How To Start You Own School

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For this we must make our lives over: rearrange the ways we work, the styles of our play, the priorities of our time and our love; and move beyond the roles that still bind us from within. To replace what we reject, we must learn anew what we have to share, and grow to make it adequate. The price of making of our lives a school for our children is our own transformation. We believe it is possible, because it is already begun.

Our parents were forced to abandon their children to the part-time uses of the State because they were integrated into its economy and culture, because they saw no alternative, because they were isolated in marriage and privacy and could not organize their lives to be also a school. We know now that no couple can cope alone with even their own relation. We learn in a larger community. To free our young many must come together, to share their powers in critical mass and intimacy. We believe it involves all entering equal as children into the School of a larger Family.

It also means learning economic cooperation, to free space and resources. And it means committing ourselves to political identity and struggle. At present here, one elementary credential can front for up to fifty kids, leaving us with only our own limitations. But when many choose to use this freedom it will be curtailed; and that will be only the beginning. For Fascism is rising softly in this land, you have seen its sign in the black headline of the sky.

The State registered our son with a number at his birth, and designs to own him. Our growing up prepared us for integration into its army, its civil and industrial bureaucracies, its systems of consumption and exploitation, decision and power. It cannot afford us to let our son grow unprepared, let alone prepared for something else. It will not give him over to the gropings of our freedom without a deadly struggle. This will take many forms. To meet them, we must real-ize together who we are and the politics of our necessities and choices. And prepare to resist, to fight for the cradle of our future, and to flourish in and beyond our resistance.

Michael and Karen Rossman

LEARNING POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

ON GOALS - THE ULTIMATE

Most groups wanting a school meet a few times, hope it feels ok, get into some business details, and get started. A few laboriously go into goals and processes and debates on the nature of learning. Sometimes it's just incredible bullshit, but it's our impression that such schools, bullshit or not, tend to be the ones that thrive. (Maybe if you talk enough about it at meetings you're too tired to bother the kids much.)

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