Postscript by Chris Mercogliano 
Which Way: Top-Down or Bottom-Up? The Story of the Albany Free School
by Mary M. Leue
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Our school, The Free School, in downtown Albany, New York, like a lot of others that call themselves "free" or "alternative," is based on the rights of children - and is still going strong as it enters its thirtieth year! Every year more families are allowing their children to choose us. Every year we are approached by more people who want to learn more about us - or even to teach with us! We have more and more (self-chosen) learning options for kids to choose from, like apprenticeships in all sorts of fascinating occupations and work/travel opportunities. The best thing about us, I believe, is our mix of kids from a wide variety of backgrounds. Most alternative schools, and many if not most public schools, are made up of fairly homogeneous groups - some because of financial limitations, others because of the socio-economic separation of the neighborhoods from which schools draw their students.
We bus in most of our middle class kids. I find it heartening to see, consistently over the nearly three decades of the school's life, how many families there are and have been in our geographical area whose choice of a school has not eliminated ours because of fear of "the ghetto," with all of its attendant statistical "undesirability" criteria! Kids are kids, and learning, kids' style, is its own reward for everyone concerned, and flies in the face of fears and prejudices!
Sometime during the early seventies we turned from a plain old "free" or "alternative" school into a school-community. And since we've got one which has been and still is highly successful - both locally and globally - I am happy to tell the story of how it happened, why, and how other people might take heart in setting up learning centers of their own! Timing is important, and ours was astoundingly tailored to the opportunities and failures of the time in which it began (the seventies). The times of the new millennium are very different, equally challenging and presenting their own opportunities for people able and willing to violate or transcend the mores of "what everyone knows," as we did. So this is not a formula for success: it is rather an inspirational account of what we did and an invitation to explore and venture on your own!
Before describing what we have learned ourselves in the Free School community, I need to offer you a model of human learning - whether that be learning by a child or by an adult - which differs radically from the educational practices (although not from the principles so eloquently advocated by educational philosophers like John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Waldorf founder Rudolf Steiner, Francisco Ferrer, anarchist founder of The Modern School movement, A. S. Neill of Summerhill and others). What I believe all these people have in common is a grasp of -- and a devotion to-- the person, whether large or small, about whom one speaks when one looks at learning, for it is the actual individual human being her/himself who is paramount here, not some hypothetical or research-generated idea of who s/he is - and age is not a primary criterion here. Grasping that fact as rock-bottom reality can be darned elusive to a person twelve or more years of whose childhood were spent in attendance at an involuntary institution based on another model!
Most of what we "know" about education, alas, is based on tainted assumptions. The notions that learning should be self-directed and that kids' learning should be segregated from that of adults have both been effectively negated by the success of the alternative and homeschooling movements. The belief that minority students have to be coerced into learning or even that most of them are relatively ineducable has been shown to be false in several inner city schools like our Albany (New York) and New Orleans Free Schools and in schools dedicated to effective remediation based on humanistic principles like the Community School in Camden, Maine. Thus, there is a great deal of successful educational experience on which to build an easily accessible, informally-organized community-based learning network to supplement the more traditional age-graded public schools. This suggestion for community learning centers is just taking the successes of the few already existing alternative educational organizations into the next logical step!
In fact, it appears that this trend is already taking place, with the success of resource centers for homeschoolers, an example being Pathfinder Teen Center in Amherst, Massachusetts under the guidance of Josh Hornick and Ken Danford. Additionally, there is the very interesting development of some of the older alternative schools into communities which offer a variety of learning options for families, both local and online, such as Pat Montgomery's Clonlara School, with its homeschooling network and online Compuhigh. Increasing autonomy for both kids and families seems to be on the increase. Unfortunately, this encouraging trend is occurring mainly in the least needful areas of our country. Both Jonathan Kozol and John Taylor Gatto have stressed this inequality of opportunity for minority children. It may be that it is in this neglected aspect of alternative learning experiences that The Free School, in Albany, now in its thirtieth year, may be of use.
It has long been a shibboleth in American society that "a good education" is the keystone of a successful adult life, morally, culturally, intellectually, economically - even maritally. Common acceptance of the moral and intellectual inferiority of "the masses" in our ghettos is widely held. By contrast, John Taylor Gatto views children both as supremely themselves and as the adults of the future they will become, and sees the task of the school and the teacher as offering inspiration to them through the teacher's own passion and know-how, supporting their individual genius or daemon, providing as much space as possible for experimentation and practice with their future adult roles, and as supporting and protecting them from the adults who have been assigned the job of indoctrinating them with the mores of the culture. For Gatto it is the personhood of the adults who shape children's primary environment that makes the crucial difference in the adults these fledglings will become - and this idea is far less simplistic than most "educators" and parents seem to think! "We teach who we are," as the saying goes - and that is who our children look to as their inspiration - whether positively or negatively!
