Traditional schools tend to operate on the principle that students are passive receptacles into which knowledge will be deposited. The syllabus, schedule, pacing and so forth are determined from above. Public School New York rejects that approach. There is no set curriculum. No grades. No teachers with blackboards writing what chapter must be memorized by Friday.
PSNY, on the other hand, throws all that out. There is no curriculum. There are no grades. Students only learn things they are interested in (at the moment) and the way they want to learn them. There are no teachers to tell them about mitochondria or the War of 1812, although students will learn those things if and when they want to. The school is self-organized. The people are responsible for their own learning and for each other.
As far as the learning goes, that means a student comes to school, then decides what they would like to learn about for that day (or week, or month). Maybe they want to learn how to code. Maybe they want to learn how to make furniture. Maybe they want to learn about physics. The community then works out how to make it happen (finding a mentor, accessing tools, peer teaching). It’s a community first. School second.
Of course, there is still some boundaries. There is still some structure. “Free” in this context does not mean “do whatever you want” all the time (that is what people seem to imagine when they hear about a free school). There are still some rules and guidelines because you can’t have 50 people in a space without some sort of consensus (and agreements are only really possible when you have self-direction). Students make all of the school’s policies by voting on them. Students will mediate conflicts between students. Students take care of the space and of each other. Students have a large part in maintaining the community. It is also probably better for you than memorizing a bunch of formulas that will be long forgotten in three months.
Learning also happens through projects and real interests, rather than through pre-existing units. A student who is interested in skateboarding will learn about physics to try to understand how an ollie or a kickflip works. Then they may branch off into learning about materials science to be able to make their own boards, then business planning if they want to sell them. They will retain that knowledge more because it is attached to something they cared about… not just something that they will be tested on. Or a student will spend weeks “doing nothing” then have a breakthrough because they are bored. This is the key point—students have large amounts of agency in how and what they learn, and this can lead to self-directed and life-long learning.
There is also a strong element of age mixing. Teenagers work with smaller children and it creates this amazing mentorship which you just don’t see in other educational environments where everyone is just with the same people of the same age. Older students are able to teach and re-learn things by teaching younger students. The younger students can look up to the older ones and be inspired (or they can be oblivious and do their own thing in the corner. Both are fine). There is a lot of social learning that goes on in this model—learning how to resolve conflicts with others, collaborating, and negotiating. This is the type of learning that matters in the real world and in adult life.
Without a pre-set curriculum also means that students don’t have deadlines or a teacher rushing them through their studies (which can take up to six months to cover what some schools will do in six weeks). Students can learn as in-depth as they want (or need) and in the way that they want. They don’t have to compare themselves to others for grades or class ranks. They have to keep their own pace to their mastery of a skill or topic. This relieves a lot of the pressure that comes with education for a lot of students.
Of course, people often ask about college admissions and job readiness, how do you know a student has learned anything if there is no curriculum and no transcripts and no test scores? Students from free schools get into universities and do great things because they have developed self-direction, critical thinking, and passion for learning. They know how to teach themselves. They know how to look for resources and for experts in a field. They have had years of experience of making real-life decisions with real-life consequences rather than just being told what to do.
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