Free to Learn

If I were to pick one verb that best represented Free to Learn, “play” would have to be it. From the very beginning of the movie through the end the audience watches the students at Free School playing. The movie opens with children of all different ages engaging in play with various different playthings in the same room. My first thought was “wow, this is a lot of freedom,” and my first question was “how do these kids learn if they play all day?” The movie itself possesses no planned performance or narrative or, but is able to demonstrate, through children and their teachers’ honest interaction with the audience, the real value of such freedom.

My initial concerns were shared by some outraged neighbors of the school (42). These women are insistent that strict discipline is required and the freedom allowed at the Free School does not do anything for the children that attend it. They cannot fathom that children could learn anything in such an environment. They are so distrusting of the system in fact, they do not even see the standards that they themselves have internalized. One woman sternly says that the school must have a strict schedule “just like you were teaching at a college.” The issue she sees here is the unpreparedness of these children to survive in the real world. The issue with this perspective that we have discussed in class is that the very standards of education and pedagogical philosophy are questionable and ill-founded.

The founder, Mary Leue, puts simply that “You don’t teach principles, you gotta live it”(53) and Free to Learn attests to the great value in such an education that creates a full person capable of living his/her potential. At the Free School the teachers speak to the children as equals and trust them to plan their own day. There are no rules and no standard learning objectives that each grade needs to fulfill by a certain time. In fact there are no grades, each student is free to live and learn at their own pace.

Just by watching the way the school functions, the audience is able to see just how much more such a philosophy is useful for the children as compared to other schools. One child explains that he had to do 3 pages of cursive writing each day at his former school and when asked if he learned anything from the experience, he replies “not really, it hurts my hands.” There is no similar standard of what is compulsory and what is not. One student explains that he was never allowed to climb trees at his former school (42). The Free school has no such rules. The only thing about the school that is slightly structured is the Council meeting and even that is a great example of effective shared governance.

The educational pedagogy at the Free School does not take the kids away from “real-life” as the neighbors felt, it actually allows them to fully live life and learn through their own experience. It is most real it can be because the learning is immediately valuable. When the children go out for a field trip, they learn that they must come back into the car if they hear lightning because the car will keep them safe (it has rubber tires that will insulate them from electric shock). When one student breaks a window, he takes full responsibility for it and replaces the old one himself. (38) He compares this to the world of other children whose parents are expected to pay and take care of the situation. By trusting the students as equals, the teachers at the Free School live by the principles that the real world demands. And in the process of such learning each student is respected as a person. Although each student is at a different level, there is no average student and no child gets left behind.