No Particular Place to Go

The story of a group of teachers and high school students who from 1968 to 1970 broke away from the public schools to start an alternative school of their own design. The introductory chapters focus on Denker and Bhaerman, explaining how they came to start the project. The middle two chapters center on events and issues during the two years the authors were with the school. The final two chapters analyze the politics of free schools and the teaching of adolescents. Denker and Bhaerman write in a lively, candid, and personal style, describing the events as they happenedeven if these events show the school in a bad light. The book is directed toward those who want to understand the free school movement of the sixties and early seventies and toward those who want to move beyond it. Students and teachers, Bhaerman says, ultimately must face what they had been avoiding while rebelling against traditional institutions: that the responsibility for their education lies with themselves and that what they took from the free school’ was directly proportional to what they put in.” An Introduction by Lawrence Dennis and an Afterword by Bhaerman and Denker put both this experiment and the free school movement in historical perspective.