Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of many books including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, The Magical Child and Evolution's End, has written a glowing foreword to this marvelously human, delightfully and insightfully written book. It is to be hoped that Chris Mercogliano's future writings (this is his first) represent Chris' heart, mind and soul to the same extent as this book, which so tellingly and faithfully pictures out in incandescent words the very lives of these astonishing and always fascinatingly individual children who dash, saunter or prance in and out of his stories, as they do in and out of the old, battered doors of The Free School in Albany's unfashionable South End working class district! Joe says (in part) of this book - and of the school itself:
This is one of the most unusual, extraordinary, and enlightening books I have had the privilege of reading, much less writing a foreword for. Mercogliano is a superb storyteller, and here he presents us with as profoundly important a view of education as is offered in our time. A certain sadness filled me, in fact, as I progressed into these chapters, for the message here is so essential to our childfen, selves, families, nation and world. But what chance, I wondered, does this genuine pearl stand of being found in a landfill of trivia, bad ideas and self-serving chicanery? Not only does Mercogliano and his remarkable Albany Free School offer us a way out of the downward spiral our schools are in, but, if we can hear him, he throws light on our personal dilemmas as well. His thesis runs seriously counter to our current chaos of conflicting ideas&emdashideas that push us like mad swine over a cliff. Yet I confess that some of his casual acceptances gave pause even to an anarchist and iconoclast like me. In every case, however, once I had considered his more revolutionary concepts, I saw how right, how dangerously right, he is. ....
It's hard to imagine many public school teachers caring much about a quirky private school of 50 students started by hippies and anarchists out to radically transform education. Most teachers, after all, work within the routines of lesson plans, mandated testing, and classrooms bulging with students--everything the Albany Free School wants to assign to the dunghill of history. Still, this integrated school, founded 30 years ago in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of New York state's capital, deserves our attention, for what makes it truly radical--and relevant--is not so much its rejection of the status quo but the sheer intensity with which its adults care for each child.
Written with a captivating lack of pretense by Free School co-director and teacher Mercogliano, Making It Up recounts the school's rocky early years and the faculty's struggle to find both funds and a philosophy. The first crucial decision, Mercogliano writes, was that "only those actually present in the building could determine the school's day-to-day operating policy." This means that students as well as adults are included in decisionmaking, free to call school council meetings to discuss and decide a host of issues.
Students find this opportunity to speak out liberating. It is all part of the school's therapeutic philosophy, which draws from the work of the late psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who believed that the repression of feelings causes a defensiveness in people, a kind of "armoring," that leads to inner desolation. Consequently, the children at the Free School, who range in age from 3 to 14, are allowed, as Mercogliano puts it, to "rage it out." For teachers, this sometimes means allowing a playground brawl between evenly matched opponents to run its course. Or it means holding kicking and screaming children on their laps until the rage is spent. Only then, Mercogliano writes, can "the tears of pain and grief that are so often trapped beneath the anger" emerge. Mercogliano admits that this approach can tax the faculty. He describes, for example, carrying a traumatized 3-year-old girl around for a number of days until she felt safe enough to explore the environment on her own.
As nurturing as the school is, it does not pamper children or allow them to run roughshod over others. "Few things are more frightening to young children than perceiving they have too much power," Mercogliano notes. "They need to be met not with punishment nor its opposite, permissiveness, but with compassion and truthful directness." How this is applied varies from child to child. The punishment for a 12-year-old boy who had destroyed his desk was to build a new one with a master craftsman. A depressed 13-year-old girl whose parents were divorcing was permitted to spend her days weaving until she regained her equilibrium. Frequently, peers call misbehaving students to task at council meetings, as when a bullying teenager was fined $5 each time he intimidated a smaller student.
Of course, the Albany Free School is not for everybody, as Mercogliano freely acknowledges. Many children do fine in a traditionally structured academic environment. But for those damaged by poverty, abuse, or neglect--the very children who are filling an increasing number of our public school classrooms--a school like this may be both a first and last chance.