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.
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.
Learning also happens through projects and real interests, rather than through pre-existing units. A student who is interested in skateboarding will learn about physics to try to understand how an ollie or a kickflip works. Then they may branch off into learning about materials science to be able to make their own boards, then business planning if they want to sell them. They will retain that knowledge more because it is attached to something they cared about… not just something that they will be tested on. Or a student will spend weeks “doing nothing” then have a breakthrough because they are bored. This is the key point—students have large amounts of agency in how and what they learn, and this can lead to self-directed and life-long learning.
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.
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.
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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