FREE
FOR ALL
other involving the study of different voting patterns, where they
analyzed the best restaurants in
the area, and then went and ate at
those restaurants.
“I also liked this class where we
made exact replicas of ourselves
out of tape,” Oscar said.
He loves talking about the
school, although he said it’s hard
to explain to his friends what
he does all day. It also took him
awhile, he said, to get acclimated
to the free-for-all environment.
“It’s easy to figure out how everything works, but to get used
to how everything works is another story,” he said. “Some kids
fit right in. For me it took more
than a year. I was upstairs playing
Minecraft all the time.”
If you don’t force any set of rules
or academic requirements, Oscar
said, each student will discover his
or her own path to success.
“Kids that don’t want to do
anything, for example, eventually they just say, ‘I’m going to
start doing something,’” he said.
“The key is to build a relationship.
That’s what we try to do here.”
“Oddly enough,” said Oscar, “It
works every single time.”
“Well,” Berger paused and
laughed under his breath. “Mostly.”
HUFFINGTON
01.13.13
IS A ‘WIDE OPEN
CLASSROOM’
FOR EVERYONE?
When Berger founded the Brooklyn Free School in 2004, inside
a Methodist Church in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, he
wasn’t sure what would happen.
His was the first free school in the
New York City area since the last
one, the Fifteenth Street School,
closed in 1975. Would people
come? Would they stay?
Free schools in the U.S. in the
late-1960s and early-1970s were
a result of the “whole social upheaval going on at the time,” said
A younger
student looks
on during the
school’s 2011
Science Fair.