GCAS Announces Another Free Seminar to the Public
On Tuesday October 6 GCAS announced the release of another free GCAS Seminar.
From our inception in 2013 we have been committed to providing the public free access to as many seminars and events as our resources allow. This commitment arises from our belief in the importance of the “commons”, which is our collective human belonging to each other (society), to our planet, and to all living things. The reality is there are many tremendously powerful forces in the world that are actively financing publicly harmful campaigns in order to undermine our collective life and reality together. These protracted and well financed campaigns subverted education beginning in the late 1970s by defunding colleges and universities forcing students to take on economically harmful debt in order to pursue a degree. As a consequence, education has been denuded of critical thinking, fact finding, truth seeking and thus a university degree has become little more than an employment gateway “certificate”; a license to be underemployed and undervalued.
Today, the university has become a handmaiden to the corporate world because it has surrendered its principal duty to speak truth to power. There is little or no resistance within our social fabric to confront these massively funded disinformation campaigns much less the growing corporate mentality that supports and reproduces more inequality year in and year out. Our choices and freedoms are contracting even as fake realities are proliferating that only benefit of the few in power at the detriment of the rest of us.
GCAS was created to form a self-sustaining autonomous academic community that protects students, faculty and supporters from economic harm “debt” so that the pursuit of truth persists unencumbered.
These free courses are designed to provide critical learning objectives to the public in order to arm citizens with the abilities to resist propaganda, conspiracy theories, and troll farms. Said differently, our courses are designed to combat disinformation and post-truth campaigns by developing our participants’ critical reasoning skills grounded in historical narratives that support democratic collectives and future democratic possibilities.