Across the country, dozens of what are known as Democratic/Free Schools have been breaking ground: they’re a fresh breed of community and curriculum that allows students more choice, input, and ownership in their education. While many of these schools vary in their secondary functions and goals, the core belief of most of these places is to establish students, teachers, and other faculty/administration as equal parties who are working together toward a common goal. These schools seek the abolition of the traditional classroom dynamic that puts teachers in a superior role, instead establishing a bond between everyone that allows for a more fruitful learning environment. I can personally attest to the value in getting through adolescence in a space like this, and I have to say that no decision in my youth saved my life more crucially than to try a Democratic School out.
State College Area’s Delta Program – Centre Daily Times
One of my friends from high school used to jokingly describe our academic experience as a “special school for special kids.” We went to the Delta Program, an alternative school of choice based right here in State College, and we both knew that a statement like that was far from telling the whole story. Yes, Delta is a special school (at least to my friends and me), but nobody I knew in my time there was a particularly “special” person; I mean those words in that we didn’t need to have been born through immaculate conception and seen as the Messiah to attend our school, nor were any of us the scum of society. From my perspective, everyone at Delta was unique, but not in a way that made us into a traveling circus; instead, we simply had a few edges that weren’t meshing well with a more traditional schooling option, and we gave ourselves the audacity to demand change and seek it out. What resulted for many of us was a complete upturn in how we were approaching school, and we even started to feel like we were at home in the ramshackle asbestos hut that was our Fairmount Avenue campus. We called our teachers by their first names, and they became some of our dearest friends as they helped us transform our learning from traditional lectures to unique, hands-on experiences that have changed the way I understand how a person can learn.
I’ve discussed this topic a lot since I started here at Penn State, and I think that it’s important for me to expand beyond reflecting on my own experiences and start making a move to establish my goals, which I thought would be a great use for the Civic Issues platform we’re taking on as a class this semester. I want to make educational alternatives into an important part of my thesis, and I think a good place to start with taking the temperature of alternative schooling is to take a look at how these schools impact our community and others like it. For example, charter schools are under hot debate in the Democratic political community right now, and I think that will be where I start. This is the first time the American public has started to have mixed views about different institutions getting public funding, which has the opportunity to totally overhaul the path of deviant curricula.