Pedagogy
The People’s Free School operates by a small set of commitments that travel from session to session and from group to group. This document names them and explains how they work in practice.
If you have not yet read the Founding Statement, start there. This document assumes you have.
Adult learning is different
Adults bring lives into the room. Years of work, family, community, organizing, suffering, victory, defeat, and ordinary persistence. Adult education that ignores this treats grown people like children and gets the worst out of them. Adult education that takes it seriously starts from what people already know and moves outward from there.
This commitment shapes everything else. The five lenses below are ways of organizing study. Reflective practice is how we stay accountable to what the room is actually thinking. Both rest on the recognition that the people in the room are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They are knowers, already, whose knowledge the work of the school is to surface, sharpen, and connect to a wider tradition.
The five lenses
Any subject worth studying can be approached from at least five angles. The People’s Free School organizes its work around these five lenses. A theme is the topic. A lens is how you approach it.
Experiential
What is your experience with this? What have you lived through that connects to it? What do you already know about it from the inside?
Experiential work treats lived experience as a legitimate source of knowledge. It is not a warm-up before the real material. It is the material. When studying labor, what is it like to work where you work? When studying race, what have you witnessed, lived through, been told, refused to accept? When studying ecology, what has changed in the land you know?
Sources for experiential work: the room itself. Sometimes interviews, oral histories, or testimonios from outside the room, when they extend or challenge what the room can offer.
Historical
How did this thing come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
Historical work denaturalizes. It shows that what looks permanent was made, often recently, by people whose choices could have gone otherwise. The wage was made. The border was made. The racial order was made. The family in its current form was made. None of it had to be this way, and the history of how it got this way is also the history of resistance to it.
Sources for historical work: historians, primary documents, oral histories, archival material, popular histories written for general readers.
Theoretical
How do we understand and analyze this? What concepts and frameworks help us see what is happening?
Theoretical work builds the analytical vocabulary the group needs to think rigorously about the theme. This is where canonical and contemporary theorists enter. Marx on the commodity form. Du Bois on the wages of whiteness. Federici on primitive accumulation and women’s bodies. Fanon on the colonized subject. The reading can be hard. We do it together, slowly, and we do not pretend to understand more than we do.
Sources for theoretical work: foundational and contemporary texts in the traditions the school draws on. Excerpts when full books are too long. Companion readings and study guides when the original is dense.
Practical
What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?
Practical work brings the theme into the present and the local. Case studies, contemporary organizing, current campaigns, lived experience of struggle. What does racial capitalism look like in your county? What does tenant organizing actually involve? What does mutual aid require to sustain itself?
Sources for practical work: journalism, organizer interviews, podcasts, documentaries, case studies. Often the room’s own knowledge of nearby struggles.
Liberatory
What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?
Liberatory work is where utopian thought, revolutionary strategy, prefigurative experiments, and contested visions of the alternative live. It includes the disagreements. Market socialism and communization disagree. Anarchism and democratic socialism disagree. The school does not resolve these debates. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.
Sources for liberatory work: programmatic writings, manifestos, strategic debates, accounts of experiments that have been tried, speculative work that imagines what has not yet been tried.
Reflective practice
Reflection runs through every session. It is not one of the lenses. It is how we work.
A session opens with a check-in. Where are people coming in from? What has been on their mind? What is happening in their life or organizing work that they are carrying in?
A session closes with reflection. What stayed with you? What shifted? What do you want to return to?
Across longer arcs (a six-week study circle, a year of programming), we return to material we have already read with the question of what looks different now. We track our own development, individually and as a group. We make space for understanding to deepen over time rather than expecting it all at once.
Facilitators model reflective practice by doing it themselves, not just asking the room to do it. A facilitator who refuses to name what they are still working out gives the room permission to perform certainty. A facilitator who names their own questions makes space for everyone else to do the same.
What the school is not
A few clarifications, because the model is easy to misread.
Not a lecture series. No one stands at the front and delivers content while others listen. Sessions are discussion-centered, facilitated rather than taught.
Not a book club. A book club picks a book and reads it. The Free School is organized around themes and lenses, and uses books, articles, films, podcasts, and the room’s own knowledge as it moves. Books matter, but they are not the unit of study.
Not therapy. Reflective practice is not group counseling. The school is doing political education. Difficult material will surface difficult feelings. Facilitators hold space for that without becoming clinicians, and redirect when the work the room needs is analysis rather than processing.
Not neutral. The school draws on the socialist, anarchist, and popular education traditions and does not pretend to be neutral about whether the current order is just. It does not demand agreement with a doctrine as the price of entry. People come to study together, and the study takes them where it takes them.
Not a credential. Nothing here certifies anyone for anything. The reward of the work is the work itself, and the community that does it together.
Where this comes from
The pedagogical commitments above are not original. They draw on:
- Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, and the practice of letting the people most affected by a problem lead the analysis of it.
- Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and the commitment that education is never neutral.
- The Scandinavian folk school tradition (Folkehøjskole) and its insistence on adult education as a project of democratic life.
- The American Lyceum and Chautauqua movements and their model of cross-class adult learning.
- Eduard Lindeman and Malcolm Knowles, who named what is distinct about adult learning as a field.
- Septima Clark and the Citizenship Schools, and the practice of meeting people where their need is and building outward.
- The Black radical tradition of study and the practice of reading together against the world that does not want you to read.
For the entry into all of this, see We Make the Road by Walking, the recorded conversations between Horton and Freire.