Chaos and Learning: The Free Schools

I want high school report cards to look like this: Playing with Gentle Glass Things--A Computer Magic--A Writing Letters to Those You Love--A Finding out about Fish--A Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty--A + !

So wrote Richard Brautigan in his poem "Gee, You're So Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain." In this spirit, growing disenchantment with U.S. public schools has produced a new alternative in virtually every state: small, mostly private "free" schools. Influenced by reformist manifestos like John Holt's How Children Fail, more than 800 of them are now run by diverse idealists --suburban mothers, ghetto blacks, former campus radicals. Their mood is typified by exotic school names: The Mind Restaurant (Phoenix), The Elizabeth Cleaners (Manhattan). Stone Soup (Longwood, Fla.), All Together Now (Venice, Calif.). Their future is suggested by an outburst of how-to-do-it information. In Santa Barbara. Calif., the New Schools Exchange publishes a newsletter that now boasts 100,000 subscribers.

Emotional Development. Many free schools collapse after 18 months. Still, three major types are surviving, clustered in California, New England and the Great Lakes region. In black ghettos, storefront street academies offer the rigorous college preparation that few minorities get in city public schools. In rural areas, counterculture whites run farmhouse schools that stress agrarian survival skills. Most common are free schools dominated by middle-class parents seeking to foster emotional as well as intellectual development.

All this is reminiscent of progressive education in the late 1920s, when a wave of eccentric schools were founded to carry out the earnest theories of John Dewey and other educational philosophers. Free schools, though, are motivated less by ideology than by despair with public education. Sensing that despair, in fact, some big public school systems are creating their own versions of free schools. Philadelphia's Parkway School, for example, holds classes not in a school building but in museums and business establishments around the city.

Like so many other U.S. educational reforms, such experiments may well succumb to official caution and orthodoxy. Still, thanks to free schools, it is just possible that quite a few public school kids will some day get a chance to earn A's for Playing with Gentle Glass Things or Writing Letters to Those You Love. To examine one of the freest models, TIME Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand last week visited the Exploring Family School, 12 miles from San Diego in El Cajon, Calif., comparing it with his experiences as a history teacher in the Peace Corps and the Los Angeles public schools. His report:

A big kid in blue jeans ambled up to a cluster of others, aged five to 18, sitting under an avocado tree. "Does anybody know where the algebra book is?" he asked. It seemed there were only two, and one was last seen "on the blue table under a pile of crap and stuff." Pointing at a beat-up 1952 Chevrolet that reminds the kids of hoodlum movies, a boy suggested, "Look in the gangster car." The big kid eventually found the book--and someone to teach him a lesson from it. But a visitor had to ask: Is this education?

For anyone who has ever been a teacher, alternately decrying and perpetuating the rigid system that nails those little brats fearfully to their seats with obedient bodies but closed minds, the Exploring Family School is gloriously hopeful --and frightening. Instead of tidy classrooms, there is weightlifting in a shanty called the music room. And all those wild-looking kids running around. Within a period of three hours, I got squirted with water, pinched by an incipient Lolita and hit in the back with a rock-hard, organically grown orange, which strayed from a ball game. Unsupervised by adults, kids of all ages did incredible gymnastic feats on a rope strung between two trees. In the main room of a green bungalow, the school's chief structure, four girls and a boy strung beads to be sold at a fund-raising fair, while two girls did mathematical crossword puzzles and talked ("Do you know it will cost $7 to have my horse's teeth ground down?"). It was educational chaos.

No Drugs or Dogs. Founded by local parents two years ago, Exploring Family is supervised by Lonnie Rowel I, 24, who once ran an experimental college while an undergraduate at San Diego State College. His 43 students are heterogeneous, to say the least. Because of careful recruiting, tuition of $65 a month and scholarships, one-third of the kids are progeny of lawyers and professors; one-third are children of poor people and welfare recipients. The rest are children of blue-collar workers, as well as offspring of rock musicians, students and craftsmen.

Exploring Family rents a 13-acre avocado farm for $450 a month plus the labor of watering 300 trees. There are only two rules: no drugs on school property, and no dogs inside the bungalow. The only schedule involves sporadic sessions on Women's Lib and natural science, and an optional morning meeting. Attendance is never taken. At one meeting a teacher named Anne (only first names, please) gently asked: "Can people start getting here at 9 o'clock?" Answer: "But we did, and nobody was here."

Surrounded by Choice. Despite the seeming anarchy, Rowell and his staff firmly believe in teaching math, reading and writing. The school has a high ratio of adults (all under 25) to kids, despite salaries of only $100 a month. There are five full-time teachers. In addition, a dozen local artists and professors do volunteer teaching. Older kids teach younger ones. Still, "classes" meet only when children come looking for things "to get into." The school's chief gift is the freedom to be interested--in anything at all.

"When people are surrounded by choice," says Rowell, "they at first want to choose everything, and so they often complete nothing. Sooner or later, the people here see that learning is interesting. But it's a slow process. We are in a transitional stage now; many of the students are beginning to settle down and stick with projects for a longer time." He is right. In spite of--and often because of--the bedlam, recognizable learning is taking place. One six-year-old did little but play for six months. Finally he realized that he wanted to learn to read; now he is churning through armloads of library books.

Kathy, a part-time staff member, read from a collection of essays by black authors to three kids stretched out on the dry, brown grass. The kids listened, asked a few questions, made a few remarks and then gave up for the day on that topic. I have seen formal seminars at Exeter that had more content in two minutes than this one did in 20. But I have also taught classes in public high schools that did not approach this informal session in interest and attention.

Other learning comes as a byproduct of what seems to be play. On "inflatable day," a local sculptor who uses giant plastic bags brought his materials and let kids blow them up. Soon the staff and the kids were posing questions like: How much air is inside? How long could you live in there? What holds it up? In crafts, says Jimmie House, an American Indian on the staff, even kids who hate math "have to measure the leather, and sooner or later it comes down to adding and subtracting."

People's Vet. This is education in small pieces. One teenager with hair down to his shoulders spent the morning helping Rowell balance the school books. To think of his spending three hours in a high school bookkeeping course seemed beyond belief; yet in effect, that is what this kid was doing. A 14-year-old girl who was cutting classes and popping pills at the local high school last year is now completely off drugs and gives lectures on E.F.S. at nearby colleges. A 15-year-old girl with a passion for animals wants to be a veterinarian and is undismayed that E.F.S. may not be able to give her the proper preparation for a college vet program. She will learn about animals, she says, by "apprenticing"--and indeed, the rise of apprenticeship programs in several states may yet enable her to become what she calls a "people's vet."

Being an Exploring Family parent can be trying. Milo Clark, 39, a Williams-and Harvard-educated former business consultant who now runs a crafts shop, says he has difficulty adjusting to his four kids' sassiness and indifference to spelling. Nonetheless, he is determined "not to set standards of achievement for them the way they were set for me. Let them discover for themselves where they are heading." Like most free schools, Exploring Family is having financial trouble, but Rowell already has enough students interested in coming back next year to ensure the school's reopening. He does not think everyone should go to a free school, but he aims to develop his version in order to help public schools as well as discontented kids. "As long as we can stay open and show the regular system that there is another way of doing things," he says, "then there's a possibility that the system will change."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.