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We Are Out-Laws: Being a Public Freedom and
Democracy School in Un-Democratic Times
by
Olivia Frey
Co-Founder/Staff, Village School, Minnesota,
U.S.A.
The future is not about designing
curriculum. It’s about awakening to creation . .
. . The most important thing is the
awakening.—Robert Louv in
The Last Child In the Woods
Village School, a K-12 public freedom and
democracy school in Northfield, Minnesota, U.S.,
is a place of awakenings. It is a place where
small, daily miracles occur.
Hear the stories of our students:
Elizabeth is now 15. She is a leader in the
school. She regularly participates in
Restorative Justice Committee where she pushes
and challenges students to admit to hurting
someone—hitting them or excluding them from
their game. She serves lunch to her classmates,
and takes over Morning Group for her adviser
when he is sick. She is acutely aware of the
health of the community, and hears the alarm in
the jagged vibrations in the air when something
is amiss—a student has taken someone’s cell
phone without the person knowing it; another
person has lied about throwing eggs against the
building. She does not take things into her own
hands and mete out fierce punishments. She opens
her hands and takes our hands in order to heal
breaks in the community peacefully and justly.
Elizabeth wasn’t always this way. Many years and
personal transformations ago, Elizabeth’s cousin
pushes her in the lunch line. She pushes him
back, and when he runs out the cafeteria door,
she chases him and pounds on his back as hard as
she can. She then returns to the lunchroom and
with two sweeps of her arms, pushes all the
lunch trays full of food onto the floors. Grapes
roll and mash potatoes and gravy splatter
against the lockers.
Jimmy came to Village School from Florida when
he was twelve. He could not read, and could
barely speak full sentences. When a teacher
would ask him how he was, he would shout “No!”
“No” was the word that defined his life, and the
word that governed his spirit. Jimmy would speak
through daily disruptive and destructive
actions: sewing into plywood with the sewing
machine that a student’s grandmother had leant
to us; burning “fuck” into the back seat of the
school van with a lighter.
Jimmy was determined to speak, which his mute,
aggressive acts of destruction were testimony
to.
Jimmy now is 17. Today he speaks. He argues
eloquently. He puns and jokes with his teachers.
He sustains long, complicated, one could say
even philosophical, discussions with his teacher
who used to be a college professor about what
makes someone a better person, or unraveling the
relationship between the psychology and the
actions of another student. He speaks out and
speaks cogently and clearly in School Meeting,
honing in on the heart of the idea under
discussion, and guiding us gently back on track.
Why did these children change? Because they are
in a place of awakenings. They attend a free
democratic school.
Students of all abilities come to Village
School. But they all come to the school with one
thing in common. They want freedom. They want to
be trusted to make their own decisions about
what they should know and who they should
become, even the youngest child. They want to
ask questions without being called “disruptive”
and sent to the principal’s office. They don’t
want to sit in a desk all day, and be able to
move only when a bell rings and someone in power
gives them permission to move, and if they can’t
sit in the desk, they are given medicine to
control them. They want the freedom to make
mistakes and figure it out for themselves, not
alone, but in the company of people who love
them and trust them. They believe that they can
do it if only given the chance.
What we believe, what children believe, this is
deeply known by all of you reading this who
attend free democratic schools, who started them
and teach in them, volunteer in them, write
about them, watch them with love and trust.
It is harder to believe when you are the state
department of education that oversees a free
democratic public school, when you are the
school’s sponsor who must obey the laws about
state standards and the federal NCLB act, when
you are the general public who pays taxes to
support the school where children are free and
where they make decisions, and you are used to
“school” as oppressive and punishing.
In our ninth year of operation, Village School
is undergoing our fourth review to renew our
contract with our sponsor, the local public
school district and with the state department of
education, required by charter school law. It is
not going well. The newspaper headlines blare
“Village School faces uncertain future” and
“Northfield charter might lose sponsorship.” The
local chief of police bellows “permissive” and
“loose supervision” and “irresponsible.” The FAX
machine groans constantly—57 pages of documents
to the lawyer, 12 pages of documents, 20 pages
of documents. Village School has not implemented
the state standards, which are largely
content-based and would require us to “deliver”
instruction in a conventional “scope and
sequence” way. Village School has not made
Adequate Yearly Progress, in fact, allows
students, some even encourage students, to
refuse to take the standardized tests. Students
“run loose” in the building and are “free to
roam” outside and in the community without adult
supervision. We plead guilty to all charges.
