Education Against the End of the World

Creative space Beirut

The future feels foreclosed. Late-stage capitalism devours the planet, governments repress more than they protect, and ecological collapse redraws the boundaries of what the coming years might look like. Lebanon has become a microcosm of acceleration— currencies disintegrate, institutions rot, war erases entire neighborhoods. In such a world, to insist on imagining tomorrow becomes an act of defiance. Creative Space Beirut (CSB), a free fashion design school founded in 2011, has built that radical insistence into its very method. On paper, it offers a three-year program in fashion design. In practice, it has become something far rarer: a living model of critical, experiential, and relational pedagogy sustained against the machinery of disintegration.

Fashion education is typically a bastion of privilege—expensive, exclusive, a system that enshrines hierarchies of status and perpetuates a hollow vision of progress built on consumption and extraction. CSB was founded as a refusal of that system. Tuition is abolished; supplies and bursaries for housing and transportation are fully provided. The school deliberately enrolls students who face systemic inequities, young people who would otherwise be shut out of creative industries. They arrive at CSB’s Beirut studio from villages, refugee camps, working-class neighborhoods, and fractured homes, carrying within them the sectarian and social divides of the country. Inside, those divides dissolve into something else. In their place grows solidarity, collective invention, and a radical experiment in access.

Creative space Beirut

The students carry stories of precarity and persistence. Some come from families who question the very validity of pursuing fashion in a place where food, electricity, health, and safety are never guaranteed. Others have endured repression from the state or within their communities, or displacements that would extinguish most ambitions. What binds them together is conviction, the belief that their futures matter, that creativity is not a luxury, but a tool of survival. At CSB, students learn not just to succeed in the industry but to challenge and transform it, building themselves as artists, professionals, and citizens with awareness and responsibility in a fractured world.

The school itself functions like a living body: porous, adaptive, responsive to the shocks of its environment. When the 2020 port explosion reduced its studio to rubble, the body reconstituted itself in the founder’s home until another space could be secured. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it redirected its energy toward the collective, paying students and tailors to produce protective gowns for public hospitals. In wartime, it shifted again, sewing thousands of blankets for displaced families. These were not interruptions but the pulse of its pedagogy: education as survival, adaptation, and defiance. At CSB, resilience is not an abstraction or a tired label, but a daily practice, a pedagogy that refuses paralysis and instead grows new organs and processes in the face of catastrophe.

This is education as liberation. Paulo Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education casts students as passive vessels to be filled. CSB insists on the opposite: that students’ struggles, imaginations, and histories are the raw material of learning itself. bell hooks called this “engaged pedagogy,” an education rooted in the body, community, and political struggle.

At CSB, these theories take form. Creation becomes survival. Design becomes dissent. Pedagogy becomes politics.

Creative space Beirut

The studio is a crucible of collective practice. Within this environment, students design, cut, drape, and stitch against a backdrop of scarcity, salvaged fabrics, a small number of computers, sputtering generators, and machines that refuse to die. But learning here is not only technical; it is relational and existential. Students collaborate with local artisans, international designers, and industry players, cultivating networks of solidarity rather than competition. This is deliberate. In a country fractured by sectarianism and in a global industry defined by exploitation, CSB wagers that community itself is the curriculum. To learn here is to learn not only how to navigate the industry, but how to make a life with others in a landscape of annihilation.

This ethos crystallized in June 2025 with We Have Arrived, We Are Home, CSB’s first graduate fashion show in seven years. Against all odds, with limited funding and a political climate on the brink, the show seemed to materialize from nothing. In truth, it was carried into being by more than one hundred volunteers: students, creatives, teachers, and friends. It was more than a graduate showcase; it was a demonstration of what a community can assemble when the world demands only survival, a collective act of refusal staged as fashion, proof that creativity and solidarity can conjure abundance from ruin.

Creative space Beirut

Care and relationship form the other axis of CSB’s pedagogy. Relational theories of education, such as Nel Noddings’ ethics of care and Gert Biesta’s concept of education as encounter, emphasize that teaching and learning unfold in relationship, not in abstraction. CSB embodies this principle in both structure and spirit. Inside, diversity becomes a daily, lived practice: students from different sectarian, socioeconomic, and ethnic backgrounds learn side by side in a shared creative environment. That coexistence is not incidental. The encounter with the “other” becomes part of the curriculum. Externally, the school’s partnerships with like-minded industry movers, artists, artisans, humanitarian organizations, and cultural institutions ground education in real networks of collaboration and interdependence. By engaging directly with these ecosystems, students learn negotiation, context, and care as part of their creative process.

This relational ethos extends beyond graduation. Unlike institutions that sever contact once a degree is conferred, CSB maintains a living relationship with its alumni through mentorship, opportunities to teach, shared resources, inclusion in the CSB Boutique, and ongoing collaborations. The result is a cyclical ecosystem where learning and teaching blur, and where each generation sustains the next. The impact of this model is evident in the trajectories of its graduates: alumni who have worked with renowned designers, launched independent brands, opened production houses, and taken on teaching roles across Lebanon and beyond. Many continue to give back directly, mentoring younger students, collaborating on projects, and creating access to networks that were once closed to them. At CSB, education does not end; it circulates. Here, creativity and connection are inseparable, each sustaining and amplifying the other.

Creative space Beirut

CSB belongs to a lineage of radical schools. Like Venezuela’s El Sistema, it reframes culture as a weapon of empowerment. Like Black Mountain College in the U.S., it melds art, life, and politics into a single experiment. Yet unlike Black Mountain, which flickered briefly and disappeared, CSB has endured through more than a decade of compounded crises, nurturing a generation of alumni who are reshaping creative industries across the region. They are living proof that access to education, when bound to community and care, can transform not only individual lives but entire cultural landscapes.

And while CSB is deeply rooted in Lebanon, its lessons reach beyond it. Across the world, higher education grows ever more exclusionary, strangled by debt, hollowed out by corporate capture, or priced beyond reach. The creative industries mirror these logics, fortified by the same structures of exclusivity and extraction that define neoliberal economies at large. In this context, CSB offers not a romantic exception but a functioning counter-model: proof that education can be free, that pedagogy can be collective, that culture can exist as a commons. It shows that schools can act not as engines of hierarchy but as living organisms, responsive to their times, resistant to the forces that would otherwise dismantle them.

Creative space Beirut

In this way, CSB speaks across borders. It resonates with communities in Latin America seeking to decolonize knowledge, with student movements in Europe demanding debt abolition, with grassroots schools in Africa reclaiming cultural practices suppressed by colonial legacies. It offers not only a vocabulary but a living practice for educators, artists, and organizers across the world who are asking how learning can be reclaimed as a collective right rather than a privatized asset.

To call CSB a fashion school misses the point. It is a pedagogical insurgency, a living organism that adapts, resists, and regenerates in contexts that would otherwise dictate deprivation. In a world unraveling under capitalism, repression, and collapse, CSB asserts another truth: that futures can still be made, even when everything conspires to erase them.

Creative space Beirut