Introduction

The New School is unique in many ways. But, like any social activity, it has roots in various traditions and prior understandings. It is the effort of this writing to begin to place The New School in the historical context of the "free school tradition."

For reasons which will be discussed further along, it is not an easy matter to place The New School in context. There is little consensus about the context itself. What is the "free school tradition" to which the title refers?

The term "free school" has been used in educational circles and public writing to mean a wide variety of things. The statutes establishing the public schools of Delaware refer to those institutions as "Free Public Schools," probably with reference to the lack of direct tuition payments. Many uses of the term "free school" have begun with some consonance with the ideas of The New School, but have been adapted or otherwise changed to such an extent that they are no longer related. For example, this is the article on "free school" which appears in the online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

free school also called Informal School, or Open Classroom, school in which the teaching system is based on an environment structured to encourage the child to become actively involved in the learning process. The free school stresses individualized rather than group instruction, and children proceed from one step to another at their own rate of development. The school day is not divided into rigid timetables as in a traditional classroom. At the teacher's discretion and under his guidance, children are engaged individually or in small groups in a wide variety of activities for longer periods of time than the usual class meeting. Talking and moving about are not forbidden; in fact, physical activity and conversation are necessary to this type of learning.

In Great Britain the method has become common since the end of World War II. It is also widely used in the United States, where such schooling is known as open classroom.

Though it is possible in reading this description to discern the common germs between what is being described and the practices of The New School, phrases like "At the teacher’s discretion" make it clear that this is not the meaning of "free school" that interests us.

A more consonant understanding of "free school" is that which was common in colonial days in America, "The term free referred to the school's purpose: to make students free . . ." This rings true. It is certainly one of the goals of The New School for its students to be free. However, we must add to this idea that the method used to realize freedom for students is the practice of freedom itself.

"The free school tradition" with which we are initially concerned here is therefore fairly narrow and manageable. It is made up of those schools which use the practice of freedom as the means of realizing freedom for students.

Even in this manageably-defined tradition, The New School is unique. We will try to explore some of the reasons why, as we discuss several schools which define this free school tradition.

For the purposes of this discussion, we will focus on two seminal schools in this tradition, Summerhill School, in England, and Sudbury Valley School, in the United States. These schools have contributed significant insights and innovations to the practices of free schooling. To the extent that we can understand them, they are therefore very instructive. However, our focus on these schools should not obscure the fact that there are several other important schools which are firmly fixed at the center of the free school tradition which we are discussing -- notably the Tutorial School in New Mexico. However, the implications for free school theory which are raised by the Tutorial School are beyond the scope of this writing.

So, to begin our discussion, we will focus on Summerhill and Sudbury Valley and their relationship to The New School.

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