Kin Projects, Organizations, Sources

The University of Masters: Professor-led authorial education. This can take many forms but amounts to the same thing: The University of Masters. Master (in a medieval sense -- e.g., professor-expert) defines the nature of education for their students (apprentices): what is education, what to study, how to study, with whom, where, when, how to assess their students, when to stop to study, when to expel a student, when and how to reward and punish a student, and so on. Master is an acclaimed virtuoso-practitioner and authorial educator. Here are examples of such Masters: Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, Dmitry Bykov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Vladimir Bibler, Cornel West, Barbara Rogoff, Jean Lave, Richard Feynman, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Martin Duberman, Ira Shor, Alexander Lobok, and so on. Students (apprentices) usually voluntarily, but unconditionally, submit themselves to their Master for the Master’s demands. The Master rules: “My way or the highway!” Students can make suggestions but it is up to the Master to accept or reject them. Sometimes Masters may organize themselves in loose guilds for coordination, sharing resources, and mutual support, which, however, usually do not limit their pedagogical and practical authorship and creativity.

The Free Moscow University (Russia)
The Independent Moscow University (Russia)
The University of Probabilistic Education: The Authorial University of Alexander Lobok (Russia)
The Shuri Democratic University (Japan)
The Izmir Democratic University (Turkey)
Coursera (USA, international)
Socrates cafe (USA, international)

AERO (Alternative Education Resource Organization)
"The Islands of Freedom in Education" FaceBook group (Russia)

"The Free University: Education without an institution?" 10 September 2020 (in Russian)
"Build a school in the cloud" by Sugata Mitra, February 2013 (in English with multilingual subtitles)

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Cobban, A. B. (1980). Student power in the Middle Ages. History Today, 30(2).
Duberman, M. B. (1969). An experiment in education. In M. B. Duberman (Ed.), The uncompleted past (pp. 259-294). New York: Random House.
Duberman, M. B. (2009). Black Mountain: An exploration in community. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Grant, G., & Riesman, D. (1978). The perpetual dream: Reform and experiment in the American college. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Phillips, C. (2002). Socrates café: A fresh taste of philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton.
Plato. (1961). Meno. Cambridge, UK: University Press.
Rogers, C. R. (1994) As a teacher, can I be myself? (Ch. 4, pp. 41-68). In Rogers, C. R., & Freiberg, H. J., Freedom to learn. New York: Merrill and Maxwell Macmillan International.
Shor, I. (1996). When students have power: Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shugurova, O., Matusov, E., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2022). The University of Students: A place for joint self-education. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 10, E1-E42, doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497. Retrieved from https://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/dpj1/article/view/497/238.

University of Students (UniS) is a non-profit project. It is an educational space, online and offline, built on horizontal connections among people and among the communities that emerge here.