How To Start You Own School

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Another incredible thing is believing you've defined anything in your early meetings—at least defined anything remotely resembling what your school will be in a few months after you open. In a brochure on starting schools, Frank Lindenfeld, Director of Summerhill West in Canoga Park, California, states: " . . . in the course of the meetings the nature of the proposed school will become defined."

We don't think you can know the "nature of the school" until it starts (and then only if you're not looking!) The "what-do-we-want" talk drifts easily into structure and such talk has an insidious habit of sounding more real than the soft, wordless flowing life the talk was supposed to house. The main thing is to get to know each other.

For when you ignore vast differences in premises (like about human beings, about how people learn, about how groups change and so on), then those differences begin to seem pretty real, and they divide after all. It's not the open differences, it's the secret ones. Maybe the ones you don't know about yourself most of all. It's because of fear. You get afraid of what you can't see.

* * *

There are roads and paths and we're all moving, our children faster than we are. The issue is still fluid: which road, how fast, and with whom. Every move towards a solid, flowing, joyful school will be easier if you have some sense of community. Fragile new schools can rarely carry the incredible burden of being the catalyst for a new community. Rather, it has to be the other way around . . .

But there are no good models, no one really knows what's happening now, let alone in the future, no one knows how to reach or make a school, the whole thing is an incredible experiment. Trust yourselves. No longer are there experts "Getting started" is gettingyour self together. Thenyour selves.

ON DIRECTORS/COORDINATORS

by Harvey Haber
New Schools Exchange

Trying to write a short statement on "qualities and skills necessary for a free-school coordinator" is like . . . I can think of no short, concise way to write this. A fantasy comes to mind: somewhere in a bad novel there is this nobel Frenchwoman shouting, "You are more dreadful than a Turkish soldier and an English official. No one on earth could embrace you . . ." And that's about it: a combination of English official and Turkish soldier, the ideal coordinator-director for a free school.

Let me explain: I think that in its beginning, formative stages, a despotism (benevolent, of course) is the most desirable system for a new school, primarily because there is nothing so deadly to its vital psyche than to have to appoint committees and have meetings before acting on every terrible little requirement that the school might have. Free school people are so resentful and fearful of ego-trippers and potential-powermongers that they cast themselves into a state of frozen inactivity rather than chance a unilateral decision by some would-be leader. No, let the would-be leader perform the necessary bureaucratic duties first. Then evolve a more democratic system if you wish. Despotism, after all, is a flawed approach and will die an organic death anyway. But if you're especially apprehensive about having a despot around, choose one so overbearingly arrogant—that one quality least acceptable to people with pretensions of freedom—that he will meet his demise sooner than later. He will have served his purpose and then must be cast out with only an infinite martyrdom to sustain himself. Then, with the beginning administrative necessities accomplished, the new school can comfortably strive for that coveted balance, the communal no-one-at-the-helm mood. (Or, retain the arrogant director and learn to love despotism — like Summerhill or Christianity . . .)

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