No Particular Place to Go The Making of a Free High School

The story of a group of teachers and high school students who from 1968 to 1970 broke away from the public schools to start an al­ternative school of their own design. The introductory chapters focus on Den­ker and Bhaerman, explaining how they came to start the project. The middle two chapters center on events and issues during the two years the authors were with the school. The final two chapters analyze the politics of free schools and the teaching of adolescents. Denker and Bhaerman write in a lively, candid, and personal style, describing the events as they happened—even if these events show the school in a bad light. The book is directed toward those who want to understand the free school move­ment of the sixties and early seventies and toward those who want to move beyond it. Students and teachers, Bhaerman says, “ulti­mately must face what they had been avoid­ing while rebelling against traditional in­stitutions: that the responsibility for their education lies with themselves and that what they took from the ‘free school’ was directly proportional to what they put in.” An Introduction by Lawrence Dennis and an Afterword by Bhaerman and Denker put both this experiment and the free school movement in historical perspective.