Modern schools are alternative schools, self-managed by students, teachers and parents which reject the authoritarian schooling methods of the modern "education" system. Such schools have a feature of the anarchist movement since the turn of the 20th century while interest in libertarian forms of education has been a feature of anarchist theory from the beginning. All the major anarchist thinkers, from Godwin through Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin to modern activists like Colin Ward, have stressed the importance of libertarian (or "rational") education, education that develops all aspects of the student (mental and physical — and so termed "integral" education) as well as encouraging critical thought and mental freedom. The aim of such education is, to use Proudhon's words, ensure that the "industrial worker, the man [sic!] of action and the intellectual would all be rolled into one." [cited by Steward Edward in The Paris Commune, p. 274]
Anyone involved in radical politics, constantly and consistently challenges the role of the state's institutions and their representatives within our lives. The role of bosses, the police, social workers, the secret service, middle managers, doctors and priests are all seen as part of a hierarchy which exists to keep us, the working class, subdued. It is relatively rare though for the left-wing to call into question the role of teachers. Most left wing activists and a large number of libertarians believe that education is good, all education is good, and education is always good. As Henry Barnard, the first US commissioner of education, appointed in 1867, exhorted, "education always leads to freedom".
Those involved in libertarian education believe the contrary. They believe that national education systems exist only to produce citizens who'll be blindly obedient to the dictates of the state, citizens who will uphold the authority of government even when it runs counter to personal interest and reason, wage slaves who will obey the orders of their boss most of the time and consider being able to change bosses as freedom. They agree with William Godwin (one of the earliest critics of national education systems) when he wrote in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that "the project of a national education ought to be discouraged on account of its obvious alliance with national government . . . Government will not fail to employ it to strengthen its hand and perpetuate its institutions. . .Their views as instigator of a system will not fail to be analogous to their views in their political capacity." [cited by Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, p. 81]
With the growth of industrialism in the 19th century schools triumphed, not through a desire to reform but as an economic necessity. Industry did not want free thinking individuals, it wanted workers, instruments of labour, and it wanted them punctual, obedient, passive and willing to accept their disadvantaged position. According to Nigel Thrift, many employers and social reformers became convinced that the earliest generations of workers were almost impossible to discipline (i.e. to get accustomed to wage labour and workplace authority). They looked to children, hoping that "the elementary school could be used to break the labouring classes into those habits of work discipline now necessary for factory production. . . Putting little children to work at school for very long hours at very dull subjects was seen as a positive virtue, for it made them habituated, not to say naturalised, to labour and fatigue." [quoted by Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked American, p. 61]
Thus supporters of Modern Schools recognise that the role of education is an important one in maintaining hierarchical society — for government and other forms of hierarchy (such as wage labour) must always depend on the opinion of the governed. Franciso Ferrer (the most famous supporter of Modern Schooling due to his execution by the Spanish state in 1909) argued that:
"Rulers have always taken care to control the education of the people. They know their power is based almost entirely on the school and they insist on retaining their monopoly. The school is an instrument of domination in the hands of the ruling class." [cited by Clifford Harper, Anarchy: A Graphic Guide, p. 100]
Little wonder, then, that Emma Goldman argued that the "modern method of education" has "little regard for personal liberty and originality of thought. Uniformity and imitation is [its] motto" and that the school "is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the solder - a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign to itself." [Red Emma Speaks, p. 118, p. 116]
Hence the importance of Modern Schools. It is a means of spreading libertarian education within a hierarchical society and undercut one of the key supports for that society — the education system. Instead of hierarchical education, Modern schools exist to "develop the individual through knowledge and the free play of characteristic traits, so that [the child] may become a social being, because he had learned to know himself [or herself], to know his [or her] relation to his fellow[s]. . . " [Emma Goldman, Op. Cit., p. 121] It would, in Stirner's words, be "an education for freedom, not for subservience."
The Modern School Movement (also known as the Free School Movement) over the past century has been an attempt to represent part of this concern about the dangers of state and church schools and the need for libertarian education. The idea of libertarian education is that knowledge and learning should be linked to real life processes and personal usefulness and should not be the preserve of a special institution. Thus Modern Schools are an attempt to establish an environment for self development in an overly structured and rationalised world. An oasis from authoritarian control and as a means of passing on the knowledge to be free.
