GCAS College Dublin
GCAS College Dublin
The Global Centre for Advanced Studies
The World’s First, Global Debt-Free College Owned by Faculty and Graduates Offering EU Accredited Degrees.
GCAS offers a new model to future researchers and students to be free to learn and explore knowledge without debt.
Academic freedom is compromised by student-debt. So we created a space to nurture and encourage critical thinking and reflection without economic pressures. We are co-owned by graduates and faculty so the freedom to think is inherently collaborative and global.
Our school is grounded in the following commitments:
We are a “decentralized” liberal arts-based community that encourages bold and courageous thinking grounded in history and evidence based reasoning.
The classroom should never be dominated by abstract, rote memorization and trivial test taking. Instead education should be primarily collaborative, student-centered and concerned with particular problems from contemporary social and economic events and one’s own life experience. In this way, the students become accustomed to a higher-level learning process of “questioning the question”; of learning by critically engaging the presuppositions on which questions themselves frame the “problem.”
Rather than the teacher delivering pre-existing, objective content to students presupposed as empty containers, the model is instead that of a facilitator who enables processes of mutual learning. The task for pedagogy today is to consider not just the problem per se, but the lenses through which it is understood, processed and acted upon, not only within institutions per se, but also within lived culture, where they are encountered.
Serious learning is not easy at times because it challenges your assumptions and asks you to give evidence for why you hold the beliefs you do. At times the student may adjust the beliefs they hold in order to better account for their life, desires, and social experiences. This is the beauty of the learning process — a process that is about growth, honesty, and truth.
The education model we developed for our college is the first of its kind and rests on the following five pillars:
GCAS is the first degree-granting graduate and post-graduate college in the modern academy to be completely independent, operated by faculty, researchers, and alumni on blockchain and our own token, GCASy. We don’t receive funding from foundations, interests groups, or the state. We are owned and operated by ourselves cooperatively. When you become a member you become part of our cooperative community whose mission is to protect and create bold new ways of thinking and being in the world.