External Program

External Program is a new online education platform organised by The Public School and AAAARG.ORG Motivated by Gilles Deleuze's 1989 entreaty to 'look for new weapons', it is orientated away from certification and employability and towards learning for its own sake. People have been invited to participate in the collective creation of its curriculum by offering to teach something or requesting a lecture on a particular topic.

The first three classes have now been selected and will take place at Wide Open School. The classes will be filmed and made freely accessible online shortly thereafter on the External Program website - thepublicschool.org/externalprogram/

The first sequence of lectures for Wide Open School set up a psychosocial constellation of concepts for analysing the present state of crisis and imagining exit strategies.

Each of the three classes begins with a 30- to 60-minute lecture and is followed by an intimate discussion, lasting between 1-2 hours, providing time for questions, elaboration and debate.

10am, Friday 6 July
Sharing - Sean Dockray defines sharing, posing it as an example of an alternative economy that is not based on exchange. Will our sharing today lead to an autonomy from the market or a higher form of exploitation?
Approximate duration - 3 hours

11am, Saturday 7 July
Egoism - Federico Campagna approachs egoism and individualist anarchism using Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own to read Fernando Passoa (aka Baron of Teive)'s only surviving manuscript, The Education of the Stoic, each in relation to contemporary psychic dynamics and resistance.
Approximate duration - 2 hours

11am, Sunday 8 July
Depression - Mark Fisher proposes that there is a social and political cause for much of our depression today. Rather than continue to treat depression privately, how might we convert it into a collective political anger?
Approximate duration - 2 hours

Approximate durationn - 2 to 3 hours.

The Public School (initiated 2007 by Sean Dockray, in Los Angeles, USA)
As stated on its website, The Public School is ‘a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows - first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this), then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes, finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.’
After operating for a year in Los Angeles, new schools, following the same model, were started elsewhere in America, and then further chapters opened in other parts of the world, including Brussels, Berlin, Helsinki and Durham. As the website explains - ‘Each chapter functions independently yet stays in keeping with the original mission ... Most importantly, The Public School provides any curious person with access to an underrepresented educational model.’