Education for Liberation
Full Tuition: $300 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Madden | Tuesdays | September 5-October 3 | 7:00-9:00 PM ET | ONLINE
Traditional education is often alienating and exclusive. That’s why Night School Bar is intentionally nothing like Harvard or Columbia. Instead, it resonates with other non-institutional models that center liberation, not job credentials. For example, we see kin in the Worker Writers School in New York, which supports working-class people to author poetry, and the Du Bois Movement School in Philadelphia, which teaches political economy to those most impacted by policing, environmental racism, poverty, and other oppressive structures. These projects similarly have arguably little in common with the most familiar forms of education.
Education for Liberation will focus on the spaces communities are currently building and the ideas they are generating in response to their critiques of higher education—which is exclusionary, recognizes and rewards only particular kinds of knowledge, and is a form of debt production. How are people who care about public libraries, people who are doing mutual aid work, and people who have been made to feel like learning is not for them, imagining “school” anew? Our course will center materials produced by these unique projects, and we will analyze how they talk about education—what counts as education, who is deserving of access, what is its purpose, and where are the spaces education happens? We will study how these projects imagine teaching and adult learning, and how they intend to support community, creativity, joy, and liberation.
Classes are recorded to allow for students to participate asynchronously. If you want to take a class but cannot make the class time, sign up for the asynchronous audit option to follow along on your own. Recordings are password protected and will only be available for the duration of the class and two weeks after it ends.
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Night School Bar pays instructors and staff a living wage, and your tuition goes toward supporting this practice. Please pick the payment tier that corresponds to your needs, and consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We will never request or require proof of need, and do not use an income-based sliding scale; we trust you to decide what payment tier is right for you. If you would like additional support deciding or would like to learn more about the practice of using a sliding scale, we recommend this resource from Embracing Equity.
We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class, and one full scholarship per person per term. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out or you would like to pay tuition on an installment basis, please email us directly, and we will work with you.
If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After that point, we are able to offer 50% refunds.