State and local reports criticizing Village
School imply that teachers are incompetent and
negligent. In fact, we are quite intentional. We
are careful about implementing a program that we
believe will harm children’s intellectual
growth. One state social studies standard, for
example, is that children will learn that the
two most important figures in the history of the
U.S. are Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
While we do not deny that these men were
important, we question whether they were the
most important. The Minnesota standards were
written in a highly charge political
environment, and reflect as much politicians’
personal agendas as they do any belief in what
children should know. At Village School and all
free democratic schools, we are not interested
in children and youth just memorizing facts, and
questionable facts at that. We want students to
ask questions, to originate questions; to
challenge accepted thinking; to not accept the
world, but change the world; and have the
courage to do so. We responded to one parent who
lamented that our students were not required to
read the works of William Shakespeare, “We do
not require students to read Shakespeare. We
want them to be Shakespeare.” Did Shakespeare
fulfill standards and take standardized tests?
How could he have possibly written what he did
without these accountability measures?
The Minnesota Department of Education may say
that they are “concerned” that we have not
“embedded” standards and that the students at
Village School are sup[posedly not learning math
or reading. The police chief of Northfield can
say that he is “concerned” that our students run
around in the halls or go fishing during the
school day or even sell pot downtown. But what
the department and the police really are
“concerned” about is that our students have
freedom.
Village School students have freedom of speech,
freedom of movement, freedom of thought, all
kinds of freedoms. They have freedom to not only
disagree with teachers’ actions or words, they
have freedom to swear at us, because we are not
about trying to control their swearing or their
words. We are about helping them to find their
voices and their thoughts and shaping them so
that they can be as powerful and effective as
they can. They have freedom not only to leave
the building, but also to throw rocks at the
neighbor’s dumpsters, because we are not about
controlling every deed that they do, good or
bad. We are about students learning
responsibility, real responsibility, not
obedience because they are afraid of punishment,
but responsibility motivated by care, motivated
because they have come to see, with our wise
help, how their wrong deeds have affected
others, and they decide that they don’t want to
hurt someone anymore. They have freedom to make
art with the swastika, as abhorrent as that
symbol is to us, because we are not about
controlling their thoughts, because that is what
the Nazis did in their repressive and
authoritarian educational system before World
War II, a system that scholars will tell you
contributed to the birth of that genocidal
movement.
As citizens in this nation, and in all public
spheres, including education, that supposedly
values freedom and democracy, we should foster
freedom and democracy in every corner of our
lives. But it is possible that most people do
not want freedom or democracy, really, and
especially do not want them for their children.
It’s hard to believe anything else, until our
leaders—our national, state, and community
leaders—and our citizens in the public sector
act differently from how they act now,
particularly with regard to education.
On Thursday, April 6, UPS delivered the latest
round of standardized tests on which No Child
Left Behind adequate yearly progress is based to
all public schools in Minnesota. The tests were
overnight expressed because the company was late
in putting the tests together for shipping.
Village School received twenty five boxes of
tests. Traditional public schools with many more
students than ours received hundreds of boxes.
We also received two empty boxes, flattened,
which were used to return completed tests. It
cost $12.00 to ship each of these flat, empty
boxes to our school. This is how we as people in
this country are choosing to spend public money
on children and their education.
During this, our latest and most contentious
review of our public charter, at least two of us
have questioned seriously why we will continue
as a public school. The philosophy of freedom
and democracy erodes with each standardized
test. Our lawyer writes that to survive, we
might need to change our program “just a
little.”
For now, we are solidly in it, though we are
deemed “way out there,” even “outlaws.” Being in
it, we can see and say, pay witness to the
current destructive forces of public education.
Our very public controversy and conversation has
challenged the usual ways of thinking.
Witness and testify. It is a noble gathering we
are all a part of, shades of the past and souls
of the current century, living and breathing
democracy at times when our very leaders want
voices silenced and democracy stifled. Yes. We
are Out-Laws.
