Free School Teaching: A Journey into Radical Progressive Education

by Kristan Accles Morrison

Chronicles the author’s personal and professional journey within the American educational system.

Free School Teaching is the personal and professional journey of one teacher within the American educational system. Faced with mounting frustrations in her own traditional, middle school classroom and having little success in resolving them, Kristan Accles Morrison decided to seek out answers, first by immersing herself in the academic literature of critical education theory and then by turning to the field. While the literature on progressive education gave her hope that things could be better for students locked into America’s traditional education system, she wanted to find a firsthand example of how these ideas played out in practice. Morrison found a radical “free school” in Albany, New York, that embodied the ideas found in the literature, and over a period of three months she observed and documented differences between alternative and traditional schools. In trying to reconcile the gap between those systems, Morrison details what she learned about teachers, students, curriculum, and the entire conception of why we educate our children.

“The effects of standardized competitive schooling are severe and they need to be critically reported as publicly and as often as possible. The stories of democratic schools, such as the one profiled here, provide inspirational alternatives. This is a book with an important story to tell.” — Ron Miller, author of Free School, Free Education and Democracy after the 1960s

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

187 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2007

Reviews

[Trey]

This book is about an alternative educational system. Imagine a school system that's student-driven, where the teachers are more like educational resources for the students and students learn according to the dictates of their own interests. Schools like this have been in existence for a long time, and they consistently produce better educated, more self-aware, more honestly intelligent people than the disaster that is the public school system in the US. An eye-opening book.

[Kerry]

Great look into progressive education, although a bit redundant at times. The only thing more I wanted was an observation of how this could be incorporated into the public schools. As of now Free Schools seem deemed to remain an "other"