Once You Start Looking For Freedom, You’re Lost

The concept of freedom is often presented as a substance, product, or condition that schools, manufacturers, or governments provide. Indeed, a “sales point” for many alternative schools is often about the amount of freedom they grant students.

This brief but illuminating passage by George Dennison is a good example of his deep thought and writing. John often said and wrote that The Lives of Children by George Dennison was one of the most moving and insightful books about education he ever read. Indeed, John and George became good friends and when John was diagnosed with cancer he stayed with George and Mabel at their farm in Temple, Maine for a while. George was a teacher at an alternative school in Manhattan and wrote about it in The Lives of Children; he later became a writer of fiction. This excerpt is from a transcript of Dennison’s comments at an assembly of people involved in free schools in the late 1960s and was printed in Growing Without Schooling 69.

Once you start looking for freedom, you’re lost. Can you imagine finding it? Hey, here’s freedom! Over here! Look! But all you can see, you know, is people doing things. What we mean is we’re not going to coerce anybody, either by force or cunning. Force is cops and corporal punishment. Cunning is what’s taught in the colleges of education—how to increase their ‘attention span’—up to a maximum you know, of sixty minutes, and then you destroy it by ringing a bell—how to “motivate” them, and so on. But the absence of coercion isn’t visible either. What’s visible, when things are going really well, is simply activities, activities of all kinds, especially, we hope, the kinds that harmonize energy, innate powers, and sweet reason. The real touchstone of freedom, you know, is not joyous people romping in the grass, but quality, first-rate work. It may be slow to emerge, especially in the sense that I mean here. But still, it is the touchstone. Verve, style, grace, lots of content, lots of meaning. You don’t reach this by regimenting people, or by having a lifestyle of freedom—which tends to be all style and no life—but by doing things, especially the things you can do with a whole heart. 

 … You don’t discover who you are …  I don’t know where this vocabulary came from. You see it all the time in proposals for free schools, “creating a climate of freedom so you can discover who you are.” …  When someone says, “I want to know who I am,” what he really means is that he hasn’t found the activities, the friends, and the loyalties that he can give himself to. These are not inside the self. They’re all outside. And you discover them by looking outside. And when you find them, you don’t feel that you’ve discovered yourself, you feel that you’ve discovered friends, activities, and loyalties.

 …  I know of someone in Vermont who went around to hired businessmen, tradesman, and professionals, and asked them if they’d take in apprentices, or at least have kids around and show them how things were done. He said the initial response of these people was sluggish, and then enthusiastic. All these adults were terribly bored, and they welcomed the idea of having kids around. This seems like a promising direction. You need the excitement and bigness of real life to bring out real things in adolescents …