Beyond Free Schools: Community
November/December 1970
By Jerry Friedberg
The Lorillard Children's School was the most nourishing, wonder-ful, genuinely libertarian scene I had ever known . . . yet I left after just one year as its non-Director. For all of us (and I think I can generalize safely here) it was the best educational enterprise we had ever experienced—both as an institution and in our own personal growings—yet most of us who founded Lorillard and were its original staff have left.
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We came to feel that ANY school AS SUCH—at any level and no matter how "free"—cannot be as natural, spontaneous, organic and life-integrative as we want our lives to be. Several of us have gone on to join with still others in founding an intentional community, hopeful that it will prove a better alternative for us.
Our brief experience in our community since leaving Lorillard has reinforced the feelings we came to by the end of that first year there. And we've learned that others at experimental colleges and free schools are coming to similar conclusions. The transition—from schools to communities—is becoming increasingly common. What's this transition about?
I'd like to talk specifically about The Lorillard Children's School and the intentional community which, for a number of us, goes beyond the school.
Lorillard had two main roots. First, I had been working with seven or so students at Bensalem College in what we called the education group. Given the nearly absolute structural freedom of Bensalem, this group had been working throughout 1968-69 (just because they wanted to) on child education.
After several months of readings, discussions and visits to innovative places and programs we had generated a very full program of volunteer placements 3-4 days a week in various experimental children's schools, weekly seminars, workshops, field trips, etc. Super important: We had—at the same time—gone through a good deal of self-selection in and out of the group and begun to develop a day-to-day life-way of personal openness, sharing and working through personal differences and problems. We lived close to one another, mostly in the same building. Learning about child education and dealing with our own growth were interrelated from the start. By Spring 1969, my let's-do-our-own-school fantasy was feeling less and less unrealistic.
The second root of Lorillard was a group of parents in the surrounding community who had successfully operated a summer day camp and regular-school-year nursery school. They were focussed on bringing together black, Puerto Rican and white families in a less authoritarian way of working with children than was common to the area's public schools. Now they were interested in expanding upward into elementary grades. . . in doing a school.
One member of this group of parents, Helene, was a good friend and began working with the education group while another member worked in the parents' nursery. When we learned of space available in a church only four blocks from Bensalem and right at the edge of nearby black and Puerto Rican areas, we were ready to move our school from fantasy to reality.
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