[Editor’s Note: On May 30, 2006 the
Northfield School Board voted 5-2 against
renewing Village School’s charter. Olivia Frey
sent the following update about Village School
on May 3, 2007.]
Time Flies When You’re Trying to Change
the World: Update on Village School
It’s been a year now since the Northfield
district voted not to renew the charter of
Village School. We are alive and well, and
whole. We are now called Village Learning
Community. At first we described ourselves as a
“home-schooling co-op,” but now, unabashedly,
call ourselves an “unschooling co-op.” The
original home-schooling designation was to
protect our students. The district vigorously
investigated the whereabouts of our students for
quite some time in order to ensure that they
were “legally” enrolled in a “legitimate”
school. The district went so far as to notify
Social Security that one of our students was
“suspected” of not being enrolled in a school,
and therefore should lose his Social Security
benefits.
Last September, our little unschooling community
started with twenty-one students. Only five
students had gone back to district schools of
the number enrolled in 2005-06. Three of these
returned to the district schools because of
transportation problems. They had to take the
bus to school because they lived at such a
distance from VLC. Of the original twenty-one
students, twelve are still with us. During the
year, two more students transferred, one student
moved to Arizona (now looking hard for an
unschooling community), and six students dropped
out. Four pre-schoolers and their mothers have
joined our unschooling group.
We have struggled to survive, and it is in the
struggle that we find purpose and meaning. We
have survived on a budget of about $400 a year,
compared to the $350,000 a year as a charter
school. We have struggled daily to clean and
maintain a building on no money. We teachers
have taken no salary all year, and have
volunteered our time to the students who are
working with us.
For several months, a group of teens, including
former Village School students, were breaking
into our building and partying over night. We
would leave one day, to return the next morning
to extensive vandalism—broken equipment, stolen
computers, expelled fire extinguishers,
demolished doors, cigarette butts and vomit.
Everyone in our community chipped in, day after
day, to clean and repair what we could. Two of
these teens finally stepped forward a few weeks
ago to admit responsibility for what they had
done, and asked to be forgiven and to join the
community again. Of the teens who did the
damage, the two who came to us had been a part
of Village School, and had learned to care and
restore damage—to materials, things, and to the
people whom they hurt. And Northfield district
closed us down because of low test scores,
because we encouraged students to question and
think rather than fill in bubbles on a test? Is
it a test score that will make us human, that
will restore our world?
As we have lived our lives together and learned
every day, every hour, every minute, not just
for the moment of a test, we have adopted other
“uns”—unjob and unmoney. We have lived and
learned on very little money. We have grown
skeptical of any job that distracts us from our
purpose, that is not deeply meaningful, and we
have become quite creative and inventive in
finding occupations—in the larger sense of that
word—that will sustain us. We are focusing on
upcycling—making crafts and useable items from
junk and recycled things; rescuing native wild
flowers and woodland plants; hosting markets in
our space; de-cluttering people’s homes and
their lives so they can live more intentionally.
We challenge all of you reading our story to
unjob and unmoney as well as unschool. As long
as we support a consumer culture, we can
unschool our children until eternity, but
nothing, really, will change in any deep way.
The forces of our culture—and we question
whether we really have a culture in our modern
societies—are strong and will tolerate no
endeavors that are meaningful and fulfilling.
Rose Ann Steenhoek and I have also started a
personal and societal transformation educational
endeavor. We invite you to take a look at what
we’re doing. Our web site is <starwalkers.org>.
Unschooling is about a shift, not only in a way
of doing school, and in a way of being and
consciousness, but a shift in the universe, of
which our bodies and our consciousness are a
part. It is a great risk. It is frightening. But
we must embrace the full power of change that is
possible if we do this work seriously and
intensely.
What is scheduled today for the Village Learning
Community? Most of the students and two of the
teachers are heading out to Valley Creek Farm to
plant chard and other greens, and jump on the
trampoline. The asparagus is coming up. I’m
heading out with one student—one of the students
who had been breaking into the school, but who
said forgive me and love me, and we did—to
another teacher’s place. We are going to start
potting rescued plants—Dutchman’s Breeches,
ferns, and day lilies. We have a market coming
up. Much needs rescue. Plants. Children. The
world.
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