Today’s City Section features a front page article by Aaron Gell about Park Slope’s Brooklyn Free School (BFS). My guess is: this will be turning point for the 3-year old visionary school. Their admissions will be up next year – mark my word.
Descriptions of the school will either scare the be-jesus out of parents or turn them on. Some will think it doesn’t go far enough in the free or un-schooling direction others will be agasht that they even have nerve to call themselves a school.
Personally, I think it’s fascinating and visionary. Clearly, a smart but unmotivated student scholastically could, theoretically, be propelled to a real interest in lifelong learning there. That’s the theory. But I don’t think I’d send my kids there.
Why? Because I think my kids need structure (Teen Spirit, anyway. OSFO seems to thrive on it). Plus I think they get to stetch their creativity and their inner resources at home. Call me traditional, but I do want my kids to be prepared for the world we live in. That said, BFS believes that they are TRULY preparing their students for life by giving them the flexibility and resourcfulness they will need to suceed. It’s an interesting argument — and I’m dying to see the school in action after reading this article.
The school’s director and founder, Alan Berger is one of my heroes. (HERO: SOMEONE WHO TRIES TO CHANGE THE WORLD BY DOING SOMETHING POSITIVE IN HIS COMMUNITY).
I knew about the school early on as I am a friend of Alan’s brother’s. Berger originally outlined the idea for the school in a 2003 issue of the Linewaiter’s Gazette, the Food Coop newsletter. A year later, the school opened up with 30 kids in a church in the South Slope.
BFS, which is now located in its own building on 16th Street and costs $9,500 dollars a year to attend, reminds me in SOME ways of the high school I went to. My school was NOT by any stretch of the imagination a free school as we did learn traditional academics. But at the core was a humanistic belief in the individuality and creativity of the student. And we were encouraged to pursue what truly interested us.
Many of the students at BFS were turned off to traditional schools and needed an environment that would really embrace their difference and creativity. I love the quote in the article from my friend, Joe Gilford, whose son is in school there. "I don’t really know what they’re doing academically. I just have my fingers crossed."
I was also excited to hear that a local teen who works at a local bookstore is now at school there, Nick Gulotta is an extremely wise, articulate, politically astute young person, who also dresses in a style that can only be described as goth-meets-preppy. Apparently, he teaches a weekly seminar on Tibet and also takes classes at the New School.
An environment where students are inspired to learn how to learn is, in my opinion, an interesting model for a school. "Kids going out with an education like this will be more creative, more inventive, and more adaptive and flexible," says Berger in the article. "(That’s) going to be a big thing when the economy changes."
God knows it’s not going to work for every kid. And you gotta wonder what’ll happen to the kids who have not learned traditional skills. Chances are, they’ll do just fine. Or not. Hard to say.
I scoured the pictures to see how many kids I knew: I did recognize one or two. One of Teen Spirit’s friends was quoted a couple of times. It sounds like an amazing place in our midst. Not for everyone. But the very fact that it exists gives me hope and inspires me to the core.
ugggggggg! I need to go back to school to understand what you are saying! I got a headache just trying to read Sage’s comment, no offense. But I need an education again obviously. Send me to PS 321 for adults.
Once you contextualize BFS within the free school movement and within the market model of education and schooling that pervades this country since A Nation at Risk (1983) you begin to see its major design flaws both as a model for pedagogy and for learning.
It’s a disservice to John Dewey and his life’s work to have his name in any associated with the free school movement. Dewey was used by the advocates of the cult of efficiency in the words of historian r. Callahan to distort the notion of “progressive” education as chaos, which, once you get down to it, free schooling is. Dewey was all about structure, one of the few necessary “either/or’s” being the difference between the mature and the immature, the adults guiding the children. The difference, for Dewey, was more in what we teach (occupations) than in how we teach it, though that’s a vast over-simplification on my part.
The free schoolers, as the article indicates, can be traced to A.S. Neill and to his school Summerhill, which was, by most accounts, a problematic place for kids to live and learn. Neill was an effective leader, but one that lead by personality more than by substance as is the case with most independent schools. Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), Joel Spring (Education and the Corporate State), and other radical educational theoretical frameworks helped to provide a methodless method for the many free schools that have sprouted around the country since the late 60s. Of course, Summerhill, in 1921, was the first.
What strikes me as ironic is that, the same people who lambaste Bush and Bloomberg and Klein (including me) for their absolutism, their business models of education: children as product, fodder for the high tech economy of the 21st century (whose jobs have already been outsourced) are the now some of the same people who are shooting back with their own brand of absolutism: FREE SCHOOLS. It’s a radical dream and it doesn’t work, or if it does work it only works for the kids who are lucky enough to have been born to upper middle class parents who HELP their kids to SELF START. Progressive education, in the Deweyan sense, was always, unfortunately, for the rich- although it was egalitarian in its philosophical underpinnings and its methods were as close to universal as any that I’ve ever studied.
How dare Alan Berger, a teacher with 7 years experience, his fly by night staff, and his advisory committee of PhD’s- all refugees from one of the best public schools in the city- PS 321- think that they can run a methodless, pedagogy-free, atheoretical, ahistorical free school? Kids educations are at stake. The far left, as always, meets the far right at the bottom of the circle. There’s not too much of a difference, to me, between the black/brown shirts and the red shirts. (No, I’m not comparing anybody to Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Mussolini. Figurative speech.)