Taking off from John's model of human life, it follows that the learning experience is not something that can be fruitfully separated off from ordinary life, nor can it be limited to any one age group, to a building set apart for the purpose, to a specific curriculum or even to a designated leader so chosen because s/he has taken university courses labeled as teacher preparation and received a certificate verifying her/his qualifications for being the person given the task of "educating our children." Yes, of course we go to someone who has specific skills in some area we want to learn about - and yes, someone who can, for example, teach kids to read and write and figure is to be prized above rubies. But that person's "credentials" to teach children need to be personal, not simply symbolic or bureaucratic - based on a passionate attitude toward the subject matter being taught, toward the process of teaching itself and toward the kids being taught, as John says.
The difference here is that learning is a process that only works well when it is basically self-chosen, which is why I posed the question of "Which way: top down or bottom up?" as the title of this chapter. It is my profound conviction that we of the Albany Free School have survived and thrived largely because we did very little in the way of prior planning for structure, but instead, made it up as we went along. So you would have to say that we have lived by the law of "bottom up." I doubt that we would have survived this long if we had pre-planned how things ought to go - because if we had, the second generation of people now coming into the community would have seen it as already established, which would have left them no room for innovation or change.
This criterion of spontaneity goes for adults as well as for children. Engaging in the learning process on the basis of a voluntary choice for nearly thirty years has left me with no doubt whatsoever that this is the right way to go! And having worked with a socio-economically integrated group of children in the ghetto in an "unschool" (as you might call it) in which the designated teachers were also self-chosen for their roles - we have never hired a single teacher nor fired one for lack of credentialization, for "incompetence" or for any other reason - I can testify to the fact that it WORKS! Our kids come to us by their own (not their parents') choice, and leave us on the same basis when they want something else. So do our teachers. There are not two rules, one which applies only to children, another to the adults, as there are in most learning centers. And we have always been open for visitation, because (unlike some free schools) our children love visitors! In fact, they surround them, take them by the hand and lead them to wherever they want them to go! And bid them a fond goodby when they leave.
I feel as though it is incumbent on me to describe how our school actually works. That's really hard, perhaps impossible. I can tell you how we fund the school (with tuition which slides all the way to zero) plus the revenue from our eleven buildings, most of them four-story row houses with multiple apartments in them which we offer to tenant families on a voluntary basis in lieu of rent). I can tell you what hours of the day we keep, how many children and adults occupy the building on school days, how the kids behave (they live their daily lives full-out from the moment they enter in the morning until the moment they leave for the night!). I can tell you what activities are available to kids and what kinds of things you would see if you paid us a visit. You might see groups hovering over a table in a room engaged in some joint enterprise, or individuals bent over a block of wood in the wood shop or a lump of clay in the crafts room - activities which might vary as widely as slogging away in math workbooks to drawing images for the school calendar, excitedly creating costumes and dialogue for a play to be put on for the whole school, writing copy for the school newspaper on the computer or listening to someone reading out loud from a favorite storybook like At the Back of the North Wind or The Hobbit, excitedly planning a trip to a local apple orchard, creating a tiny village diorama with multi-colored modeling clays, or any one of a number of other activities perhaps chosen jointly by students and a teacher, perhaps by a single student.
After lunch, you might see a couple of three-year-olds vying for the privilege of each taking a handle of the huge aluminum cooking pot half filled with the scrapings from lunch to lug down the stairs and out through the back yard to where the chickens cluck and strut, waiting for their daily treat. You might see others scurrying up the sidewalk to the neighborhood park to play baseball or swing on the swings or to the museum in the state Mall, or scrambling into the school van for some trip they had all planned together. We are a busy, intense crowd, and time at school just flies. But how these things really work is impossible to stipulate, because every day is different from the previous one. Truly, we "make it up as we go along." And with luck, it will always be that day, because none of us ever wants it to be any different. And when our kids finally leave us, they swing almost effortlessly into the routine of the new school they are to be attending, because they have developed the habit of looking on school as sheer pleasure and stimulation. And the new routines and nightly preparations they now have to get used to seem to bother them not a whit, because school has not jaded their appetites for learning. They come back frequently to tell us how much they are learning in their new schools!
