East Bay Free Skool

Free Skool
or Freedom School

The BARRINGTON COLLECTIVE is starting a free skool. What started as an informal network of sharing skills and hobbies now has ambition to become much more. The current crisis in the Oakland Unified School District as well as the isolated and ineffectual approaches of much of the “radical community” has led us to the broader community of the East Bay; the very neighborhoods we live in.

We see the current crisis in the OUSD as an opportunity for full COMMUNITY CONTROL of our schools; the charter school model coupled with the No Child Left Behind Act makes it possible for public education funds to be diverted directly into the hands of the community they serve. Parents, teachers and students could organize on the neighborhood level, demand charter status and form their own schools. Public schools are administered by those in power and their interests are to educate folks the minimum amount necessary to prevent rebellion. The public schools are inefficient, test crazed and prisonlike; the possibility of something else should be celebrated. Centralized institutions are alienating and destructive of community and culture, wherever possible we support the creation of decentralized, autonomous organizations networked horizontally rather than hierarchically.

The Barrington Collective is a loose knit, volunteer collective which functions with no budget and limited resources.

WHAT WE ARE DOING

*organizing a peer to peer skillsharing free skool for Summer 2005

*organizing free adult school classes such as ESL

*organizing free after school/ summer school program for youth and kids in Oakland Unified

*holding neighborhood meetings to find out what the community wants; what adults want to learn, what parents want their kids to learn and what the kids/youth themselves want to learn

*advocating community control of the schools, in the form of small, parent/teacher/student run neighborhood schools.

WHAT WE WANT

*volunteers to teach or organize

*other groups to network with

*community input, wants and hopes

*resources, spaces and supplies to use

CONTACT

Website:
http://barringtoncollective.org/freeskool
E-mail:
freeskool [at] barringtoncollective.org


"Rulers have always taken care to control the education of the people, they know better than anyone else that their power is based almost entirely on the school, and they therefore insist on retaining their monopoly on it."

Francisco Ferrer


for other free education projects see;

http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/ - Albany Free School
http://brooklynfreeschool.org/ - Brooklyn Free School
http://www.santacruz.freeskool.org/ - Free Skool Santa Cruz