"The underlying principle of the Modern School is this: education is a process of drawing out, not driving in; it aims at the possibility that the child should be left free to develop spontaneously, directing his [or her] own efforts and choosing the branches of knowledge which he desires to study. . . the teacher . . . should be a sensitive instrument responding to the needs of the child . . . a channel through which the child may attain so much of the ordered knowledge of the world as he shows himself [or herself] ready to receive and assimilate". [Emma Goldman, Op. Cit., p. 126]
The Modern School bases itself on libertarian education techniques. Libertarian education, very broadly, seeks to produce children who will demand greater personal control and choice, who think for themselves and question all forms of authority:
"We don't hesitate to say we want people who will continue to develop. People constantly capable of destroying and renewing their surroundings and themselves: whose intellectual independence is their supreme power, which they will yield to none; always disposed for better things, eager for the triumph of new ideas, anxious to crowd many lives into the life they have. It must be the aim of the school to show the children that there will be tyranny as long as one person depends on another." [Ferrer, quoted by Clifford Harper, Op. Cit., p. 100]
Thus the Modern School insists that the child is the centre of gravity in the education process — and that education is just that, not indoctrination:
"I want to form a school of emancipation, concerned with banning from the mind whatever divides people, the false concepts of property, country and family so as to attain the liberty and well-being which all desire. I will teach only simple truth. I will not ram dogma into their heads. I will not conceal one iota of fact. I will teach not what to think but how to think." [Ferrer, cited by Harper, Op. Cit., pp. 99-100]
The Modern School has no rewards or punishments, exams or mark — the everyday "tortures" of conventional schooling. And because practical knowledge is more useful than theory, lessons were often held in factories, museums or the countryside. The school was also used by the parents, and Ferrer planned a Popular University.
"Higher education, for the privileged few, should be for the general public, as every human has a right to know; and science, which is produced by observers and workers of all countries and ages, ought not be restricted to class." [Ferrer, cited by Harper, Op. Cit., p. 100]
Thus Modern Schools are based on encouraging self-education in a co-operative, egalitarian and libertarian atmosphere in which the pupil (regardless of age) can develop themselves and their interests to the fullest of their abilities. In this way Modern Schools seek to create anarchists by a process of education which respects the individual and gets them to develop their own abilities in a conducive setting.
Modern Schools have been a constant aspect of the anarchist movement since the later 1890s. The movement was started in France by Louise Michel and Sebastien Faure, where Franciso Ferrer became acquainted with them. He founded his Modern School in Barcelona in 1901, and by 1905 there were 50 similar schools in Spain (many of them funded by anarchist groups and trade unions and, from 1919 onward, by the C.N.T. — in all cases the autonomy of the schools was respected). In 1909, Ferrer was falsely accused by the Spanish government of leading an insurrection and executed in spite of world-wide protest and overwhelming proof of his innocence. His execution, however, gained him and his educational ideas international recognition and inspired a Modern School progressive education movement in Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan and, on the greatest scale, in the USA.
However, for most anarchists, Modern Schools are not enough in themselves to produce a libertarian society. They agree with Bakunin's argument that "[f]or individuals to be moralised and become fully human . . . three things are necessary: a hygienic birth, all-round education, accompanied by an upbringing based on respect for labour, reason, equality, and freedom and a social environment wherein each human individual will enjoy full freedom and really by, de jure and de facto, the equal of every other.
"Does this environment exist? No. Then it must be established. . . [otherwise] in the existing social environment . . . on leaving [libertarian] schools they [the student] would enter a society governed by totally opposite principles, and, because society is always stronger than individuals, it would prevail over them . . . [and] demoralise them." [The Basic Bakunin, p, 174]
Because of this, Modern Schools must be part of a mass working class revolutionary movement which aims to build as many aspects of the new world as possible in the old one before, ultimately, replacing it. Otherwise they are just useful as social experiments and their impact on society marginal. Little wonder, then, that Bakunin supported the International Workers Association's resolution that urged "the various sections [of the International] to establish public courses . . . [based on] all-round instruction, in order to remedy as much as possible the insufficient education that workers currently receive." [quoted by Bakunin, Op. Cit., p. 175]
Thus, for anarchists, this process of education is part of the class struggle, not in place of it and so "the workers [must] do everything possible to obtain all the education they can in the material circumstances in which they currently find themselves . . . [while] concentrat[ing] their efforts on the great question of their economic emancipation, the mother of all other emancipations." [Michael Bakunin, Op. Cit., p. 175]
Before finishing, we must stress that hierarchical education (like the media), cannot remove the effects of actual life and activity in shaping/changing people and their ideas, opinions and attitudes. While education is an essential part of maintaining the status quo and accustoming people to accept hierarchy, the state and wage slavery, it cannot stop individuals from learning from their experiences, ignoring their sense of right and wrong, recognising the injustices of the current system and the ideas that it is based upon. This means that even the best state (or private) education system will still produce rebels — for the experience of wage slavery and state oppression (and, most importantly, struggle) is shattering to the ideology spoon-fed children during their "education" and reinforced by the media.
For more information on Modern Schools see Paul Avrich's The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and education in the United States, Emma Goldman's essay "Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School" in Anarchism and Other Essays and A.S Neil's Summerhill. For a good introduction to anarchist viewpoints on education see "Kropotkin and technical education: an anarchist voice" by Michael Smith in For Anarchism and Michael Bakunin's "All-Round Education" in The Basic Bakunin. For an excellent summary of the advantages and benefits of co-operative learning, see Alfie Kohn's No Contest.