radicalsundayschool.noblogs.org
From their website:
Radical Sunday School is an anarchist (anti-authoritarian socialist) educational collective based in Amsterdam. We want to help our communities learn like they’re already free: free as in without charging money, free as in choosing for yourself what classes are about, free as in learning to free ourselves from bosses and bureaucrats. We also work to challenge the more subtle hierarchies of the classroom, like the rule of the expert over the amateur. In our classes, everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to contribute.
This is a neat idea but unfortunately the name and advertisement 100% read to me like this is Christian proselytizing. I wouldn’t expect secular education to be remotely part of this from just this material, and I wouldn’t even check out the website to confirm.
Considering this group is in Amsterdam, it may be that there isn’t as much of a religious backdrop to make people think of it like that. Admittedly I don’t know the demographics of the city, much less the country, enough to know whether that’s the case or not.
Very few Western countries are as fervently religious as the US. Amsterdam is 13% Christian and 62% no religion, so safe to say religion isn’t the first thing that would come to people’s minds there.
Yet, the Netherlands has its very own bible belt! There are quite a lot of conservative christians in the Netherlands, they just don’t live in Amsterdam. I don’t disagree though that religion is less at the forefront of public conversation than in the US.
Yeah, I’ll confess, this may be very largely an American perspective. I am in one of the least religious metro areas of the US, and it’s still 50%+ Christian. For anyone who has been near Christian conversion propaganda, there are a lot of red flags in that ad, but I also agree with some comments below that it doesn’t seem like a great pitch even in absence of that context. I’d want to know more about what is being taught and why before I would be interested.
I saw it in a left wing collective cafe on the bathroom wall, so I think in this context I never would have thiught about it like that
That’s fair! Context is key. I was thinking if I saw this on the street, I’d ignore it for the reasons above.
True, hackers meet on tuesdays https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/The_Tuesday_Pattern
Some friends I had in my 20s had a similar project in South St. Louis. Late 90s, early 2000s. Just folks running classes teaching eachother what they know. Learned to make burn balm from lavender, helped renovate and bring a house up to code, community gardening, bike shop, an arts center…lotta cool stuff can happen when people work together with a good mindset.
Got to say, I have a ton of things I want to do and rarely enough time. The pitch for this doesn’t strike me as appealing.
