Free Skools are decentralized networks that share skills, information, and knowledge without the limitations of hierarchy and the sterile institutional environment of formal schooling. Free Skools promote self-reliance, critical consciousness, and personal development, helping students make living connections between ourselves, our community, and the earth. Free Skools aim to give people skills not just to survive within the institutional framework imposed but to thrive without and beyond it.

This is our tribe to talk about Free Skools everywhere. Learn about how to make a Free Skool happen, how to keep it going, and what we are constantly learning. Figure out how to get involved and how to get others involved. We invite folks from Free Skools everywhere to share their experiences.

A Free Skool is neither a public school, nor a private school. It is related and grew out of the democratic school movement. It is, at-heart, non-institutional and non-authoritarian. Generally, it is a completely grassroots effort, a collection of individuals deciding to act collectively and autonomously to create educational opportunities and skill-sharing within their communities. As with all grassroots work, grassroots organizing is about ordinary people doing extraordinary work to improve the world we live in. It is about recruiting, training and mobilizing people to raise awareness and advocate for positive change.

Free skools often operate outside of the exchange economy in favor of being a part of the gift economy. While not always free in the monetary sense, free schools are free in the sense of free speech, not free beer.

http://tribes.tribe.net/freeskool