In the past, 'free schools' meant something very different. The Peckham experiment was part of a tradition of radical education
There is nothing "free" about the new "free schools" opening this September. They may be free from the control of their local education authority but they have been selected by central government, are often being managed by private sector companies and look set to reinforce the existing purposes and values of mainstream schooling.
"Free schools" used to mean something very different in the past: you just need to look at a school set up and run by working-class families in Peckham after the second world war to get an idea of what the alternative might be. Set up as part of an experimental health and community centre, the Peckham free school was beloved by children, their parents, the local community and the educational establishment. It was a school in which there were no rewards and punishments ? yet order prevailed. It was a school with no compulsory lessons ? yet children learned not only basic reading, writing and maths but also poetry, art and drama. It was a school with no formal competition or testing, in which children were motivated by the activities of the older children and adults they saw around them; a school in which the gap between learning and life was, according to a Times Educational Supplement writer at the time, "not only bridged: it simply does not exist".
In this school, the aim was for children to be and become free. This aim was reflected in the everyday experiences and activities of the children and their families: a school child could freely interact with a non-teaching adult; a parent could be trusted with school funds to implement a curriculum idea; a young child could decide when she was ready to climb the bars in the gym and be allowed to practise carefully getting to the top without interference; a parent could take her child out of school to go swimming; visitors or older siblings were free to wander among the children and lend a hand with the sums or floor games.
Adult visitors were struck by the sight of the children "just getting on with it" and their ability to use their freedom responsibly. A teacher at another school commented that she could always spot children who had attended the Peckham free school because "they know what they want to do". Pam Elven, a child at the centre, claims that the experience taught her and others "how to live". When a lack of funds caused the centre to close in 1950, the children mourned its passing like a "death in the family".
The Peckham free school is part of a tradition of radical education, which demonstrates the possibility of an education rooted in relationships, experiences and experiment. A small number of schools in the UK still exemplify this kind of approach; for example, the Family School in Brixton, the Self Managed Learning College in Brighton, the New Forest Small School.
It is interesting that all of these schools applied for free school status and were refused, despite the endorsement of parents, children, the local community and the local education authority. It creates an impression only confirmed by a leaked email from one of Michael Gove's strategists: that there is a thinly disguised political agenda behind the drive for free schools. As Virginia Carrington, director of the Family School suggests, the current government's "approach to educational innovation and self-directed learning will continue to be limited to the middle classes, to children who already have many advantages in life".
The new free schools promise more of the old academy mantras of "world-beating ambition", tougher discipline and a transmission approach to learning. This is an approach that is not just empty (how does "beating the world" help children to lead a good life?), but also gravely mistaken, since it is based on a force-feeding model that has been widely discredited in research on how people learn. If the problems young people are faced with these days tell us one thing, it's that more of the same won't do. Reconsidering radical experiments like Peckham's free school are a good place to start: they offer us not a blueprint, but a glimpse of a different way: a free and flourishing school for a free and flourishing child in a free and flourishing community.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/30/free-school-peckham-education
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