Category Archives: EDUCATION

In amongst the wild forests and fjords near the Nordic town of Rissa lies a small, hidden community: the Fosen Folk School. Part of Norway’s wider ‘folk high school’ pedagogy, the school takes an alternative approach to education, focussing on the development of practical, handcrafted skills for life rather than tests and grades. From tiny…

In 2001, two Danish artists, Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen set up a makeshift, educational experiment in their Copenhagen apartment: it was called The Copenhagen Free University (CFU). In the vein of utopian, liberal arts institutions like Black Mountain College and the Free University of New York, their venture was a reaction against the increasing…

Germany’s Kunstakademie Dusseldorf is widely recognised as one of the most radical art schools in the world. The 1960s and 1970s were a particularly profound period for the academy, when ground-breaking teaching methods gave rise to progressive new forms of performance art, painting and photography. Since then, the school has remained a respected centre for…

The Bauhaus remains one of the most iconic and influential art and design schools of the modern world, and its legacy lives on today. Founded in Weimar by the great German architect Walter Gropius, the school’s aims were visionary and utopian. Gropius’s goal was no less than an entire unity of the arts, bringing all…

In 1933, an art school like no other was founded near the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina: its name was Black Mountain College. While the experimental and progressive art school only lasted for 24 years, its legacy has survived far longer. Black Mountain modelled a new, open-ended and unstructured way to teach liberal arts,…