Say you’re bored by your 9-to-5. You’re intellectually understimulated and you want a challenge beyond your book club, which, it turns out, is just you and your friends gossiping around a lukewarm charcuterie board.
What are your options? You could apply to graduate school, if you have the ambition, money and time. Or you could start smaller and enroll in a class at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR).
The Brooklyn Institute is a nonprofit education center that offers evening and weekend courses for adults, catering to those who want the rigor of a liberal arts seminar but at a more modest commitment. The unaccredited classes are held for three hours each week for a month and are led by lecturers with advanced degrees. Though adult learners can enroll in massive open online courses or extension school programs, the institute differentiates itself with more niche and left-field topics: the novels of Clarice Lispector, the history of trauma and transgender Marxism.
And the best part? No grades.
Andres Begue, 32, discovered the organization earlier this year after casually searching for continuing education opportunities online. “It’s nice to be able to go into something that I have no context for and learn something new,” said Mr. Begue, who works in technology support at a software company. He was intrigued by a course about the 20th-century Austrian playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard.
