To modern ears they sound like nothing short of anarchy

October 22, 2014 5:42 AM

The BBC looks back on the Free Schools movement

There would be no timetable, no compulsory lessons, no uniform, no hierarchy. Teachers would be called by their first names. The children would make up the rules and decide what they wanted to learn.

There'd be no fees, fixed hours, term times or holidays. They were to be schools without walls - and open whenever the community wanted them.

Many of them quickly folded - with some communities not receptive to the idea of educational anarchy. But a few put down solid roots.

posted by frimble (22 comments total)

"Movements" almost never succeed, not do many involved with them expect runaway success, however defined.

The point is to introduce new ideas with a break from the past. Many schools in the Commonwealth have borrowed ideas from Free Schooling for years now, and continue to do so.
posted by clvrmnky at 6:02 AM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

I remember reading about A.S.Neill whilst still in school (and a very propah British style prep school it was) - the experience left an impact on me.

Summerhill

I can't remember which book I read, but I don't think it was by Neill himself. Vague memories from 4 decades ago seem as though it was more of a memoir perhaps or by a third party gushing over it?
posted by infini at 6:25 AM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

To echo clvrmnky's point -- I attended an experimental high school in Canada. It that opened in the 70s, but I attended in the mid 90s. Many of the ideas mentioned were implemented in the school originally but it by the time I attended it had drifted from the anarchic experiments of the Free School Movement. We still had no time table, called teachers by their first names, and had classes in the evening, had a max of 100 students, but were regulated like any other high school in Toronto. The thing is, I think the school worked, the lack of structure meant independent learning which lead me to be more prepared for the lack of oversight that awaited in college/university/grad school.

Education for students 15-18 is badly broken for many pupils, this is one way forward... too bad it seems left in the past. Even my former school has drifted and ditched the part-time teachers (then typically PhD students, who exposed me an excited me about the possibility of grad school) and evening classes.
posted by christopher.taylor at 6:59 AM on October 22, 2014

Was glad to read at the the end that Summerhill is still around and still going strong.
posted by kyrademon at 7:03 AM on October 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

The point is to introduce new ideas with a break from the past.

From the point of view of the experimenters, at least. For the children and their families, the point is to receive a quality education. A break from the past is neither good nor bad in and of itself: it is simply a neutral quality.

I get the sense that these particular schools significantly limited their students' future choices, without offering slam-dunk advantages in exchange. I'm not saying that they were horrible, but it does heavily suggest that there are very good reasons why this particular trend did not catch on.

I can't personally speak to the qualities of similar schools. I'm sure that many are excellent, and that their graduates value their time there. The closest I would come to criticizing these kinds of schools would be to point out that the sweeping majority of people who evince the qualities most prized by such schools did not, in fact, attend those kinds of schools. All of the most curious, studious, open-minded, flexible, etc. people I know went to highly traditional schools, often with downright "old world" extracurricular studies.

But hey, all of life is an experiment for the future. Experimental institutions, including schools similar to these free schools, have their place.

In short, life is a highway, and I want to ride it all night long.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:13 AM on October 22, 2014 [3 favorites]

From about 1972 to 1975, I attended an "open plan" school in Montreal named Rosedale. It was not a great experience, though a new headmaster in the last year I was there seemed promising - low academics, lots of chaos, I got bullied a lot.

I would still think that such a school would be a lot better than your typical New York City public school in 2014.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 7:17 AM on October 22, 2014

The dream of Free Schools persists to this day.

I went to an alternative hippie-dippy high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that was likewise founded in the 1970s, though I attended in the early 90s. It was an extremely formative period in my life, and I'm very much the better for it. First-name basis with the teachers, no bells, open campus, 90 students to a grade. We also had a system where a student could teach a class for other students, and everyone would get credit for it. I took Sci-Fi Lit and American Film History that way. Also economics!

That school started out as the place for artists and stoners, but became so well-known as a great academic experience that demand far outstripped supply. They had a waiting list for entry, and then parents camping out a week to not be waitlisted, and eventually a lottery to prevent families with the resources to camp out from getting an unfair advantage. They've also increased the student population a few times. I deeply wish all the kids who would benefit from that environment had access to it.
posted by Andrhia at 7:35 AM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

I did some work at a Free School in the US, briefly, in the early 2000s. I think some of the early Free Schools went hard in the paint with child-directed education because they had to execute a dramatic shift from authoritarian educational approaches of the mid-20th century... ones that have survived have offered solid education while also being committed to a radical approach for it.
posted by entropone at 7:42 AM on October 22, 2014

The Albany Free School-- Still going strong.
posted by oflinkey at 7:58 AM on October 22, 2014

> "I went to an alternative hippie-dippy high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan ..."

Ah, Commie High. Great jazz program, too.

