How To Start You Own School

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Someone granted power by the community, someone to make day-to-day decisions (within, of course, "policy" set down by the Board). Someone to free the teachers to float with the children fulltime. Isn't that what it's all about, learning, and loving? To be with someone you love full time, even when you know it's a short time? It never happens when teachers are hassled with everything.

But it has to be organic. Someone rising into the job, feeling right; maybe a parent, teacher, older student; a neighbor wandering in at the right time.

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DECLARATION ON THE BIRTH OF THE CHILD LORCA

We will not send our child to a public school, or even to a private one in the usual sense. Together we have managed to learn much the schools couldn't teach us, and unlearn some of what they did. The heart of our knowledge is ours now, and it tells us we must be responsible ourselves for the conditions of our child's growth. This is no romantic hippy daydream. It is a full political act: grounded in theory, chosen as strategy, implemented with all the skills of our consciousness.

We choose to move on the future by freeing our child from the control of the present State. We declare independence from its essential instrument, the System of Education. We will not give our young over to be conditioned in obedience with its programs by any of its representatives, however unofficial, informal and liberal. We will grow our own . And we will grow them as free as we can manage, in situations where we have only to contend with what is in ourselves of the lives we are trying to leave behind.

Several years ago we left the Educational System, where we were cut off from our many selves. We sidestepped the institutions that continue it in society, and began to come together. Now we know that other lives of learning are possible. We can name them. Crippled as we are, we can create their initial conditions: we understand what is involved, and have the skills and the power. For we have been learning to be what we imagine: to live in our bodies, make art with our lives, realize cooperation, and fight Fascism by any means necessary, including the creation of alternate realities, guerilla enclaves of Life in the State of Death.

Good life learning means understanding is integrated in action. We display our knowledge of the culture of specialized roles, with its destructive systems of education, competition and authority, by how we manage to be each other's teachers, siblings and lovers, parents and children, by how we tend and heal and share each other's growth. We must focus at home through this if we are to focus anywhere else and into the future. We will grow our own . And we ourselves must be directly involved in what and how our children learn, for no one else can represent our interest in the future.

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