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.
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.
Of course, there is still some boundaries. There is still some structure. “Free” in this context does not mean “do whatever you want” all the time (that is what people seem to imagine when they hear about a free school). There are still some rules and guidelines because you can’t have 50 people in a space without some sort of consensus (and agreements are only really possible when you have self-direction). Students make all of the school’s policies by voting on them. Students will mediate conflicts between students. Students take care of the space and of each other. Students have a large part in maintaining the community. It is also probably better for you than memorizing a bunch of formulas that will be long forgotten in three months.
I’m also interested in the school’s economic model. It is free to attend, unlike many alternative schools that, despite good intentions, often end up as playgrounds for middle and upper class kids whose parents can afford boutique schooling options. Public School is funded by donations, volunteer labor, and whatever free or low-cost spaces it can secure. Makes it sound scrappy, right? That’s the point. Very DIY. You’ll find people who think that this is a major problem, an example of low funding and support = low quality education. But the other side of that is that the community must be creative and resourceful; it cannot simply monetize problems.
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.
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.
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.
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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