FREE
FOR ALL
learn,” and appreciated how few
constraints there were on what
he was allowed to study. He remembers being 13 and reading
about acid rain, how it was killing
all these fish in the Adirondacks,
so he and a group of students
decided to try and stop it. They
became so passionate that they
contacted Eliot Spitzer, who was
attorney general and “fighting coal
plants” at the time, and asked him
to speak to students. They also
brought in a government biologist.
“Nobody told us to learn about
these things,” Graves said. “We
wanted to.”
A sense of community is inherent in the free school movement.
At Brooklyn Free School, if a parent or outside volunteer wants to
teach a class, they can. There’s
also quite a bit of volunteering.
After Hurricane Sandy, many students have dedicated each Friday
to gathering supplies and working
at local Occupy Sandy depots.
Kristan Morrison, an education
professor at Radford University in
Virginia and author of Free School
Teaching, said she has been
amazed at how well-rounded free
school students are.
She said many free school students often opt for a more stan-
HUFFINGTON
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dardized high school education
— mostly because of parents’ persuasion — but because of their
free school “foundation,” they are
more able to thrive there.
“They learn quickly how to play
the game, how to do what teachers
expected, and picked up knowing
“SO MANY KIDS
GOING TO THESE
ALTERNATIVE
SCHOOLS HAVE
REALLY THRIVED,
BECAUSE THEY’VE
BEEN FREED FROM
THE RAT RACE.”
how to be competitive,” Morrison
said. “The harder game is how to
be emotionally whole and emotionally healthy. I grew up thinking: this is the way the world is,
this is the way I have to be. Whereas [free school] kids know there’s
another choice. They might want
to play this game, or not.”
Free schools offer a sort of “self
esteem inoculation,” Morrison