As I said above, having started as a school, thirty years ago, we became a community learning center somewhere along the way. This happened because families who sent us their children came to realize that what we had - and were - was not just for children, but was for everyone! So, many families found houses to buy and fix up cooperatively in the same block as the school, and gradually, we found ourselves living and working more and more with each other and with (and in) the school. We have never made sharp distinctions between any of the activities engaged in by adults and children, or between the school and the rest of the community, and there have always been personal incentives for adults to move closer to the immediate environs of the school to be in a position to take part in various school and community activities.
Because none of us ever had much money, we quite quickly saw the value of creating hedges against undue drains on the little we did have. And so we set up a whole series of support structures for affordable home ownership, health, financial security, access to group support for problem-solving, further education, recreation, pregnancy support, skills learning, and, chiefest among them all, an on-going basis for developing a steadily increasing sense of personal and professional worth and expertise based on direct experience over time. This sort of result can happen only when and where there is a lifetime investment in community learning! The price is a deep commitment on the part of everyone in the community to making it happen. It's been a great way to live, for young and old alike.
* * * * * Postscript by Chris Mercogliano
I would like to conclude with a statement about our school written by Chris Mercogliano as a proposed conclusion to the first version of his book about the school, Making it Up As We Go Along. It is appropriate that "my" chapter in this book about community learning be at least partly written by someone other than myself. Our school has always been a shared enterprise, and no one person can really give its full flavor. Here's what Chris has had to say about us:
...With the arrival of second-generation students and teachers, it appears certain that the Free School will be around for years to come. We will continue modeling true community-based education for an increasingly polarized and atomized nation; and we will go on providing safe haven to a handful of those children who are in danger of falling victim to the dark shadow of our compulsory education system, as well as fostering the growth of a certain number of children who would probably fare well in almost any setting. Given the steadily increasing number of calls, letters and visits from people interested in discovering real alternatives to the standard version of school despite the waves of conservatism currently washing over American society, it seems we are answering a genuine need for us to keep making it up as we go along in our 130 year-old building on Elm Street.
Meanwhile, several questions remain in the air. First of all, does honoring the principles [we have described] require the pattern of organization called "school?" Hardly. Schools, as Ivan Illich and successors like John Holt and later John Taylor Gatto have pointed out, nearly always have and always will set themselves up in opposition to most or all of them. While some schools do a better job than others of avoiding what Illich calls "the corrosive effects of compulsory schooling," the fact remains that generations of state-enforced, centrally-managed education have quite literally schooled our modern minds, both individual and collective, out of the ability to picture things differently. In other words, the current generation of parents is almost entirely dependent on the notion of "schooling" as it now exists, having so thoroughly internalized the myths of school: that education is a scarce commodity of which a prescribed amount must "be gotten" before a person is declared to be a competent adult (Illich, Farenga), that children learn only in the company of professionally trained and licensed teachers (Holt), and that the system of public education in this country is a democratic institution, which with only a little more tinkering, will one day soon begin delivering life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to its adherents (Gatto).
If all of this anti-school sentiment be on the mark, and I believe that it is, then the next question is, "So why the Free School?" The easy way out here, of course, would be to say that we are not really a school at all (we aren't free either, being tuition-based); but instead are a community, as I attempted to demonstrate in the chapter by that name. And while I stand by those assertions, we are nonetheless a school after all, imperfect at best and always struggling with the paradoxes and competing urges which underlie the whole business in the first place. Furthermore, some of our kids' parents would prefer that we were more of a school than we actually are, and all very much want and need us to contribute to the raising of their children to the extent that we do. In return we try very hard not to cause separation between them. Finally, instead of "giving kids an education," which implies some sort of passive exchange; or in some way "preparing them for the future," which is sure to instill a sense of ennui and futility, we try equally hard to unite the active principles of living and learning.