(I didn't go there, but I have a number of friends who did.)
posted by kyrademon at 8:09 AM on October 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

I went to an alternative school for two years, one in middle school and one again in high school. (Each time, it had been the first year for them to offer that grade level. They've since gone back to just being an elementary school, like they were for most of their history.) It wasn't on a Free School - better known in this country as a Sudbury School - model. There were required classes, but there was also a lot more leeway in terms of designing your own educational experience. For instance, at the high school level (and the "high school" was one class consisting of seven students), we all voted to do a unit on rats. Mostly because I loved rats and apparently convinced everyone else it was a good idea. This involved getting pet rats for the classroom and studying rodent biology, the Black Death, and psychology (the history of psychology, the use of rats in experiments, etc.; we'd run them through mazes to test how quickly they learned, which didn't work so well because we kept cuddling them and giving them treats no matter what they did). I have fond memories but had some trouble there mostly because I'd spent too long thinking of teachers and authority figures as the enemy. They were incredibly patient with me, though.

I was just thinking the other day about the kids I'd known who'd grown up at that school - mostly children of the teachers and administrators. They were all astonishingly well-adjusted, and way more emotionally mature than I was at the time despite being younger than me. There was a huge difference between the kids who transferred in from public school and the kids who'd gone to that school for their entire lives, from preschool on. In public school, I'd been bullied terribly, and when I came to the alternative school in seventh grade, I (shamefully) took that dynamic with me. I'd mock a kid for liking "old" music (classic rock - yeah, I was dumb for multiple reasons) and he'd confidently brush it off without taking the bait. My best friend (another transfer) and I made fun of a sweet little boy for seeming gay. He articulately explained how that hurt his feelings, told me I was fundamentally a good person, and asked why I acted so much meaner when my friend was around. Never in my life had I felt so ashamed. That's the last time I remember bullying someone.

I don't know how most of the graduates did vis-a-vis college and jobs, though several of my teachers were grown-up former students, so apparently a significant number go back to work there. Not that "a significant number" means much in a pool of 50 or so students. I wish I'd learned to whittle down that chip on my shoulder back in seventh grade. I'd have stayed and had a much happier school experience instead of transferring back to public school for more bullying and boredom.
posted by Anyamatopoeia at 8:14 AM on October 22, 2014 [9 favorites]

> "... though I attended in the early 90s."

(And thinking about it, this probably means we at least have acquaintances in common. Small world, I guess.)
posted by kyrademon at 8:16 AM on October 22, 2014

St. Paul, MN, has had an open school -- actually called Open School for much of its life -- since 1971.

In the 70s & 80s the St. Paul Public School tried so many different things! I was in a city-wide elementary magnet program, and even we thought that Open School was crazy. (And we were learning to speak German in grades 1-6 from European teachers who lived with host families, and had a Guest Philosopher named Peter Shea every Wednesday after recess for an hour, so we kind of knew from experimental.)

They're big fans of charter schools there now, including the "circus school" Circus Juventas Youth Performing Arts Circus.

I admire the foment of new ideas and new techniques, and it pleases me to think that there is a school for every student, but at the same time I am leery of taking chances on my child's one shot at an education. It's a hard line for parents to walk.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:38 AM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

The free school concept worked great for our kids, however we did it as homeschoolers. I know many others who had similar experiences. Maybe the idea is solid, but simply doesn't scale well. A dedicated parent with the time can facilitate an awesome education for their kids, but it doesn't really scale well to school sized.
posted by COD at 8:46 AM on October 22, 2014

I would argue that the institutional system we have now doesn't scale well.

But I have fond memories of being introduced to short wave radio and the LOGO programming language in my alternative elementary school. I don't have memories of mind-expanding educational opportunities in the traditional schools I went to.
posted by el io at 8:50 AM on October 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

I, too, went to a school based in part on a variety of educational models, including Summerhill and free schools, Quaker education, and a variety of other educational theories. It was founded in the early 70s and started out more like a free school, but the students quickly asked for grades because they wanted to go to college. They also asked for regular evaluations (in text). So every term, we got a letter grade (on a 5 point system) and a paragraph summarizing what we had done well, what we needed to work on, etc. for each class. The school emphasized honesty, respect, and the concept of freedom with responsibility. It was small (my graduating class was large at 24), community-oriented, and informal. I got a great education. There was room for me to really shape it, and I took full advantage of it.
posted by julen at 9:14 AM on October 22, 2014

Yeah, Commie High was spoken of with reverence by the bullied misfits at other local schools, back in the 70s and 80s. Some managed to transfer there, since apparently in those days there were spots available. All you had to do was figure out how to get daily transportation from the wilds of Chelsea or Dexter, and you too could escape the hell at your local school. I had figured out how to keep my head down well enough and wasn't suffering as much, so I never tried for that escape valve myself. But I nodded wistfully along when the more acutely miserable kids rhapsodized about this wonderful school they wanted to transfer to. A school for freaks and geeks, with no gay-bashing, no locker room cruelties, lunches downtown instead of being locked into a cafeteria full of jerks, no football worship... it must be heaven.
posted by elizilla at 9:29 AM on October 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

My high school was built in the early 70s, when open floor plans were the rage. There were no walls in between classrooms in the same department.

