Education for the People

Second Street Jazz

It has no curriculum, it’s not accredited, it has no affiliation with the public school system and it doesn’t offer degrees. 

by Catherine Wagely

The Public School’s (surprisingly successful) experiment in crowd-sourced education

The front window of the Telic Arts Exchange would be indistinguishable from its Chinatown neighbors, were it not for a blue neon sign sitting in the window’s far right corner. Though tending to blend with Chinatown’s overabundance of neon, closer inspection will reveal that this sign buzzes with the curious inscription of: THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. The storefront’s aberrant use is revealed by a series of such quiet details. In its window are two small sheets of paper, pasted on the inside sill, that explain the school’s existence. It has no curriculum, it’s not accredited, it has no affiliation with the public school system and it doesn’t offer degrees. But it does offer curious people a chance to learn. And what’s more, they get to learn what they want.

Today’s class, “Analyzing WikiLeaks,” has a relatively lax agenda. According to the online description, it aims to, “explore the substance and structure of the WikiLeaks site, and its implications behind mainstream op-ed characterizations.” It makes the class sound headier than it is. Really, everyone here just wants to understand how WikiLeaks works and whether it matters. Now in its fourth week, the class alternates between workshops and discussions. On workshop days, a data visualization specialist named Josh helps participants create visualization techniques to make sense of the data dumps on Julian Assange’s site. On days like today, the goal is to talk.

People trickle in slowly, and the 4 p.m. class doesn’t actually begin until 4:30. We have to wait until after coffee has been made. The massive table that dominates the room (it’s longer than eight feet on each side) has been around since before the school began. In fact, according to Public School committee member Liz Glynn, it was made for an exhibition that occurred before Telic Arts Exchange transitioned from gallery to classroom, and it may be the school’s most constant feature.

The Public School began in 2007, with meetings held in the basement of Telic’s former Chung King Road location. When Fiona Whitton, who has a background in architecture, and media artist Sean Dockray founded Telic in 2003, it functioned as an alternative gallery space, hosting performances, exhibitions and screenings. But what came to best describe Telic’s oeuvre was the word “event.”

“A lot of people who had been doing media art had begun to work relationally,” Glynn points out. Telic made the shift with them.

“I began with a concept, which was a school that was sort of a blank canvas,” Dockray told writer David Elliot in 2008. People would propose classes based on what they wanted to learn, or someone with a particular interest or skill to share could propose to teach. The school would run on a donation basis (a recommended $5 per class, sometimes more if classes require special equipment), and, at first, Dockray and Whitton thought it would interact with Telic’s exhibitions.

Occasionally, it did. For instance, artist Rachel Mayeri organized a Jane Goodall inspired course on “How to Act Like an Animal,” which culminated with a performance in the upstairs gallery. But as the school became more absorbing, the exhibitions began to seem less essential.

Dockray and Whitton established a fluid committee-it changes every few months-to review proposals and, with the help of committee members, created an online network for submitting and discussing class ideas. By 2009, they’d moved to their current space at 951 Chung King Road, and Public Schools based on the L.A. model had started popping up in other parts of the country, then other parts of the world (the Berlin school just opened this year). According to current committee member Solomon Bothwell, you could divide classes into three categories: those that are craft-related, like carpentry or coffee roasting; tech-driven, like 3-D modeling; or idea-based, like classes on Marx or Los Angeles poetry. “But you don’t have to see it that way at all,” says Bothwell. Even classes that seem totally different tend to feed into each other somehow (Bothwell himself facilitated a coffee roasting workshop and a class on the development of manifestos).

“It’s unlike most education, where you would look at a class for its functionality,” says Adam Katz, who managed the L.A. school before helping to found the school in New York. “You can do things at The Public School that aren’t about what you’re able to get out of them.”

It’s more about the experience of doing them with other interested (and interesting) people-though the experience shifts as often as do the people. “It’s very personality driven,” says Glynn. But personalities tend to come and go organically, leaving some residue of themselves behind. “There’s a nice kind of layering that happens here, not like in a normal school.”

“Analyzing WikiLeaks” gets off to a rocky start. A few of us are new to the school, and it’s not quite clear how to best approach the discussion. But we begin to get the hang of each other, and smart comments get made, about privacy, protests, Facebook and the one-man show of Julian Assange. I remember that this is how good seminars always worked, in college: you’d feel each other out, and eventually, in the best situations, you’d start bouncing ideas around the room in a way that felt almost inspired. The inspiration hasn’t hit yet, but it feels like it will, and that potential is enough to make me want to keep coming to class.

 

The Public School is located at 951 Chung King Road. Class times vary. Suggested donation for a class is $5. For class times, and information about upcoming classes, visit la.thepublicschool.org

ADVERTISEMENT