All of which leads to yet another unanswered question. If the Free School's approach to education is even half as efficacious as I have described in [Making it Up as We Go Along], then why don't we find parents lining up at our door to enroll their kids? The answer is a complex one, many of the component parts of which have already been addressed. What remains to be said is simply that not everyone wants their children to have fun in school, to construct their own problems to which they create their own solutions--and perhaps herein lies the crux of the matter--to be free to be themselves. I lifted that well-worn phrase straight from the mission statement which the older students in the school just recently wrote for a literary magazine they're starting up in order to raise money for a cross-country train trip. Of course the reason for this widespread reluctance to entrust children with the responsibility for their own growth leads us right back around the circle to Illich, Holt and Gatto. So many of us have been so deeply conditioned to be cautious and fearful followers that the idea of setting our own kids free is then perceived as some sort of ultimate threat. And according to what I hear from friends and associates whose kids are now doing their learning at home, the push and pull between the urge to control and shape their children and the willingness to let them go their own way is very much the same.
In any event, it behooves us all to remember that a schooled approach to learning, one which involves textbooks, lesson plans and rote exercises is at best an approximation of any true and lasting experience of the real-for-sure world. In order to turn back the rising tide of artificiality, we have no choice but to become aware of the gap between ourselves and the true sources of learning, sustenance and meaning in ours and our children's lives--all of which our postmodern consumption-driven economy is so hell-bent on luring us away from. Returning to Illich one final time, if the opportunities for learning amidst the everyday world were once again abundant, then there would be no need for education as such. But returning to a romantic notion of the past is unlikely at best. On the national scene, all of the momentum remains in the direction of ever greater standardization and centralization, all in the name of corporate efficiency, and in any event, there is mounting evidence that efforts to radically alter the educational system will always prove futile.
Meanwhile, real change is occurring wherever individuals and small groups are reclaiming responsibility for the raising of their children. Little independent schools like ours are sprouting up all over the place once again, and the number of homeschoolers is growing exponentially. Furthermore, there is increasing collaboration between freeschoolers and homeschoolers as the two somewhat amorphous groups begin to recognize their abundant common ground. Thanks in large part to the homeschool movement, networks of apprenticeship opportunities are forming with the goal of once again enabling adolescents to enter the adult world successfully without being forced to submit to state authority and control. Prestigious colleges and universities are discovering that free- and homeschool "graduates" make fine catches because they are often more worldly and mature--and better educated--than their conventionally schooled counterparts.
And there are signs of people taking back control over the basic means of their lives in other areas as well. For example, increasing numbers of women are fighting for and winning the right to have their babies in the sanctity of their own homes. The term "community-supported agriculture," whereby produce is grown locally (and usually organically) on a subscription basis is coming into common parlance. A number of towns and villages currently are experimenting with various alternatives to money as the basis for the exchange of goods and services, thus taking the idea of bartering a step further than it was in the days of the sixty's and seventy's counterculture. At the same time, let us not forget that these are largely white, middle class phenomena. As Jonathan Kozol has so starkly portrayed in his most recent two exposes, Savage Inequities and Amazing Grace, in many ways we remain two separate nations, one white and one not white, and the signs of hope in the increasingly segregated ghettoes of our major cities are few and far between.
In closing, it is becoming clear to me that there really are no grand conclusions to be had regarding the subject at hand. While what we choose to call "education" needs constant reexamination on a great many levels--sociopolitical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual--it is not in and of itself the solution to any of the issues that I have raised in my book. If we look at our nation as being in the throes of a disease state, as Kozol and others would have us do, then suffice it to say that the domain of education and all of the problems associated with it are at the same time symptoms and causes of some greater illness. Or said another way, if the fundamental concern before us is the developmental well-being of our children, then to focus narrowly on the subject of schools, or even more broadly on "education" is to miss the mark entirely, and only serves to reinforce the myth that there exists a prescription for that well-being.
Thus I have told the Free School's story for one primary reason: to hold it up as just one example of how we can support the growth of healthy, sane children and truly endow them with the guarantees written into the Constitution by our forefathers. I will repeat one last time that there is no one right way to do it. To school or not to school is not the question. The question, which needs to be asked over and over again, is what is best for this child or that child, or my child? In answering, let us remember two things; first, that the real answer lies largely within each and every child; and second, that the decisions which affect even one child, whether he or she be in Albany, New York or Albany, Oregon or Albany, Georgia also affect children in the darkest and most sequestered slums of our major cities. In other words, just as there are no single answers, there are no simple ones either. The world always has been filled with injustice and paradox and confusion and danger just as it has with compassion and beauty and courage and hope. What saves humanity again and again is the miracle that within the spirit of human children there exists a hardy seed of wonder and exuberance, one which freeschoolers and homeschoolers alike are determined to preserve for future generations. And that is why, together, we must continue making it up as we go along.
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© Copyright 2000. Mary M. Leue - All Rights Reserved.
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