Traditional schools tend to operate on the principle that students are passive receptacles into which knowledge will be deposited. The syllabus, schedule, pacing and so forth are determined from above. Public School New York rejects that approach. There is no set curriculum. No grades. No teachers with blackboards writing what chapter must be memorized by Friday.
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.
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.
Finally, there are the inevitable questions from the peanut gallery. “But what about college?” “How will they get jobs?” The implication, of course, is that the current system is doing such an effective job at preparing students for, well, any of the things that schools are supposedly for that we need not be concerned. Most jobs will require on-the-job training for skills anyway, and there are many free school graduates who have gone to universities. Admissions officers are sometimes intrigued by applicants who can articulate real interests and demonstrate the ability to self-direct rather than just good test scores, grades, and traditional achievements. To be clear: college is not the only path forward and, in some ways, not even the primary path that Public School is modeling.
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.
Of course, people often ask about college admissions and job readiness, how do you know a student has learned anything if there is no curriculum and no transcripts and no test scores? Students from free schools get into universities and do great things because they have developed self-direction, critical thinking, and passion for learning. They know how to teach themselves. They know how to look for resources and for experts in a field. They have had years of experience of making real-life decisions with real-life consequences rather than just being told what to do.
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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