Yesterday I went to the Really Free School, a space invented by a collection of proactive individuals in the wake of an education increasingly becoming threatened by supermarket aisle logic. The Really Free School indeed professes to be free - and it is. 'You will not spend one penny inside these doors...' they say. It is also free in the sense that it is transient, unanchored and manoeuvrable, both in the sense that the schedule and topics covered are in constant flux, dependent simply on what sessions people want to propose, announced a couple of days before they are due; and that hired thugs turn up to eject them from their premises, and court proceedings linger threateningly. Happily though, no one seems too troubled but these somewhat empty threats.
Having previously been based in a house in Bloomsbury Square and Guy Ritchie's house in Fitzrovia, in obviously fun but unstable circumstances, the Really Free School seems to have settled for now in a pub, The Black Horse, near Oxford Street. That's where I went yesterday, having been intrigued by a lecture on the Middle-East.
On one of those pub-sign-balckboard-things you get outside pubs was scrawled a few of the events that were taking place. Another sign just inside the door had the schedule of classes happening that day. Such delights included Indonesian Lessons, ethnomusicology, a workshop by the Paper and the Middle-East history lesson I had gone for.
I chatted to a couple of chaps manning the door for a while, who are effectively living in this pub. They told of the ups and downs of their precarious existence spreading the good word of education. A bashed up piano was there. I sipped my coffee and gormed at things. An anti-capitalist banner spread across the inner wall, and I new I was in the right place.
I was directed upstairs to where the Middle-East class was due to be held, and I wandered into a room containing what can only be described as a 'circle group'. I've been in the vicinity of many of these recently. This one was slightly different as someone was sitting in the middle, presumably a kind of focal point of the discussion, a target of interrogation. The content had a revolutionary spirit, an analysis of the protests in Egypt and Libya and their analogous qualities to things happening back in happily democratic Britain.
I assumed the Middle-East class was next, so I slunk into a corner, found a chair a positioned myself upon it. No one questioned me, included me, or noticed me - it was business as usual. Then someone else came in and asked 'is this the Middle-East?' 'I think it's upstairs,' someone replied.
There was another upstairs. Stupidly I had remained in mere id territory, I still had another flight of stairs before reaching the ego. I went up too far, found come bedrooms, mattresses on the floor, sleeping bags, and went down again. I found a small collective preparing for the talk. A blackboard lay horizontally on a table with a map of the Middle-East on it, all in an unassuming beige room, where the windows failed to keep out the busyness of Oxford Street down below. As I enjoyed the juxtaposition, the talk started.
For one and a half hours this young guy, a student from SOAS, traced the history of the Middle-East from Muhammad to now, pointing out the misconceptions along the way; illuminating the complexities and ambiguities of territorial and religious stand-offs; the golden cultural ages, the inventions of writing and the wheel in the Persia/Iraq areas; the merits of Islam and the impact of Orientalism.
Sitting on benches and on the floor, our teacher found an attentive audience, peering over the map, making suitable noises when something clicked. The class came to an end and a more casual type of general chit-chat continued - the current turbulence in the middle east; what was going on later in the free school; how cool this whole thing is. I peered across the room, watching these intrepid conversationalists and keen learners, all so encouraged by the advance of the School, and slipped out the door. Down the superego-staircase, passing the continuing circle group, down down down back towards the cruel reality that was Central London outside, it's gates open and beckoning.
On the ground floor another class was underway: a discussion on disability activism was in full swing, impassioned and good-natured exchanges zig-zagging across a crumbling table, shiny with the beer stains of its previous life. I eased past and went outside.
Their radical anti-establishment ideology maybe a bit naive, as some have said, but it has a kind of from-the-rubble-build-something-great optimism. It also importantly contributes to the continuing debate that is surrounding education now, manages to avoid being a Big Society bastard, is fun and makes a mess. For a pleasant, learned experience in a place that welcomes all, you could do far worse, and someone who lacks my social ineptitude could really flourish here, provide their own lectures, man the door with the other revolutionaries, penetrate the circle group of dissent.
Go forth, intrepid rogue - heed the call of the Really Free School!
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