Free Schools, Free People Education and Democracy after the 1960s

Free Schools, Free People Education and Democracy after the 1960s

By Ron Miller (State University of NY Press, 2002)

This is a sharp study of the free school movement and how John Holt, in particular, shaped its legacy. This is from the chapter, "The Legacy of John Holt":

In a remarkable essay in the New York Times Magazine in 1970 that stirred up an angry response from readers, Holt described how campus protests at Berkeley were subjected to repeated police violence, even though they were raising concerns that were, to him, perfectly legitimate. "To our students and young, who cannot tolerate our society as it is, we only offer more and more of what they can't stand. Bigger, noisieer, dirtier cities, more war, more exploitation more corruption, more cruelty, more ugliness, more depersonalization, and at the end of it, the virtual certainty that if the world is not destroyed by war it will be made unihabitable by the waste produts of an ever larger gross national product."