I assume it was disaster, because by the time I attended in the 90s, there were those office-style partitions in between the classes. They didn't go all the way to the ceiling though, and since there were no hallways, the back of every classroom still had to be open to allow traffic. You could still hear two to three classrooms over; and it really cut back on class discussions and projects because it would just be too loud.

I don't understand the thinking of the open plan. We're we supposed to learn from the other teachers through osmosis?
posted by spaltavian at 9:30 AM on October 22, 2014

The bigger problem is that expanding free schools would bring in the same kinds of demands for quantitative management that end up being used to manage any large-scale public education system. (And indeed, that's exactly what happened to the English schools of the 1970s.) And the bit about teachers being unpaid volunteers and taking benefits at the English schools is more than a little worrisome in an era of deprofessionalization, and wouldn't work in most of the U.S. for obvious reasons. Ditto for the way in which children can opt out of certification.

The commonality in both the linked article and the stories people are posting here is that you need strong community norms and good parenting styles for a free school to work. Because each example of a free school only works on a locally scale within receptive local communities, they're not capable of generating the kinds of broader social change that would let their norms become more widespread. When the linked article talks about today's Summerhill school "turn[ing] out pupils who become doctors and entrepreneurs" and occupying "a niche as the only boarding school of its type in the world," or mentions that the 1970s-era pupils never "went on to become millionaires," you get a real sense of why this movement hasn't taken off and why it didn't last.

What I take from this is that losing a social safety net, accepting overcredentialing in the job market, and turning over public goods to privatizers and quants has huge effects on education and on the lives of children and parents. How do we get closer to a world where most schools are free schools?
posted by kewb at 9:36 AM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

I get the sense that these particular schools significantly limited their students' future choices, without offering slam-dunk advantages in exchange. I'm not saying that they were horrible, but it does heavily suggest that there are very good reasons why this particular trend did not catch on.

Having experience of what schooling was like in the late 80s/early 90s in a similarly deprived area, I rather suspect that the students' choices are no more constrained than they would have been in the conventional system.
posted by ambrosen at 2:49 PM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

/rant
The linked article seems to be treating the free schools as a sideshow curiosity without any effort to understand what they were about. It is woefully uninformed about the history of educational philosophies: the main ideas behind free schools go much farther back than the 1970s, and although there was definitely a wave of popularity at that time, there have been previous and subsequent such waves as well. Folks like Bertrand Russell were even instantiating such schools in the UK in the early 1900s (along with the Summerhill School mentioned in the article).

The article's explanation of the actual details of the philosophy behind free schools and other more democratic, progressive forms of education - and variations therein - is lacking as well. The use of "anarchy" is apt given philosophical overlaps, for example, but it doesn't seem to me like this was intentional on the author's part. (Not to mention: the author thinks that "modern ears" would find the free school model more chaotic than 1970s contemporaries who were still mired in the sort of hierarchical authoritarianism required to tolerate corporal punishment??)

I spent time at two different schools following similar philosophies as these free schools (three I guess, if you count the two months or so of home schooling). Best educational experiences of my life, hugely formative for me, and directly contributed (albeit not the sole factor) to me becoming a mathematician. Different kids need different levels and types of structure, so the school that was more flexible in providing for these needs was more successful for some other kids I knew (they got me young enough that I hadn't been trained out of my inquisitiveness and enthusiasm for learning everything, so I flourished in both environments; and it gave me a base that allowed me to resist the dulling effects of the worst of the more traditional schools that I attended later). There's a huge difference between structure and hierarchy/authoritarianism, however. Structure, in anti-authoritarian forms, can still be respectful of individual's needs, emotions, and autonomous choice, and can be implemented with the consent and cooperation of kids.

It's interesting, and slightly mind-boggling(*), to me how attached some people are to the idea that kids should not call adults by their first names, as well. Having grown up interacting with many of the important adults in my life not as intellectual or experiential equals but with equal respect as human beings, I have no trouble treating someone with respect, or recognizing and respecting legitimate expertise, when I call someone by a more informal referent as opposed to a formal title. And using a formal title doesn't seem to convincingly paper over my lack of deference to authority-for-the-sake-of-authority on the occasions when I use someone's title because it's not worth the argument not to. (*I mean, I understand, intellectually, the dynamics behind it; I just don't understand it experientially or emotionally.)
/rant
posted by eviemath at 6:24 PM on October 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

Obligatory link to Brasseye's "The Drumlake Experiment".

P.S. Chris Morris fans: don't miss Red Meat Radio, a 3-hour retrospective of his radio work on Radio 4 Extra, November 29th.
posted by ZipRibbons at 2:00 AM on October 23, 2014