This might sound strange, but I think that the traditional education model is stuck in the industrial age. We have children sit at desks in rows, for instance. They get information imparted to them in units on a timetable of which someone else deems to be important. They have a bell tell them when to take breaks, when to switch activities, when to eat, and when to go home. They have grades to tell them how good they are and in what they are good.
Rather, the school is a self-organized community of students (and adults, who are not considered somehow above or separate from students) who make decisions about what they want to study and how. This may sound anarchic, and in some ways it is, but it is also structured. People group together in working groups based on common interests, whether coding, urban gardening, film theory or some other subject, and organize themselves, setting their own pace and goals. Study is driven by need and interest rather than syllabus, so, for example, people learn math when they want or need to do so for some larger project rather than drilling algebra year after year whether they have immediate use for it or not, as is more common in traditional settings. Does this sound chaotic? It may in theory, but in practice people generally figure out how to make it work together. Remember that it is a school for people of all ages, not only children, so adults can provide guidance and advice as needed without being placed in a hierarchical position above the students. School time is thus largely taken up with meetings and arriving at consensus about school-wide decisions, from use of space and resources to interpersonal conflicts. School members have power in this arrangement, real power, not the faux power of “student government plans the dance” as in many traditional schools. It’s a mess sometimes (democracy always is a bit of a mess), but that is also the point. You’re learning how to deal with disagreement and conflict in real time, not learning about it secondhand in a civics textbook. There are, of course, those who worry that this structure means that nothing ever gets accomplished or that it descends into simple anarchy. In my experience this is not the case, and in fact such communities tend to self-regulate fairly well, since everyone has a stake in its function.
There is also no distinction between “learning” time and “real life” time. At most traditional schools kids work on meaningless tasks for much of the day, leaving behind the “real world” of adult interactions and responsibilities. At Public School New York people work on things that are meaningful and important to them, often collaborating with people of all ages (collaboration between adults and children across age groups in school settings! Who knew? ), and they are accountable to their peers, not to some external authority figure who enforces rules with reward and punishment. Their motivation for learning is intrinsic interest and a social responsibility to others, not to a system of grades, gold stars, or external threat of punishment. You may think this sounds idealistic but it’s not: this model has been in use, in various forms, for decades. Democratic free schools have been around since at least the 1960s and some go much further back than that.
I’m particularly fascinated by the way it inverts the traditional idea of “socialization.” Public schools and most other educational institutions purport to teach social skills but the reality is often quite different. The social skills you learn in most schools are how to sit still, how to follow arbitrary rules, how to compete with peers for a relative position in the rankings. At Public School New York, you are negotiating, organizing, collaborating, resolving real conflicts with real stakes. The traditional school setting is a highly contrived, controlled space for learning social skills and, as with learning “academic” skills, it is just one model. At Public School, you learn to be a leader not because you are the elected class president but because you took initiative on something that mattered to you and you persuaded others to help you do it.
I’m also interested in the school’s economic model. It is free to attend, unlike many alternative schools that, despite good intentions, often end up as playgrounds for middle and upper class kids whose parents can afford boutique schooling options. Public School is funded by donations, volunteer labor, and whatever free or low-cost spaces it can secure. Makes it sound scrappy, right? That’s the point. Very DIY. You’ll find people who think that this is a major problem, an example of low funding and support = low quality education. But the other side of that is that the community must be creative and resourceful; it cannot simply monetize problems.
Finally, there are the inevitable questions from the peanut gallery. “But what about college?” “How will they get jobs?” The implication, of course, is that the current system is doing such an effective job at preparing students for, well, any of the things that schools are supposedly for that we need not be concerned. Most jobs will require on-the-job training for skills anyway, and there are many free school graduates who have gone to universities. Admissions officers are sometimes intrigued by applicants who can articulate real interests and demonstrate the ability to self-direct rather than just good test scores, grades, and traditional achievements. To be clear: college is not the only path forward and, in some ways, not even the primary path that Public School is modeling.
The other big thing about having no set curriculum is that it forces a constant adaptation to what students need and want and also requires being responsive to the individual, to group, to community, in the here and now rather than trying to anticipate their needs based on some presumed external measure of what might be useful in five or ten years. Technology changes. Culture changes. Individual interests are wildly different. Why pretend that one predetermined path is good for everyone? It’s an experiment, a laboratory, a provocation for what education could look like when we start designing it around human development rather than the needs of an industrial age workforce.
I’m not claiming that this approach is the right one for every student (I don’t think it is) or that there is no valid role for more traditional pedagogies (there is) but I think it’s important that something like it exists right now when mainstream public education is more and more test-obsessed, more and more standardized to the point of absurdity, more and more obsessed with compliance to the point of crushing creativity. Public School New York and its kindred communities are not just talking about reform; they are living it.
The free school model is not right for everyone. Some children work better with external structure. Some parents find it difficult to deal with the unknown in not knowing exactly what their child is doing at school each day. It also requires a level of trust—that children are naturally curious and are capable of learning without being forced or told. It requires trust that children are more than test scores.
But for students who do not fit into the traditional schooling model—students who get crushed by the traditional system or who have never fit in—it can provide a different way. A place where education is personal, not through algorithms or tiered worksheets, but through real human interactions and self-directed learning. Where the question asked is not “what do you need to know for the exam” but “what do you want to know about the world?”
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