How To Start You Own School

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At any rate we got to wondering what it would look like if we collected all the free-school goals we could find and coalesced them into one grand set of Cosmic Super Goals. Here it is:

"WE WANT OUR SCHOOL TO . . .

Build or Increase Skills—in order to be able to . . .

• Survive (in wildernesses, "dying environments,"or "in a revolutionary future")
• master the culture ("basics," "the three r's")
• protect oneself from the culture
• attack and change the culture
• put things together ("problem solving," "reasoning," "creating," "learning how to learn")
• share, live in groups, be responsible for yourself, talk straight

Be Therapeutic . . .

• promote health, personal growth
• allow "integration of mental fragments into gestalts
• clear the decks of bad cultural debris
• help fulfill children's needs (i.e., holding them etc.).
• entertaining, fun

Be Anarchistic

• an adventure
• free to do whatever comes up
• discover stuff, explore

Increase Perception

• of the senses
• of the child's sense of the world, of nature
• of other cultures

Foster Spiritual Growth

• be a ground for rituals
• a place for engendering myths "unique to us"
• allow a sense of the holy to flow,

Parents Seeking Teachers

If you're a group of parents, with kids in various states of torture at the hands of public schools and all, perhaps after months of meetings and hashing it over, it's good when you get to the part about bringing in teachers. There are few aspects of starting schools more pleasant, few fraught with more awkwardness.

You think you know what you want: someone warm, loving, open, cool , good with kids. What then when another family wants all that plus someone who can get some heavy academics going as well? Sometimes the first real below-the-surface differences are revealed at this point, and the best skill—and love—is necessary to work it out. Some potential schools split at this point; others don't but should—various power games get going, for example, one group who wants structure capturing a teacher over those who don't. Often the game is incredibly subtle, and you don't find out who "won" until later.

When these issues come up it may be the first plunge off the cliff of defining things, trying to get clear about Educational Philosophy, and all that. (Possibly what you really want is someone to make happen to your kids all the things that didn't happen to you when you were a child—and how can you be rational about that?)

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