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.
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.
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.
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