"People thought it was a really weird school"

November 5, 2016 4:31 PM

Uni High tapped into the pop-psych teachings of the ’70s to create one of the most bizarre curriculums of the era: Sex, Drugs, and Textbooks: Inside L.A.’s Most Controversial Educational Experiment by David Kukoff, L.A. Magazine
posted by Room 641-A (9 comments total)

I got my Master's degree in Alternative Education in the late 70's at Indiana University, one of the few universities offering this degree then. At the time, the program reflected my desire, as one who was not well-served by traditional education, to provide greater freedom for students, teachers, and parents. The philosophy of the alternative school movement stemmed from the Summerhill-style "free school" movement of the early-mid 20th century. At the Summerhill extreme, students could do whatever they wanted, and staff were there as coaches, as adults there to facilitate whatever projects students felt motivated to undertake.

Alternative schools were to exist as something in between regular schools and free schools, using portfolios instead of grades, for example. However, the movement foundered before it even got underway, for reasons alluded to in this article. Here for example, from Caldwell Williams, one of the founders:

...The local administration unilaterally changed the procedure from a lottery to assigning students to us. One year, in the middle of the school year, we had 60 seniors dumped on us who weren’t going to graduate. The administration told me it was an administrative decision and asked if I was going to be insubordinate...

In short, alternative schools became a dumping ground for problem students. Whatever crackpot theories we idealistic youngsters had in mind was not a concern of the administrators. They just wanted to get rid of problem kids. Putting kids who often needed clear structures--even if "alternative" in some way--in schools guided by principles of freedom did not often end well.

The L.A. school portrayed here, in the midst of the Scientology and est crazes, was certainly sui generis, but the story of the alternative school movement in general, as it played out--and is still playing out--is a fascinating one. That the initially promising "schools of choice" movement devolved into the current exercise in opportunistic capitalistic perversion is just the latest chapter in a narrative studded with weird examples like IPS, the high school in this article.
posted by kozad at 8:31 PM on November 5, 2016 [14 favorites]

I was in IPS for my senior year -- I was a reasonably successful student at Uni before that but mostly too bored to put much effort into it. For me it was a good experience overall, challenging me emotionally and in terms of how I related to other people. In the evolution of IPS (Idiots Play School to the rest of Uni), this was after basic training was started, and body-mind, and there was a lot of est influence, but I think before Scientology became part of the mix. Paul Beahm and Louise Goffin (both mentioned in the article) were there at the time, and I think Pat Smear was as well although I don't remember him. Lucky Lehrer, later a drummer for the Circle Jerks and Bad Religion, was also in IPS then. I guess there were students there who were 'problem kids' from an administrator's viewpoint, but in the emotional space created within IPS what struck me most was the depth of both pain and strength that could be revealed by even the most normal-seeming kid.

It's amazing that IPS lasted as long as it did, even given the place and time.
posted by Killick at 9:23 PM on November 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

I got my Master's degree in Alternative Education in the late 70's at Indiana University, one of the few universities offering this degree then.

Indiana! I worked for Indianapolis' public schools (1995-96) and discovered first-hand its alternative approaches to education (The Algebra Project at a "no walls" school) and through visits to its libraries. A lot of history in the basements of those old schools. Vonnegut occasionally praised Indiana's schools and libraries in terms of Johnson's Great Society. I didn't settle there. At that time, the center of the city was gutted by a white flight of a severity I had not before witnessed-- there was a single, giant mall trying to revitalize shopping/eating after work. I lived in the city. The apartment complex next to me served as a remote annex for the county jail system.

Good times.

Note: Not capitalizing est defers to its marketing copy.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 9:48 PM on November 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's interesting how a bunch of people who saw traditional schools as authoritarian mind control institutions, and set out to resist them, ended up signing on to a bunch of authoritarian mind control cults and imposing them on their new school. They even told protestors to love it or leave it.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:01 AM on November 6, 2016 [7 favorites]

Holy crap, I went to Uni and never expected it to be the subject of a MetaFilter FPP! I also had NO IDEA about this program - it ended almost 10 years before I started. I moved to LA in 10th grade ('86) and Uni was my districted high school, so off I went. Maybe if we'd lived in LA beforehand I would have known about it, but it was never mentioned at Uni. I really liked the school - it was a nice blend of the surrounding neighborhoods, some wealthy, some not - nowhere near as prissy as Beverly (Beverly Hills) or Pali (Malibu), but also not "barrio" level like it says in the article. We had several celebrity kids there with us - Sean Astin was in my graduating class, for example (and a really good guy) - although over time most of them moved to Crossroads, a private school not too far away. I moved away from LA after college, and I've heard Uni is in a bad state now, which is disappointing. I enjoyed it a lot.

Jonson (for the older MeFites who remember him) and I went to Uni together - I should ask him if he knew about this history. I'll bet he did. I was just clueless.
posted by widdershins at 7:04 AM on November 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Putting kids who often needed clear structures--even if "alternative" in some way--in schools guided by principles of freedom did not often end well.

Yep. Yep. That was me. My experience was wholly positive socially, which I never would have come close to had I attended our public school. Academically I was a mess despite getting the equivalent of A grades. I dropped out after a year-and-a-half at 17. Good people at The Washington Ethical Society School. I've Googled a few names I remember, and I've never come across anybody who stayed in teaching.
posted by ezust at 12:17 PM on November 6, 2016

This was many years after the period described in the article, but I went to a school with a similar, but much stronger Scientology focus. Seems like my school may in fact be the crazy, horrible culmination of these failed experiments.

I started much younger than high school, and it seemed fine at first, probably because I didn't know any better, but I came to deeply hate my school experience as I grew older, at least partly due to watching so many students get churned up and spit out by a poorly conceived system. "Bad" kids either dropped out, were quietly expelled, or were pushed along to even worse schools, while the "good" kids were carefully brainwashed and fed marketing copy they could parrot to outsiders to assuage fears.

One person in the article described how they just wanted to get out, but felt they couldn't reenroll in a different school, and that is exactly how I felt. I actually tried leaving once, but I was so monumentally ill prepared for a standard curriculum, I had to return to the school I despised or risk failing out of high school altogether, and I was by most accounts a pretty bright and well-behaved kid.

I just get so frustrated realizing that people knew how crappy these kinds of schools were decades before I graduated, but then these schools still manage to hang on in various forms even today. I don't doubt that there are a lot of things wrong with the average teaching style, and I get there are kids who need something outside of the norm, but everyone deserves better than the kind of false utopias promised by places like these.
posted by Diagonalize at 12:45 PM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

In short, alternative schools became a dumping ground for problem students.

Experiments in education are important, particularly for students who're simply not being reached. As with most institutions, there are certainly failures ... yet they can make all the difference for some.

Public education, a great challenge, is still new. The compulsory lockstep pioneered by Luther in the 16th century was certainly useful for the institutions. Only a century ago did the shortcomings spur a serious search for other methods. As usual, they were abused by those who knew they had the best answer already.
posted by Twang at 4:06 PM on November 6, 2016

Didn't Darby Crash and Pat Smear from the Germs go to Uni's alternative school?
posted by AJaffe at 5:30 PM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]