Free School

I first heard of Free Schools in a feature on Albany Free School in Adbusters Magazine a while back. As a product of mainstream public education I was both intrigued and apprehensive; as the private schools tend to be elitist and further weaken the public system. But at Albany nobody is turned away for financial reasons, and the school was based on freedom and democratic principles that are equally, if not more accessible to children of the poor.

There is no curriculum, no grades, no tests. Everything is decided spontaneously based on the mood of students and teachers. What kind of school IS this? "Truth be told, we are a community far more than a school - a safe, nurturing, open space where daily fifty-five kids ages three through fourteen, eight full-time teachers, a cook, a steady stream of interns, volunteers and visitors, as well as myriad goats, chickens, rabbits, pet rats, lizards and goldfish work, play, learn and eat together".

So imagine my delight when I received a Myspace bulletin about The Vancouver FreeSchool

Now, I'm not anti-public school by any means. But certainly there is something wrong. It is a social sorting system; a pecking order. It is a means of inculcating youth to be subservient to authority. It doesn't reward critical or creative thinking, but rather neatness, and the ability to meet deadlines. Standardized testing has left me with the skill to absorb massive amounts of useless information. But hey, I'm good at crosswords. Years of torment in gym class has left me ferociously competitive and acutely self conscious.

Wikipedia defines a free school as "a school that centers on democratic principles and participatory democracy with 'full and equal' participation from both students and staff. These learning environments position youth voice as the central actor in the educative process by engaging students in every facet of school operations, including learning, teaching, and leadership. Adult staff support students by offering passive and active facilitation according to students' interest."

Whereas this all may sound like a hippy utopia freak fest; its an idea that has been around for a long time. Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer (1859-1909) established "modern" or progressive schools in Spain in defiance of an educational system controlled by the church. The oldest surviving democratic school, Summerhill School in England, was founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill. Summerhill is a private school that receives government funds and is held accountable to government standards. The Modern School at Stelton, New Jersey, was a child of the early twentieth century anarchist and libertarian education movements.

You'd think Vancouver would be leading the pack in terms of organic, free run, mind-farms. But I am of the opinion that the US is leading in this area because the dire state of affairs that the public school system is in perpetuates the need for an alternative. That being said, Canadian education still encompasses the traditional pitfalls of mainstream learning, and that is that a small bunch of stuffy old educators write up a curriculum for a huge and diverse group of children.

Following this year's school strike in British Columbia, the topic of class size edged its way into the dispute. The teachers argued that it was necessary to limit the number of students per teacher as they said it decreases the quality of their service. Indeed when I was going to school, there was like 30 portables on the all-weather feel. Teachers also point out that due to the increasing demands on parents to work more and more, they have adopted a greater role in the development of children's lives; a sympton of our hyper-capitalist society.

The FreeSchool Vancouver website puts it like this:
"Mainstream education leaves many of us behind. Financial inaccessibility and pedagogical practice often alienate students from their own learning process. The Freeschool encourages a departure from these limitations and pursues educational practices that emerge from our own community in order to better serve those who partake in it. The volunteers and community members who have come together to organize, teach and learn are all interested in non-hierarchical, anti-oppressive and holistic education where not only the academic is addressed, but the social, political, creative and personal as well. We stress the importance of smaller learning groups that function as self-determining collectives of equals. Students have the power to pursue their learning in independent, individual and creative ways. Facilitators are resources for the group rather than authority figures. The Freeschool is in its infancy and therefore we anticipate much of its philosophy will change and develop organically as students, collective members and facilitators work/learn together."

So far they offer workshops that vary from home brewing to dumpstering for food. The next workshop is on December 4th; crocheting with Nathaniel K. Wolfe. On December 17th at 5pm Juls and Nathan present: DIY Publishing: Zine Making Workshop. How to be a publisher, author, graphics design engineer, and distributer on a tight budget.

You can find them at the new Spartacus Books: 319 W. Hastings, 2nd Floor.

Also last year I read about Matt Hern's Purple Thistle Centre in the Georgia Straight. The publisher of Crank Magazine and author of Field Day: Getting Society Out of School (New Star Books, 2003) Hern, the most affable anarchist you're likely to meet, frames the question politically. "Schools are sites of social re-creation as well as social construction," he says, "so they not only reflect the world as it is, but they also create it." For kids who spend six hours a day, five days a week, 10 months a year for 12 years "in institutions that are badly undemocratic, totally hierarchical, totally rife with petty domination: you have no time, you can't read when you want to read, you can't change rooms when you want to change rooms, you can't go play when you want to go play", Hern argues, submission is inevitable. "You look at that whole situation and if that's how you spend your whole life growing up, then wouldn't it make sense that those are the kinds of institutions you would not only seek out but seek to re-create? Those are the kinds of social relationships you're used to. If you're used to not really being able to make many decisions about your life and being in institutions that are badly antidemocratic, then when you grow up, those are what you'll feel comfortable in, that's what you look for, that's what you would feel would be normal."

That paragraph explains so much about my life it is scary. As a result I am totally co-dependant in my relationships and at work I tend to get taken advantage of by employers. Yet at the same time I have a very passive aggressive attitude towards authority. I also believe that my school experience is at least partially responsible for my alcoholism. I started drinking in grade 8 at bush parties. I would save my 2 dollars of lunch money so I could afford a six pack every single Friday night, then I'd spend my 10 dollar allowance on a six pack for Saturday night. This continued until I got my first job when I was 17. Then at college I started to drink daily, and by the time I hit the bzzr gardens at U.B.C I was a fully qualfied alcoholic. I like to think that the oppression of formulaic curriculum had something to do with this, and that if I had gone to a free school things might have been different.

So just remember that before you dismiss these ideas as naive and utopian. You don't want your kid to be some drunk jock idiot now do you?