How Free is Your School? A Visit to the Portland Freeskool

Imagine a school with no classrooms. Imagine a curriculum flexible enough to include organic chemistry, acrobatics and bike repair. The teachers are sometimes younger than the students, nobody gets paid, and the students can talk back as much as they want. No, this isn't an Internet school. This is the Portland Freeskool.

The Freeskool is in a building called the Liberation Collective, sandwiched in downtown Portland, Oregon. The Liberation Collective is ground zero for progressive politics and punk/anarchist youth culture in Portland, and it provides a fitting home the Freeskool. The windows are full of t-shirts with slogans like "Hate is not a family value" and "Free Mumia!" Inside, two ratty couches and an old rug furnish the main meeting area. Records by Portland indie and punk bands are for sale, along side rows of homemade, cut and paste-style zines. The walls are lined with books and pamphlets on everything from anarcho-syndicalist activities in Spain during its Civil War to political manifestos advocating for a vegan diet.

	"K.I.D.S. was born out of a passion to change the way that youth are treated and to reclaim kid pride."

One of the groups that meets in the Liberation Collective every Friday is K.I.D.S., the founding body of the Freeskool. K.I.D.S. came together in 1998 as a group of youth organized to resist curfews in Portland. Their "manifesto" reads: "K.I.D.S. was born out of a passion to change the way that youth are treated and to reclaim kid pride."

Over the last three years, K.I.D.S. has orchestrated direct actions to protest a new daytime curfew, held workshops, and organized and participated in several "youth liberation conferences" that promote recognition of what they call "youth oppression." In early 2000, they formed the Freeskool.

Recently, I drove up to Portland in April to attend a K.I.D.S. meeting and learn about the Freeskool. When I walked into the Liberation Collective, there were 12 people sitting on the couches, talking and eating pizza. The meeting started with the warm-up question: What has inspired you in the last week? When my turn came, I told them about the article I was writing and asked them for help and information. I was hoping they could help me make connections between the Freeskool and alternative schools in general. I was curious about how they operated, what philosophy they operated under, and how they managed to pull it all off.

It turns out that there are a number of freeschools around the country. Most are different from the Portland Freeskool, but similar in design. During the late 60's and early 70's freeschools popped up around the country. Parents dissatisfied with the state of public education got together and founded private schools that were "small, innovative, anti-traditional...[and] that based their teachings around notions of children's freedom, self-governance, and social justice," according to Tate Hausman, a graduate of the Department of Education at Brown University. Through conferences and newsletters, the freeschoolers built a movement that, at its peak, gained national prominence.

	"According to the Freeskool, curfews, anti-skateboarding laws, police treatment of youth and the inferior legal status of minors are the instruments of what the call 'youth oppression.'"

The freeschool movement reached its peak in the early 70's and has declined since then. This might have been because things grew more conservatism through in the 70's and 80's, and it was difficult to operate radical freeschools, without broader community support. Now, only a handful of freeschools remain intact 30 years after the movement began; most have closed their doors, changed their motivating philosophies or become home-schooling resource centers.