Thomas Gokey‘s great list of Alternative Schools.  Reproduced here because I don’t trust the Internet.  Added to below

The Art School in the Art School (Syracuse)

The Art School in The Art School (The AS in The AS) seeks to generate a creative and intellectual community through an open school / open source structure. Through activities such as classes, discussions, forming groups of interest, reading groups, critique groups, workshops, eating and drinking, publishing, and making, The AS in the AS seeks to create an experimental environment for shared inquiry. All events are FREE and open to the public.

The school exists in relation (opposition, subversion, supplement, mimicry) to Syracuse University’s School of Art and Design, which embodies typical US art school and university educational practices.

The AS in The AS is a platform for self-organization: its activities are generated through suggestions, proposals, conversations, and finding ways to make things happen.

The University For Strategic Optimism (England)

Our basic public services, we are told, are simply too expensive. They must be thrown under the wheels ofthe megalithic debt that bears down upon us. They must be privatised, corporatised and commodified. All this so we can ensure the continuation of a system that funnels wealth into the hands of a privileged few. This failed and flailing market system, we are told, is the only one that is possible, drastic cuts the only alternative, the fairest thing to do. Any deviation from the path laid out for us will unleash the worst imaginable, a media-imagined Worst that threatens from our darkened skies.

This course offers an emphatic No! to this description of our current situation, and sees instead a magnificent opportunity, a multiplication of possibilities, the opening of a space in which we might think about, and bring about, a fairer and wealthier society for all. In short: Many good reasons for strategic optimism! High profile economists from all sides tell us that the cuts make no fiscal sense. This course seeks to move beyond this point, to interrogate how the cuts make sense, to whom, according to which logic. It urges a rampant questioning of the ideological basis for the relentless privitisation and privation of our lives: Are these cuts incoherent, as some have said? Or is this a specific move/set of moves on the part of neo-liberal capital? Are labour, education, healthcare, and the environment, mere commodities, to be consumed by those who will redeem them as more capital? Can the opposition to cuts begin moving towards a society ‘fit for purpose’? Is it still easier to imagine The End-of-the-World than The End-of-Capitalism?

The Experimental College (Saint Paul/Minneapolis)

At EXCO, the Experimental College of the Twin Cities, everyone can teach or take classes and all classes are free. EXCOtc is a collective of Experimental Colleges in the Twin Cities that shares visions of a better world, offers free and open classes and is building a community around education for social change.

The Public School (Brussels, Chicago, Helsinki, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, San Juan)

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 (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.

The Gandhigram Rural University

Gandhigram was born  in 1947. A team of dedicated disciples and contemporaries of Gandhiji, Dr.T.S.Soundaram and Dr.G.Ramachandran, developed Gandhigram, the home of many rural development programmes.

The Gandhigram Rural Institute (GRI) was founded in 1956.  With undying faith and deep devotion to Mahatma Gandhi’s revolutionary concept of ‘Nai Talim’ system of education, Gandhigram Rural Institute has developed academic programmes in Rural Development, Rural Economics and Extension Education, Rural Oriented Sciences, Cooperation, Development Administration, Rural Sociology, English and Communicative Studies, and, Tamil and Indian Languages. Students who emerge from its portals tend to meet the personnel needs for rural development under various governmental and non-governmental schemes.

[...]

Today, it has become a nationally and internationally recognised Institute for its contribution to rural education, so much so that the New Education Policy of the Nation reflects the principles evolved here in developing the rural university concept.

Started  in a small way, the Institute has developed into a big educational complex, comprising seven different faculties, offering in all about fifty different programmes. It awards Doctoral, Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees, Diplomas and Certificates through its seven academic faculties: Rural Development, Rural Social Sciences, Rural Oriented Sciences, English and Foreign Languages, Tamil, Indian Languages & Rural Arts, Rural Health & Sanitation, and, Agriculture & Animal Husbandry. It has, at present, about 2300 students and 125 teaching and 250 non-teaching staff.  The programmes offered here have attracted students from abroad every year.

16Beaver (New York)

16Beaver is the address of a space initiated/run by artists to create and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production, and discussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects. It is the point of many departures/arrivals.

The Independent School of Art (Pittsburgh)

The Independent School of Art is an experimental art school that autonomously operates without external resources, accreditation, or a physical site. Run solely through the labor and efforts of its participants, the school fosters an action-based approach to college-level arts education, a real-world model where students are challenged to determine and create their own artistic realities. The school’s barter-based tuition system makes explicit the social contract between students and teachers and honors their collective labor as a vital form of cultural production. Locating nomadically, the school prioritizes social over physical architecture, and asks all involved to imagine how their practice might intersect and respond to a larger set of physical situations and cultural possibilities.

The ISA complements its curricular offerings with student and faculty designed exhibitions, fundraisers, lectures, grants, publications and now a play. These multi-disciplinary public actions are a central part of the school’s pedagogy, and serve a vital function by engaging the students in the direct creation of public culture. The ISA is designed for continual reinvention and experimentation, changing each season to reflect the ambitions, personalities and abilities of those in its community.

AnarchistU (Toronto)

The Anarchist U is an open, volunteer-run, non-hierarchical collective that organizes community events, workshops and a variety of courses on arts and sciences. Most courses run for ten weeks, and meet once a week. There are no admission fees.

