How To Start You Own School

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Then, the "how." How are you going to do it? By yourself? With a group? How?

That's when it begins to get hard. It's easy to spread bull about goals. But people's basic assumptions and beliefs come rolling out pretty fast when they get down to the "how." The "how" has to do with the kind of teaching, space, and mood; how many children; where; and who will do the dirty work. If you had no goals but you did have a humane and coherent "how," you could still create a good school.

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It's something that has to be worked through—there's no "how to" that you can read about. Whether or not your school is ever going to be real starts at this point: when you decide to sit down and work things out. Either with straight out-on-the-table honesty, or devious crap.

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Are you going to have experienced teachers or not? Parents involved? How much? How many children? Normal children? Where? In homes? Rented buildings? In buses (a school without walls)? Tuition, or not? How much? How many teachers for how many children? Why "teachers" at all? Why a "school" at all? What's going on, anyway!

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Then, when it's flowing and you're into it warmly and deeply, perhaps the "who"—"who's going to do this," and "who's going to do that"—will take care of itself. In some schools, things just seem to happen. But usually not, so you'll need to decide about decision-making: who decides, who chooses among options. Who is going to build the envelope within which the school can thrive; who decides when and how to fend off attackers?

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Having a clear decision-making structure is another way of avoiding buck-passing: doing time schedules; making hard choices between too many applicants for a teaching position; dealing with parents who won't (or can't) pay tuition, or who leave their kids at school later and later into the afternoons; talking with the health officials who want to close you down. And then there's the income tax forms to be made out for teachers; the occasional accidents, meetings to be called, equipment to be ordered, kids (and more frequently, parents) who fall apart on your hands.

If you are going to have a School , you'll need some structure. If you're not to be an isolated community—if in fact you face the human misery, the roaring needs of those on heavy cultural transition roads—you'll need some guides through the hard work and difficult decisions you'll have to make.

Our bias, congruent with the Moses bent we're obviously on, is on a "structure" focusing around a coordinator. Moses. Someone good with long marches.

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