M a r k W.
N o v a k / U n i v e r s i t y of W i n n i p e g Living and Learning in the
While conventional educational programs differ some-
what in their social organization and concrete practices,
they invariably collect around some traditional and
unprobIematic understanding of pedagogy (what
teachers do), curriculum (what is taught), and
evaluation (how we measure success or failure in a
program). In the free school, with its radical commit-
ment to oppose conventional educational understand-
ing, the actual practice of education (what we are doing
here in this place we call school) becomes problematic.
Thus the social organization of the free school must be
viewed as a unique, collective attempt to redefine
pedagogy, curriculum, and evaluation. By observing
the flee school members' solution to this problem of
redefinition we learn in some detail about a new edu-
cational alternative, but perhaps more significantly we
can then link this alternative to the actual concerns,
troubles, and needs of the people engaged in the con-
struction of the free school program.
The present paper examines these problems as they
manifested themselves in the context of one such free
school.
The Genesis of Pegasus
In May 1970 a "homogeneous''1 group of approxi-
mately 20 parents approached the Hillsborough2 school
board and requested that the board establish a school
based upon the recommendations of the Hall-Dennis
report, Living and Learning (Ontario Department of
Education, 1968). This school, the parents' brief
(1970) stated, should be run in accordance with the
following principles:
"1. The school will be governed by a council consisting
of 50 percent parents and 50 percent staff and adminis-
tration. (Prior to establishment, 50 percent parents and
50 percent administration.)
2. The total operational budget, including salaries,
shall be allocated to the school council as one unit to be
divided by them as they see fit.
3. The child shall have total personal freedom; with
the only limitations being that the child does not
Interchange/Vol. 5, No. 2/1974
Free School
infringe upon the rights of others, or endanger his health
or safety.
4. The school will be concerned with the development
of basic skills, though not necessarily in the traditional
order.
5. At its inception, classes will be provided from junior
kindergarten level to the equivalent of the sixth level.
6. Enrolment in the school will be voluntary, parents
who enrol their children must be in agreement with the
basic principles of the school. Since enrolment is volun-
tary, parents shall be permitted to send their children
to the school regardless of boundaries."
While not all of the trustees fully supported a free
alternative---e.g., some voted for the school in order to
"allow these parents to educate their children as they
please"--the trustees' willingness to gamble with free
education, coupled with the already popular trend to-
ward open-plan classrooms, favored the approval of
the parents' demands. With at least one well respected
trustee, an author and university professor, planning to
send his own child to the school, the trustees after some
debate finally endorsed the parents' proposal for a
three-year trial period.
Immediately after the board endorsed the parents'
brief, the summer's work finding a suitable location,
choosing a staff, and determining the direction of the
program began in earnest. Parental interest in school
affairs went beyond merely convincing the board to
approve the school--as the parents themselves said in
their brief, "the school should provide for parental
involvement in the goals affecting the life of the school."
Accordingly, the parents played a dominant role in the
school's practical organization.
The first practical task, hiring a staff, faced the
parents soon after the board's approval. Teachers from
within the Hillsborough school system were invited to
apply for the three openings (projected on the assump-
tion that 70 to 90 students would enroll), and from
corps of volunteers the parents selected two women and
a man, all in their twenties. The three teachers agreed
with the principles outlined in the brief and shared the
1
 parents' desire to participate in an educational alterna-
tive. Although two teachers already had plans to be
away for the summer, the third met with the parents
through the summer months.
While I have scant and then second-hand informa-
tion on this formative period prior to September 1970,
I know that a great deal of time was spent working on
the school's philosophical underpinnings. In particular,
parents and the single staff member established curri-
culum guidelines, articulated their theory of free
education, and generally prepared themselves for
September. What would happen then was the great
unknown and all the preparation in the world could
not assure success. The parents waited with appre-
hension and excitement for the opening that fall.
