Traditional schools tend to operate on the principle that students are passive receptacles into which knowledge will be deposited. The syllabus, schedule, pacing and so forth are determined from above. Public School New York rejects that approach. There is no set curriculum. No grades. No teachers with blackboards writing what chapter must be memorized by Friday.
PSNY, on the other hand, throws all that out. There is no curriculum. There are no grades. Students only learn things they are interested in (at the moment) and the way they want to learn them. There are no teachers to tell them about mitochondria or the War of 1812, although students will learn those things if and when they want to. The school is self-organized. The people are responsible for their own learning and for each other.
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.
Without a pre-set curriculum also means that students don’t have deadlines or a teacher rushing them through their studies (which can take up to six months to cover what some schools will do in six weeks). Students can learn as in-depth as they want (or need) and in the way that they want. They don’t have to compare themselves to others for grades or class ranks. They have to keep their own pace to their mastery of a skill or topic. This relieves a lot of the pressure that comes with education for a lot of students.
Of course, people often ask about college admissions and job readiness, how do you know a student has learned anything if there is no curriculum and no transcripts and no test scores? Students from free schools get into universities and do great things because they have developed self-direction, critical thinking, and passion for learning. They know how to teach themselves. They know how to look for resources and for experts in a field. They have had years of experience of making real-life decisions with real-life consequences rather than just being told what to do.
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.
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