Brooklyn Brainery Offers Popular Courses The Brooklyn Brainery, in a storefront in Carroll Gardens, offers courses on eclectic subjects popular with recent college grads. ON a recent Monday night, a gaggle of 20-somethings crammed into a former Curves fitness center along the industrial edge of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The storefront gym had been carved into two classrooms. In one, a rugged blond man, Brandon LeNoir, was teaching a class called "Let There Be Light." A dozen students, huddled at long butcher-block tables littered with wires and scissors, learned how to make a simple lamp. "Don't worry about neutral and live wires," said Mr. LeNoir, 34, an interior designer by day. It doesn't matter for us. In the other classroom, a 24-year-old art-history student, Melissa Jackson, was giving a PowerPoint lecture titled "A Short History of Anthropomorphic Taxidermy." One slide showed a wedding scene in which all parties - bride, groom, vicar, proud parents - were played by stuffed kittens, a whimsical tableau created by the Victorian-era taxidermist Walter Potter. The class, mostly women, gasped in their folding chairs, caught between the macabre and a "cute" overload. It was just another school night at the Brooklyn Brainery, a hipster schoolhouse started by a pair of underemployed polymaths, where students can learn abstruse subjects like the secret lives of bacteria, taught by teachers with few teaching credentials. Tuition is $5 to $30, enrollment takes place online and PayPal is accepted. By yoking together the craftsy movement that brought countless Mason jars of homemade pickles to Brooklyn pantries and the academic fetishism that gives rise to corduroy clubs and literary blogs, the schoolhouse offers what it calls "accessible, community-driven, crowd-sourced education." In other words, it is the Learning Annex in the age of D.I.Y. Brooklyn. "We are just curious about learning things," said Jonathan Soma, a founder of the Brooklyn Brainery, who works as an information technology temp to supplement his income. We figure, there must be other people like us out there. Indeed, much of the borough seems suspended in a state of continuous education, an endless senior year driven by the belief that everyone has something to teach. There are composting collectives that spread the gospel of turning kitchen scraps into soil. A once-a-year convention called Brooklyn Skillshare offers "community-based, community-led, and community-building" classes taught by Brooklyn residents. And 3rd Ward in Bushwick is a veritable finishing school for the Etsy set, with classes on screen printing and welding. In fact, it was at an introductory welding class there three years ago that Mr. Soma, 28, discovered he shared a passion for learning with Jennifer Messier, 27, a development assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two were drawn to the flame of knowledge but found learning expensive. The welding class, for instance, cost $200. So the pair formed the Brooklyn Brainery in 2010 and began teaching their own classes. At first they rented at Gowanus Studio Space, a sprawling brick building near the fetid canal. Their philosophy was simple: classes had to be fun, cheap and academic. They took the classic definition of a "liberal arts education" to heart; the closest one might get to an applied skill is making snow globes. "That's kind of the point," Mr. Soma said. As soon as you start teaching something useful, eyes become dollar signs. We didn't want that. With no budget, Mr. Soma, who has an undergraduate degree in cognitive science, taught most of the early classes. A preternaturally wry man with thick spectacles, his early course load included "Optical Collusion," a build-your-own telescope class; Scents & Sensibility, an introduction to perfume; and "Meat!" which was about different cuts of meat. "Our naming philosophy was that it was either a pun or a regular word with an exclamation point," Mr. Soma said. "Exclamation points," Ms. Messier added, "are how you get people excited." Mastery of material was secondary.