Beyond Free Schools: Community
(Page 8 of 11)
November/December 1970
By Jerry Friedberg
The success of The Lorillard Children's School was, and continues to be, enormous. It proved for many of us—and for others who came to visit from Michigan, Brooklyn and points between—clear demonstration that a radical alternative to more conventional education is possible and viable. For many of us, several parents and certainly all the staff, our lives have been changed and enriched immeasurably. And the kids: We saw Chris move with less fear, Mordecai fill with bubbling laughter, Roger give and take more affection, Victor move out from his mother. . .
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For a number of us, one of Lorillard's greatest successes was that it inspired us to more and gave us courage. We had taken risks. Communal finances, consensus decision-making, organic self-selection, encounter and vulnerability, learning in the context of loving an enterprise and its people . . . all this and more had worked.
For myself, I had been thinking about, reading about, visiting and even giving courses on intentional communities for five years. The experience of Lorillard made it absolutely clear to me that this was indeed what I wanted to try in my own life: That much of what I had long dreamed about was workable and even more rewarding than I had dreamed. And so, ten of us—eight adults(four from Lorillard) from 19 to 45 years old, and two children 2 1/2 and 5—recently began an intentional community 110 miles from New York City. One of our goals is a different way of raising children—being with, teaching, leaving alone, learning from and sharing a life-way exploration—naturally and organically, as we live together and deal with our daily life needs and impulses. We are exploring communal child-rearing (a far richer concept and practice than teaching) in a flexible, experiential way as an integral part of exploring who we are ourselves and how we live. Let me see if I can describe and give some feeling for what we're about.
We have no especially-labelled persuasion (Marxism, vegetarianism, Walden-II-ism, religion, primitivism or whatever), and no plan to fulfill. Finances are communal as much as people like—in practice, virtually all. Everyone puts in what he earns (or what we earn in our developing communal enterprises) and takes from the pot as he sees fit. We are moving toward a simpier life-way, spending less, doing more for ourselves with what is at hand, making greater use of inner resources and depending less on ourside diversions, eating more healthily (the meals are great!), gardening organically and doing our best to be aware of ecology and do well by our planet.
Increasingly, we are raising the children communally though the primary focus on their parents remains. Similarly, we are given to non-exclusiveness and multiple relationships while still tending to focus on primary pairings.
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