Monday 28 January 2008

Our School

Having never slept for a third night in a row my walk to work seemed more like a nightmare than dream. As we walked up to George Street the gale whipped the litter into a tornado. The rubbish hadn’t been collected for nearly three weeks – bags which had been tossed from windows lay burst open and Libby let out a scream when we saw a rat run across the pavement as we passed the National Gallery. In the Meadows there were tents and wigwams as people tried to separate themselves from the rest of the city.

We stayed in our tight group until we got to school but the sight that greeted us immediately lifted my spirits. Nearly forty children were waiting at the gate together with six adults – none of whom I’d ever met. The two police officers had keys to the school and led us into the assembly hall. After a moment’s awkward silence I stood up and asked everyone to introduce themselves – children and adults. The children ranged from 9-17 – only four of the new children had gone to this school. Two of them had walked from Portobello through Holyrood Park to get here –nearly six miles. Of the adults three were teachers, one secondary and two primary, together with a retired social worker, and two parents who had come along with their children.

I explained that we would be trying to help continue the children’s education but also provide care and support for them and their families. I repeated my point about this being a new reality and that we must think about our new school in a very different way from how we had known schools in the past. It maybe seemed a bit “new age” but we sat in a circle for nearly two hours trying to work out how we could organise ourselves. I was amazed with the ideas which streamed from the kids – it was as if a cork had been released as idea after idea flowed and was picked up and added to by others in the group. We adults realised what was happening by remaining silent – something I’d never experienced before. I won’t try to capture here all the incredible ideas that we recorded but we wrote them up on a whiteboard. Perhaps the most important part were what the kids called “space rules” it was as if we were creating a virtual world within our new reality.

There were six “Space Rules”:

We all have an equal say in how the school runs
Our health and safety are the most important things in our school
There are to be no classes
Individuals design their own timetable
Adults help but don’t direct
We care for each other

I couldn’t believe how quickly they adapted to the new reality – it was almost as if they had been preparing for this moment all their lives. It’s not as if they tried to cut us adults out – merely that they wanted to use us in a very different way.

The only difficulty I had with the discussion was when they described the sanctions for not following the “space rules”. If it had been adults we might have been a bit softer but the group were unanimous that if health and safety were to be protected that any breaking of the rules would result in that person being asked to leave – adult or child. Their logic was impeccable – “We are choosing to come here, no one is being forced, if we choose to belong we must follow the rules”.

For the rest of the day we split up into groups to develop some of the ideas further and to explore the school. One group took responsibility to make lunch and made a wonderful pasta dish.

It seemed that everyone looked to me for leadership but I took my lead from them by making sure that we acted democratically. I remember reading A.S Neill’s book when I’d been student and although I’d thought it to be a bit laissez faire it provided me with useful template with which to shape my behaviour.

Mike Harper was true to his word and visited us in the late afternoon. He thanked us all for getting it started and suggested we could have even more people turning up tomorrow.

I phoned Alison to let her know how we were doing but she refused to speak to me.

It’s the evening now and David, Libby and Stephanie are all sleeping in front of the fire. I can’t describe how good it feels to have them round me in the knowledge that we have done something today for other people.

I’ll update tomorrow with more of our arrangements – particularly how we intend to start to help people in our communities, which was a key part of what the kids wanted.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just plugged into the Chronicle following a phone call from Auckland NZ. Keep up the good work.

Anonymous said...

Good call on the facilitating learning vs. mandating learning. You may run into some issues due to age gaps but those are surmountable. At some point, if you want to be able to offer any kind of official stamp to their education, you'll need some basic benchmarks for standardization that they need to goal towards, but this is a heck of a good start.

Its not a continuation of the old system, but takes what is good from the old and evolves it into something useable in the given situation.

If your student count gets too high you may run into problems, but adherence to the "space rules" will at least give you a frame work for finding solutions to such problems as behavioral, cliques, etc.

Anonymous said...

Anon

Hopefully my next few posts, which cover the ideas which the kids came up with, will give you some idea about how we'll deal with some of the issues we might run into. I like the point you make about evolution.

Mike

Hello to all in NZ.