Education outside the system
Many young people who joined the counterculture were dissatisfied with formal education. They objected to grades, lectures, required courses and the sense that universities served government and industry. Some responded by building their own schools. These efforts were small, short-lived and informal, but they were an important part of the period, and they left ideas that later entered mainstream teaching. The mainstream schools and their reforms are covered in a separate article.
The Free University of New York
The Free University of New York, usually shortened to FUNY, was founded in 1965 in Manhattan. It offered classes for a small fee, or none, in rented rooms and lofts. Subjects mixed the political and the practical with the unconventional: radical politics, art, film, new approaches to psychology, and subjects that official universities often did not teach. Teachers were activists, artists and writers, and students were whoever turned up.
There was an explicit critique behind it. The founders argued that universities had become impersonal institutions and that education should be open to anyone, without admissions or degrees. FUNY was unstable, as many such projects were, and it depended on volunteers and donations. It lasted only a few years.
Berkeley and the free university idea
The same idea appeared on the West Coast. After the Free Speech Movement of 1964, activists around Berkeley set up classes outside the official curriculum. These “free universities” spread to other campuses and cities, often with student leaders, volunteer instructors and course lists that changed from term to term. Many of the founders saw the aim as both an alternative and a pressure on the official institution to change.
The San Francisco State Experimental College
At San Francisco State College, students and sympathetic faculty set up the Experimental College in the 1965-66 academic year. It allowed students to propose and teach their own courses, and it operated with the college’s cooperation. Topics included poetry, politics, encounter groups and the arts. The experiment is often seen as a model for later efforts to widen student participation in the curriculum.
Its life was short, and it was affected by conflicts on campus. It remains a useful example of how an alternative could grow inside an official institution, rather than apart from it.
The Haight Ashbury Free School
In San Francisco, the Haight-Ashbury district produced its own educational efforts. The Haight Ashbury Free School, active in 1967, offered informal classes in subjects such as crafts, music, politics and survival skills in the neighbourhood, with volunteer teachers and no set curriculum. Classes were held in houses, storefronts and parks.
The school belonged to a community that also ran a free clinic, a switchboard and free meals. Its purpose was partly practical: new arrivals needed to learn how to find housing, avoid trouble and take care of their health. The Digger free food distribution and similar projects ran on the same assumption, that a community could supply what the institutions did not.
Summerhill and the free school idea
A strong influence on the alternative-school movement was A. S. Neill’s Summerhill, a boarding school in England founded in the 1920s. Pupils at Summerhill chose whether to attend lessons, and school rules were decided at a meeting in which pupils and staff each had one vote. Neill’s book on the school was published in the United States in 1960, and it sold widely over the following decade.
American parents and teachers, reading Neill together with the work of writers such as John Holt, started small “free schools” in the second half of the 1960s. These generally had few rules, little formal testing and a belief that children learn best when they follow their own interests. Some were run by parents in rented buildings, others by teachers who had left public schools. The movement grew further in the early 1970s.
What these projects achieved
Their achievements were modest and mixed. Many had no money, little continuity and no formal recognition. Teaching quality varied, and the same openness that attracted people also made it hard to keep the projects going. Some students gained confidence and a sense of agency, while others found the lack of structure frustrating. There is no reliable count of how many such schools existed in 1967, and any claim of precise numbers should be treated cautiously.
Lasting effects
Even so, the ideas did not disappear. Calls for student involvement in setting courses, interdisciplinary classes, pass-fail grading, independent study and credit for experience all spread in the following years, and some became standard in mainstream institutions. The free universities themselves mostly faded, but the questions they raised, about who education serves and who decides what is taught, are still debated.