This might sound strange, but I think that the traditional education model is stuck in the industrial age. We have children sit at desks in rows, for instance. They get information imparted to them in units on a timetable of which someone else deems to be important. They have a bell tell them when to take breaks, when to switch activities, when to eat, and when to go home. They have grades to tell them how good they are and in what they are good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not claiming that this approach is the right one for every student (I don’t think it is) or that there is no valid role for more traditional pedagogies (there is) but I think it’s important that something like it exists right now when mainstream public education is more and more test-obsessed, more and more standardized to the point of absurdity, more and more obsessed with compliance to the point of crushing creativity. Public School New York and its kindred communities are not just talking about reform; they are living it.
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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