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.
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.
As far as the learning goes, that means a student comes to school, then decides what they would like to learn about for that day (or week, or month). Maybe they want to learn how to code. Maybe they want to learn how to make furniture. Maybe they want to learn about physics. The community then works out how to make it happen (finding a mentor, accessing tools, peer teaching). It’s a community first. School second.
Of course, there is still some boundaries. There is still some structure. “Free” in this context does not mean “do whatever you want” all the time (that is what people seem to imagine when they hear about a free school). There are still some rules and guidelines because you can’t have 50 people in a space without some sort of consensus (and agreements are only really possible when you have self-direction). Students make all of the school’s policies by voting on them. Students will mediate conflicts between students. Students take care of the space and of each other. Students have a large part in maintaining the community. It is also probably better for you than memorizing a bunch of formulas that will be long forgotten in three months.
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.
There is also a strong element of age mixing. Teenagers work with smaller children and it creates this amazing mentorship which you just don’t see in other educational environments where everyone is just with the same people of the same age. Older students are able to teach and re-learn things by teaching younger students. The younger students can look up to the older ones and be inspired (or they can be oblivious and do their own thing in the corner. Both are fine). There is a lot of social learning that goes on in this model—learning how to resolve conflicts with others, collaborating, and negotiating. This is the type of learning that matters in the real world and in adult life.
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.
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.
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