This dissertation presents the value of indisciplinarity as a phase of transition to a sustainable wall-less classroom. Can a healthy erasure of over-institutionalised specialist authorities address higher levels of engagement in Secondary schools? What could this process of cultivating an emancipatory redistribution of authorities entail?
2008-2011 saw government austerity measures severely impacting social care and university funding. In Scotland, more self-organised mutual improvement groups undertook indisciplinary approaches. How did these conditions result in these mutual improvement groups constructing a curriculum from the commons?
This critical social research presents these accessible, diverse selfdirected groups through memos, vignettes, e-mails and transcripts coded for thematic analysis. It focuses on the early stages of “ungrounding” and emerging subjectivities. This participant observation research documents these attempts to sustain leaderless collectives of autodidactic promise. The “Autodidact Archives” subsequently locates these field observations in the reality of the institutional educators’ personal experience. Their recounts legitimise forms of vernacular values to encourage the cultivation
of self-taught expertise.
Despite operating on similar democratic assumptions such as horizontal organisation, consensus by assembly, and diverse inclusive constituents, each group produced different termini. Critical concepts of commons and enclosure challenge the pharmakon of autodidactism within a growing restless multitude of a post-Fordist “democracy”. The indisiciplinarian as a facilitator or student manifests these tensions, risking their ipseity.
In the seventies, the rurbanisation movement and alternatives propose moulding institutions to suit human activity, not vice versa. Through the lens of critical deschooling, this dissertation presents groups of ordinary people enacting non-hierarchical alternatives pit against austerity: radicals, conservatives and the undecided between them. The wall-less classrooms are already tentative steps towards the erasure of authority where schools become sites of found assembly, not imperatives. Learning set in the vernacular values of a community is ageless and potent and engages not just students but the disengaged sectors of society.