The Four Hour Academy

The Four Hour Academy is an experimental institute of education which aims to act as:

1. a critique of current systems of education
2. a vehicle to propose radical new forms that these systems could take (however naïve they may be).
3. a leech on its surroundings;
4. a workshop only four hours in length, in which students are asked to explore ‘the institution’ they are situated in and to build their own within it.

Fuelled by this impossibly short time frame, students are forced to think and act critically to consider the host–institutions motives, parameters, and possibilities, and how these can each be subverted collectively by the group.