It’s no secret that University is expensive as fuck. A dick-measuring competition of who can get deeper in debt, if you will. Fees-free only gets you so far, for those lucky enough to have qualified for it. After that, it’s around $35.75 per lecture for the average student – excluding the pricier degrees like medicine and dentistry. Perhaps something to keep in mind the next time you are considering skipping a lecture. Just saying.
And so, sick of the neoliberal scams that have put such exorbitant prices on education, Critic Te Ārohi turned to online Facebook events to see what crap there was to learn outside of the classroom – for free!
The world of Facebook events presents like a bot-saturated Mad Hatter’s tea party, never mind the fact that you’re on a website that is at best an empty void for boomers to yell into and companies to harvest data from, and at worst is an active threat to democracy. Forget about that for now though. The discovery page is a battleground of middle-aged-crisis hobbyists (bless their hearts), spiritual gurus promising to GET YOUR LIFE BACK ON TRACK, and scientists peddling seminars on incredibly niche theorems.
I signed up for them all.
Expectations were low heading into my two-week crash course of a remarkably wide range of topics. The somewhat severe lack of graphic design skill, or general technological competency really, of the event pages was initially misleading, and so the most I expected to learn was how to download some really air-tight security software. How wrong I was.
We got the ball rolling with a Horse First Aid webinar. Naturally. There were a few hurdles to jump over (heh) to gain access to this coveted event: after five minutes of sitting in the Zoom waiting room, an email containing suspicious links to discounted horse medication was sent to my inbox. Was this a front for a ket black market? Would my thirst for out-of-pocket knowledge inadvertently threaten my decade-old promises to Harold the Giraffe?
Hopes were crushed when my eventual entry into the Zoom was met with a PowerPoint presentation on the main causes of death in horses. Colic was killer number one, for all those wondering. This webinar was a horse girly’s wet dream, covering all things equine (a word I learned in the presentation) with a generous portion of horse-related humour that went right over my head. My mum never let me ride horses. At the end of it, though my human first aid knowledge remains frightfully scant, I can now (maybe) help a choking horse if it comes down to it. Top tip: the Heimlich manoeuvre will NOT work. I asked.
Next up was a Q&A Zoom with a tarot card reader. Admittedly, the most I knew about tarot before joining was that it had something to do with divination, so as a Harry Potter stan, I was pumped. True to the format of any class, there was some light prep-work involved in drafting a question to ask during the session. My eyes shone with the possibilities, but was quickly shut down after some googling revealed that asking when you’re going to die is a big no-no in the tarot universe. Guess it tends to be a bit of a buzz kill or something.
As predicted, the entire session had the vibe of a Professor Trelawney divination class, right down to the reader’s periodic eye-rolling and muttering (to spirits, I suppose) as if possessed. I half-expected when it came my turn for her to tell me I had The Grim, or whatever the tarot equivalent is. Overall, it was a grand time: we tested the vibrations of online dating sites to decipher which would help one woman meet her soulmate (spoiler alert: not Tinder), confirmed someone’s decision to move overseas to girlboss a new business venture, and told another hopeful that no, it was not a good idea to have their ex in their life. Bad vibrations.
Spirits were high heading into the next event. This one required the noble sacrifice of an actual ($35.75) uni lecture in order to attend a free hour-long online stamping class. A simple trade. To clarify, we’re not talking about postal stamps here; this was ink-stamping, and it is a very serious craft. This was a community of people who live and breathe stamping; they snort lines of glitter and huff craft glue. As the host expertly took us (her inferiors) through the card-making process, the comment section was chock-full of “super cool”s, “gosh”es and, my personal favourite, “embossing is kind of magical, isn’t it?” Word.
I was quickly learning, however, that these Facebookers liked to play it fast and loose with the word “free”. The host posted a 32 item supply list racking up a total of US$571.50 (NZD $891.61) ten minutes prior to the class. Now, I realise many of the regular attendees (the more hardcore stampers among us) would have been in possession of a lot of these supplies already, but as an aspiring stamper I felt disenfranchised.
Unfortunately, the trend of faux-free education continued into the next event as I was saddened to learn I had missed the train for a free creative writing class. To be able to attend the next would require coughing up 5 million Vietnamese dong. To that I say: fuck right off. This class was most certainly NOT the fun, funky and fresh kind of learning I was on the hunt for. Things were looking grim.
But wait! The breathwork meditation session on the “inner smile” was my knight in shining armour, a ray of sunshine through the dark clouds of capitalist deception and trickery. The class was scheduled for a Wednesday afternoon – i.e. hump-day nap-time. It was an intimate group of five on Zoom led by a doctor of acupuncture and Eastern medicine, and self-described psychic since the age of 13. We were all encouraged to create a space of calm beforehand. Lacking the crystals (amethyst was recommended) and burning sage others proudly brandished, I settled into my pillow fort with a steamy mug of noodles.
In all honesty, this class was exactly what the doctor ordered. At this point in the semester with assignments and tests coming out of our asses, I’d say you couldn’t go far wrong with a meditation break. Or just a nap. Fairly certain that’s how the session finished on my end, anyhow.
Science Week at the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary provided even more wholesome content. The butterfly caretaker hosting the livestream felt like that well-meaning teacher-aide at your high school who became the collective mother of all the students. Viewers were treated to a tour with Mother Butterfly through the exhibit which very much resembled the one in Otago Museum, except the experience came without the stinking heat and $12 admission fee. It also came without the tactile ecstasy of butterflies landing on your arms, so I guess you get what you pay for.
We learned some fun facts about the lifecycle of butterflies, got a cheeky sneak-peek at an upcoming black-light exhibit demonstrating how the insects see, and even got a couple juicy close-ups of what one could only describe as butterfly porn – a tad inappropriate for the class of Year 3 students whose teacher said “hi” in the comment section, I thought. Shout-out to Mother Butterfly’s husband for hyping her up in the comments!
After a more stimulating couple of weeks than my lecture schedule provides, this haphazard online course was a smashing success. If you are keen to avoid those pesky Uni obligations and acquire some niche knowledge, this is the place.
The biggest lesson learned, however, was that there are actually some really wholesome communities of people online. Due to technical difficulties, they may sometimes be easily mistaken for an underground drug ring, and in some cases it might just be a scam, but in most cases the classes on Facebook events really are passionate individuals sharing their interests with others. And that, my friends, is what non-commodified education enables.