We offer an open, collaborative, radical way of learning built on democratic models of education, structure and process. We are working to build a vibrant and productive community free from the struggles for power, profit and prestige that are the consequences of existing social and economic structures. The AFU also acts as a space that critiques the ongoing forms of oppression that result from this.

The Anhoek School (New York)

The Anhoek School is an educational experiment. It investigates alternatives to traditional American education at a moment in time when many experimental schools have closed (Black Mountain School and Antioch College) or ceased to develop inventive and/or radical methodologies.

In short, The Anhoek School is an experimental all-women’s graduate school. The curriculum is based on cultural production (political, aesthetic, and theoretical). Classes are small (5 to 7 people). Tuition costs are mediated by a barter system; that is students labor for the school in exchange for classes. The location of the school shifts according to invitation or the the topic of the course. To date, workshops and classes have been held in Brooklyn, New York and Marfa, Texas.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation University (New York)

Something’s got to give. The $200,000-debt-model of art education is simply untenable. Further, the education artists are getting for their money is mired in irrelevance, pushing them into critical redundancy on the one hand and professional mediocrity on the other. Blind romanticism and blind professionalism are in a false war alienating artists from their better histories.

At root, it’s a form/content problem. Arts education is divided between the practical problems of form (e.g., money: how to get it, raise it, administer it, and please the powers that control it) and the slippery problems of metaphor (e.g., education: how to learn, what to learn, why to learn).
Artists are the people who spend their time figuring out how best to resolve form and content problems. That’s what we do when we stretch a canvas, edit a video, implement a social space, and develop a history. It is both reasonable and generatively ridiculous to believe that artists ought to be figuring out how arts education should work. This is the premise of BHQFU: that artists can figure this thing out.

Tent State University

Tent State University is a national movement (started at Rutgers in 2003) that believes democracy and education are inseparable social rights that belong to everyone.
Tent State wishes to dispel the myth of a “budget crisis,” which is used as an excuse year after year to justify cuts to social capital like education, while money for wars of aggression or corporate welfare is always available. This is a crisis of values and leadership. This is important now more than ever in this global economic meltdown.
Tent State is a space where students, faculty, staff, community members and organizations can come together and practice democracy. Only by building our own institutions of art, politics, and education can we generate enough social power to change the undemocratic structures and practices of our universities and society.

University of the People

University of the People (UoPeople) is the world’s first tuition free online academic institution dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education. The high-quality low-cost global educational model embraces the worldwide presence of the Internet and dropping technology costs to bring university level studies within reach of millions of people across the world. With the support of respected academics, humanitarians and other visionaries, the UoPeople student body represents a new wave in global education.

Peer 2 Peer University

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources. The P2PU helps you navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and we are building pathways to formal credit as well.

Open Badges Project

# Today’s learning happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it’s often difficult to get credit for it.
# Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are working to solve this problem by developing an Open Badges infrastructure.
# Our system will make it easy for education providers, web sites and other organizations to issue badges that give public recognition and validation for specific skills and achievements.
# And provide an easy way for learners tomanage and display those badges across the web — on their personal web site or resume, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere.
# The result: Open Badges will help learners everywhere unlock career and educational opportunities, and regonize skills that traditional resumes and transcripts often leave out.

The Saxifrage School (Pittsburgh)

A Saxifrage School student does not need to “enter the world” upon graduation because they have already been in it. Rather than moving home, they find that they have already made a new home for themselves in the campus’ neighborhood and are more than capable of taking care of themselves. They continue in the work of their life with money in their pocket and enjoy the freedom that comes upon renovating their home, maintaining their vehicle, and growing their own food. After completing two very different fields of study, they recognize the value of a balance between physical and intellectual work. The graduate has their choice of employment because they have versatile and proven skills, speak fluent Spanish, and–since they owe no money–have loose salary requirements. They paid for an education that was simple and honest: a transaction between the teacher and the student.

Free University of Los Angeles

“We will have our own schools that are not designed to re-produce ignorance, obedience, helpless docility, fear, and hate”

University of Openess

The University of Openess is a framework in which individuals and organisations can persue their shared interest in emerging forms of cultural production and critical reflection such as unix, cartography, physical and collaborative research. Campus at Limehouse Town Hall, London.

Manoa Free University

The MFU is dedicated to the quest for alternative emancipative structures – main research fields for now are collective organizing, anarchitecture, soundings and political subjectivities, maybe they can be connected by some weird naval activities.

Informelle Universität in Gründung

Informelle Universität in Gründung: die Idee ist, ein Netzwerk zu schaffen, in dem wir, soziale Veränderungen im Sinn, Resourcen und Produktionsmittel teilen. Dieser Raum soll uns als Grundlage dienen Wissen zu produzieren, zu verbreiten und im Spannungsfeld von Form (Strukturen), Kultur und Gesellschaft zu recherchieren.

L’universite tangente

L’université tangente est une université zéro. Elle se constitue en rupture avec les recherches scientifiques, les productions et transmissions de connaissance, les pratiques culturelles et artistiques domestiquées par l’État ou le marché.