Workshop on Workshops?

An excerpt of a rant from Steve S. in which he takes on our concept of skill shares and workshops:

The other side of this dynamic is that people treat Radical Writers as a space where you can just show up and expect to be taught how to become a better writer, without having the involvement or having to do the work that a real academic class at school would provide. I think that type of education, which despite our best intentions tends to happen any time someone professes to host a "workshop" i.e., a model of education more democratic and non-hierarchical than a hated "school" class, is in fact even more hierarchical than traditional schooling, because it further reinforces the idea that a student is an empty vessel lacking knowledge, to be filled by the teacher/expert/professor. Without each and every participant preparing themselves to both learn AND teach, all workshops on any subject will run into this same problem. Writing workshops can be a shining example of how to use education for social change, and it's incredibly easy to lead them without hierarchy. But they require dedication and preparation, and unless you are interested in putting that in with me, then I'm not going to bother trying to put this thing together anymore.