How To Start You Own School

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Going by feel, not by words.

* * *

The best description I ever heard of a teacher was by Jill:

"The person who accepts you completely as you are while still being a model of a more skilled, more conscious, more aware, and more loving person. . . "

* * *

And this is what the kids said they wanted in a teacher:
—He learns from us
—He shows me stuff
—They don't get in our way
—She's there when we need her
—He helps us get the stuff we need

Teachers Seeking Parents

At this point in time there appears to be many teachers—public school drop-outs or those simply pulling the role around them in a soft new way—looking for children to teach, more than there are parents seeking teachers.

Thus, many teachers are starting their own schools.

There are plenty of free-school candidates around, but parents sort of . . . prefer kids where they'll seem safe. (How many times have we said, even recently, hedging our bets, "The children should learn to make it in both culture Whatever that means.)

But advertise, in underground papers, in university communities, and hopeful parents will appear, both parent and teacher wanting the school to be a vehicle: the teacher, a way to make life more authentically new-culture based; the parents perhaps a transition to a less ambiguous posture. Somewhere in there are the kids.

Over-advertise, and you are in the unpleasant situation of"selecting"—you can't select among people you don't know without forcing yourself into a kind of ghastly rationality aid superficiality, as well as ending up with a lot of disappointed parents.

But either way, teachers who start schools are usually "ahead" of the parents, in that they've worked through in a very personal and direct way—at least theoretically—the different teaching modes rooted in the different cultures through which we're passing. And this is a heavy load; one which frequently forces teachers to be prematurely "wise" about what's going on. Jerry Friedberg, discussing Lorillard Children's school, describes the sense of distance between "staff" and parents very vividly:

" . . . The parents came from very different background (that had, in fact, been one of our initial goals), and shared very little of their daily lives, perceptions, and orientation with one another or the staff. With several notable exception (for example, we wound up having three parents on the staff). parents did not, could not, partake of an organic, self-selecting, daily sharing, working-things-through process such as the staff was experiencing. Here was no group of close friends shaping day-to-day common experience as part of an over-all life-way, but rather, by virtue of being a school in the city, a well-enough-intentioned group of heterogeneous people pulling and tugging at one another and the staff.

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