schedule of free, open to all classes a few weeks ago, and the effort is growing.
In a panel discussion at the summer session's launch June 2, speakers placed the school in a radical context, mentioning other efforts such as D-Q University and Black Panther liberation schools like the Oakland Community School.
The group's mission statement says that the UOTC "aims to inspire participants to evolve more equitable and just societies and live more empowered and fulfilling lives." The school isn’t accredited and students won’t get any formal acknowledgment of having taken classes there.
It does, however, have some system-approved teachers. Dr. Barbara-Ann Lewis, who is teaching a class called Science Literacy to any and all who show up, is no newbie. She received her PhD in Soil Science from UC Berkeley in 1971, worked as a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory for seven years, and then taught environmental engineering at Northwestern for another 27. Since then she worked a stint as a violin-maker (“it’s good to have a trade,” she told me).
So what’s a pro like Lewis doing in a place like this? For her, its almost civic duty. “I want to teach the public,” she said. “The public votes, but has no idea about some of the real science behind the environmental issues.”
But in many of her university classes, “I had the standard students. They pay tuition, they come in, they don’t know too much about what’s going on in the world. They’ve lost their curiosity.
She found students with that curiosity in her experience teaching with the Free University of San Francisco last year, Lewis says. “I had an 18-year-old and I had a 50-year-old in the class, lots of kinds of people, who all wanted to learn.”” (http://www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision/2012/06/22/free-classes-all)