It is very late at night, or very early in the morning, and I am finally done with all of my activities and other school work, and can sit down and watch this video. At my feet, and propped on my desk, just above the horizon of the edge of my laptop, is a stack of books. 1 GRE Strategies, Practice, and Review + 1 LSAT logic Games strategies and tactics + 1 LSAT Reading Comprehension strategies and tactics + 2 Barnes and Noble birthday gift cards from 2008= $148.00 spent and the further cementation of a complex that has begun to molest my starry slumbers, in addition to the constant nagging of my daily life. I dream of meetings missed and cameras hurled into peace lake.

The blatant, unashamed happiness of the students in the Free to Learn video, turns my own learning experience into the enigma. I can understand the ways in which my educational experience has been conditioned by a structure of authoritarianism- by the ways in which the traditional ideas of "teaching" and "learning" function to create and organize incapacities, to plant the seed for cultivating submissive citizens who have no awareness of their potential to exists as autonomous, life long learners. I believe I can see that, see the evidence of that around me. And yet, I feel like I have been left powerless in its wake. I learned how to thrive within the system, how to get the A. I cheated on my exams in high school when the opportunity was too easy to pass up, I gave out my homework for students to copy. I had no sense of owning my education. The material I learned was there for me to regurgitate; school was not the place to learn, but rather the place to prove how much I already knew.

And yet, I have not been beaten totally by my "instruction." Throughout my experience in public schools, I read emphatically. I had an awareness that what was going on in school was not really learning, and that something better existed. I believe I am constantly trying to make up for lost time by pushing my academics (farther than what I can handle sometimes). In short-- I love to learn. How? Why?

The Kaplan exam books waiting on my desk, the self awareness that I, however begrudgingly, will schedule in time everyday to memorize logic game strategies for an exam that I don't believe holds any importance in measuring my character, in validating my worthiness in pursuing "higher" education, serves to remind me that I have not learned to say "fuck it." I have not learned, as the children at the free school obviously have, to use my learning to learn who I am, and to give that the primary importance in demarcating the shape of my education.

To be well rounded means that we must know everything. At the free school, students learn through daily practice, what their priorities are, what it is that they care about. Their pursuit of learning is dictated by what they want to learn; not, as mine has been, by what I believe I need to learn (or need to prove) in order to compete. And I don't mean compete just in the sense of "getting the job," but more so, in the sense of competing to exist on the other side of the system-- to be able to be the person in the position of power, rather then further the experience of being powerless.

As we discussed in the last class, no one can exist outside of the system. In what ways does the free school acknowledge this? Is this true? Can anyone really say, "fuck it"? Must I take the LSATs? How do I overcome the fear of the risk involved in ignoring the system? Does a constructed social reality really just crumble if I say "no"?

Standardized test prep books are expensive. And I know they are totally the product of a constructed, imposed, set of values. And yet, I bought them, and chose to remain a complicit accomplice to the system which I both recognize and despise. Inscribed on the binding of the books, illuminated in bright red highlights, reads: "higher score guaranteed." Maybe my line of thought is as follows:

1. First--you do as the system instructs. You get the grades, you play the game.

2. Second--once you master the system, then you can begin to implement a change from within.

I believe this linear way of viewing social change accords with Jocatot's view on how the idea of Progress is constructed by, and exists within, traditional education systems. The student and the teacher exist within a hierarchy in which the student is told that he/she knows nothing without the teacher's instruction. The student's job is to absorb knowledge. Eventually, after enough time steeping in the explanations of the teacher, in the intelligence of one's superiors, and after proving that one has done so by doing well on examinations, one can develop a mind capable of thinking on its own-- "a few more lessons, then you'll see the light." Jacotot points out however, that this linear construction of social change, of learning, puts equality off and isolates it in the constant future, always just on the horizon.

Perhaps the Free School is approaching social change from a non-linear perspective. The objective is to teach students from the onset that they are intrinsically equal, valuable, and unique individuals. The objective is not to teach them how to become what they already are by breaking them down and then building them up, as traditional educational schemas do. I think this is invaluable, and am jealous of their time to sit at the window and contemplate the rain, or discover, through practice, what is important to them.