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The New School
by John R. Hiner Jr.
Staff Member, The New School, Delaware, U.S.A.
The New School is a liberty-based day school,
founded in 1995. It is a free association of
people ranging in age from five to fifty years.
The New School shares a great number of
structural similarities with other “democratic
schools.” It is democratically administered with
student participation. It is “non-coercive” with
regard to lessons and traditional studies. It
shares many benefits for students with other
“democratic schools” and has similar pitfalls to
which its members are susceptible.
The New School is also significantly influenced
by the intellectual tradition of radical
questioning and thoughtful engagement of life,
represented by the New Program of St. John’s
College. (See,
www.stjohnscollege.edu.)
When Melanie Jago Hiner set out to start The New
School, she had a vision of “authentic
engagement and interest in all aspects of life.”
Because of her grounding in the classical
liberal arts and philosophy, which she shared
with three other adult founders of the school,
it was assumed that this engagement would
include the intellectual dimension of
awareness as well as all others. The adult
founders all agreed with Socrates that, “the
unexamined life is not worth living,” and with
Aristotle that, “All humans by nature desire to
know and the sign of this is the delight we take
in our senses.” They also agreed with the book
of Genesis that, “God looked at everything He
had made, and He found it very good.” The New
School was founded on these ideas.
The subtle implications which arose because of
these predispositions, and the divergence which
they cause between the theory and practice of
The New School and those of other free schools
are startling and intriguing.
Because of their common background at St. John’s
College, when the founders of The New School
read in Summerhill: A Radical Approach to
Child Rearing, that children should be
free, they heard it with the practiced naiveté
of St. John’s. They took freedom to mean “the
power to do what one wants,” with all the
complications that the history of thinking about
freedom introduces into that idea. They thought
of the deep insights of ancient texts, the
innovations of the Italian Renaissance, Christ’s
victory over death, the exhilaration of sky
diving, a mountain vista, the soaring beauty of
a lover’s touch, the delight in a child’s eyes.
In designing The New School, the founders’
efforts were radical in the sense that the New
Program assumes — a fundamental engagement of
first principles.
In structure, The New School is a collaboration
of individual people. The purpose of this
collaboration is to mutually support the
activities of each member by providing
resources and materials, including the
fellowship of living in a dynamic and
challenging community. In many ways it is more
libertarian (or even more anarchic) than many
participatory democracies and less cohesive than
many small communities. To accommodate the
strains of these extremes, the School is very
much a society of laws. Its structure and
traditions are designed to support the
activities of each child, in the hope of making
A.S. Neill’s goal of being ‘entirely on the side
of the child’ a constant reality.
Life in The New School is relentlessly
challenging, in the hope of avoiding the
temptation of settling for activities which are
less than fundamentally satisfying. Members of
the School are relentlessly and rigorously
articulate, in the belief that, without the
tools of reason, a person cannot know himself
and therefore cannot be free of manipulation,
coercion, or even simple mistake.
A well-rehearsed criticism of “democratic,”
“progressive,” or “free” schools, is that voiced
by Erich Fromm, a noteworthy psychologist and
social critic:
I feel that [certain approaches to free
schools] somewhat underestimate the importance,
pleasure, and authenticity of an intellectual in
favor of an artistic and emotional grasp of the
world. (See,
http://www.erich-fromm.de/data/pdf/1960e-e.pdf)
The New School seeks to answer this criticism by
its embodiment of the spirit of inquiry and
careful articulation which comes from the New
Program of St. John’s College. In this spirit,
freedom at The New School is not an end in
itself. Freedom is adopted in support of open
and radical inquiry. Freedom is the necessary
means to the best education; education is a
means to goodness.
The presence in The New School of adults
experienced in and adept at the skills of reason
as envisioned in the New Program has provided a
preference for articulate, shared exploration,
in addition to the other forms of growth and
learning which free-school traditions afford.
The forms and practices of The New School are
wholly compatible with “inner freedom” as sought
by psychologically-focused schools. The New
School is wholly compatible with the political
freedom and social competence which are the
focus of more democracy-focused schools.
However, in addition to these benefits, The New
School seeks the intellectual benefits of
rigorous and articulate discussion and the
application of the skills of reason to the
emotional and practical experiences of students.
The New School gives full and meaningful weight
to the value of intellectual engagement of life
and the world.
This intellectual focus occasions some unique
arrangements in the structure of The New School.
Because of the importance of rigorous and
articulate inquiry in its traditions, even a
theoretical appearance of inconsistency in the
freedom afforded to the students could represent
a serious problem. The expectation that students
at various times will subject the structure of
the School to intense and demanding scrutiny
requires avoidance of any sense of deception.
Because of this, neither a traditional corporate
structure nor the headmaster system were
sufficient for the needs of The New School. The
structures of The New School are therefore
designed so that the freedom of the members of
The School Meeting is not subject to control by
any other school body.
Both the School Assembly and The New School,
Inc., are entities subject to the discretion and
action of the School Meeting. They are able to
act within the narrow scope of their roles;
neither of these bodies has power to determine
policy or otherwise limit the discretion of the
School Meeting. The individual freedom of each
student is recognized as an inherent and
personal right.
Another unique structural element in The New
School is the form and conception of the School
Meeting. The New School is not committed to
participatory democracy as an end in itself.
Neither does it maintain a commitment to
harmonious community life as a condition for
inner freedom from psychological stress or fear.
For these reasons the function of the School
Meeting at The New School is neither to practice
participatory democracy, nor to foster communal
cooperation or cohesion. In fact, the School
Meeting of The New School is not a corporate
body charged with making either corporate or
communal decisions. Rather, the School Meeting
of The New School is a forum where the
individual members of the School, who are
interested in a matter of shared resources or
individual conflict, can meet and arbitrate
their differences. It is therefore not a
governing body in any comprehensive sense, but
is rather a tool for the coordination of
individual desires and interests.
This approach to the School Meeting as a tool
for the use of the members of the School is
consonant with the treatment of each student as
though he or she were the primary focus of the
School. Thus this arrangement emulates Neill’s
injunction to be ‘entirely on the side of the
child.’ Further, this formulation of the School
Meeting allows a broad scope for experimentation
with concepts of governance and power structures
to those students who choose to use the School
Meeting to explore these issues. By not
committing to a participatory democracy model,
the student is free to explore the roots and
underlying issues implied by that system itself.
Hence, rather than teaching a child to live in a
participatory democracy, the structure of the
School allows the student the opportunity to
explore the underpinnings of democracy itself as
well as other forms of government.
This is consonant with The New School’s interest
in allowing the broadest range for intellectual
freedom and in fostering intellectual engagement
of first principles in all areas of interest to
the student.
The New School follows the practices of student
governance and (administrative) non-coercion
regarding lessons. It shares with other
“democratic schools” a commitment to student
freedom, equality, and authentic respect for
those human beings who make up the school.
To these traditions, The New School adds the
intellectual traditions of St. John’s College,
thus elevating intellectual engagement of the
world to an equal status with the emotional and
political experiences that other “free-school”
traditions serve so well.
We hope that this confluence establishes a free
society of learners, supported by necessary
legal and political means, but animated by
individual commitments to seek goodness at all
levels of human experience.
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