In September the school, named Pegasus, opened in
a formerly vacant wing of HiUsborough Elementary
School. A drop in enrollment at Hillsborough (a
borough-wide phenomenon that had left this school
and many others with extra space), coupled with the
need to find a suitable location for Pegasus in only a
few short months, brought these two schools together
under one roof. Thus the board appended Pegasus as a
"subschool" to this already existing program, with the
stipulation that Pegasus would, nevertheless, remain
independent. Although the two schools shared a prin-
cipal s and the physical plant, they otherwise remained
separate.
With an enrollment of approximately 90 children
at Pegasus, the board allotted three full-sized class-
rooms and one small lounge for the school's use. All
of these rooms were formerly conventional kinder-
gartens, located on the ground floor of the two-storey
school building. The rooms were spacious and bright,
but not especially attractive. Fluorescent lighting, green
and grey mottled tile flooring, blackboards on most
walls, reminded the observer that these rooms were
designed and equipped for the "business" of educating
the young. They provided neat, easy to clean, well lit
space, yet aesthetically little could commend either
their design or decor.
Perhaps the most significant thing about these class-
rooms was their spatial separation; each room was a
self-contained unit, i.e., no two rooms directly inter-
connected. Only by entering the hall and passing
through a set of heavy metal and glass fire doors could
one move from one room to another. The separation of
the three rooms---~ne room set aside for primary
children--resulted in an unwanted and artificial divi-
sion of students and teachers.
My first field note, written after nay initial visit to
Pegasus early in October 1970, provides a visitor's
view of the school's visage.
"On first entering the school, I suddenly felt as though
I were in the midst of a carnival. With children running
here and there, toys and art supplies strewn around a
large room, a group of children watching T.V. in one
corner, while other children ran in and out shouting
and laughing, I felt completely disoriented. A woman,
a few years older than I and, as I later found out, a
parent participating in the school program, stood
across the room. I made my way over to her for some
guidance.
I introduced myself and a grand tour of the school
began immediately. Whisked here and there, from one
room to the next, I could barely get a sense of where I
was or what was going on around me. I did manage to
note to my guide that the school seemed well equipped.
A profusion of live animals (including some chickens),
an indoor sandbox, a plethora of art supplies, a lounge
with a T.V. and stereo, a woodwork bench complete
with tools and wood, all stood out as particularly inter-
esting and expensive pieces of equipment.
After my tour I spent the afternoon watching the
students at 'work.' I confess that I felt strange through-
out the day. The apparent freedom of the children
impressed me; for example, they roamed in hordes and
in small groups, in and out of rooms with little or no
adult supervision. I feel that my own disorientation
resulted from the students' mobility, their sheer num-
bers and the apparently casual organization of the
rooms."
Given the freedom to move within the school----and this
was a fundamental principle at Pegasus the students'
constant movement was at least partially the result of
the artificial division of classroom space. Wandering
and movement were a response to these obtrusive
material conditions.
Although supplies and equipment seemed readily
available, I learned later of the apparent waste and
destruction of these materials. It was said, for example,
that in Pegasus' first four months of operation the stu-
dents used by conventional standards a year's worth of
supplies. One might argue for the increased creativity
of the students, but several times I witnessed young
children pouring good paint down drains (although
usually by accident as they attempted to pour a usable
quantity from large jars). I noticed too that tools gradu-
ally disappeared from the work-bench, until only a
meager supply remained; and cassette tape recorders
were broken or missing.
It serves no purpose to recount these problems for
their own sake. Surely any social experiment spins off
complications and displays growing pains in one form
or another. Yet, these troubles illuminate a far more
serious problem: to many concerned parents the school
remained stubbornly incomprehensible and apparently
chaotic. Lack of adult supervision, apparently callous
use of supplies, and the absence of any ongoing, regular
program unnerved and provoked even the most pro-
gressive parents. The high attrition rate during the
school's first four months--approximately 30% of the
 "like-minded, homogeneous" parent-body left by
Christmas----can be traced back to these mundane but
by no means simple problems.
T h e Free S c h o o l as a M e m b e r ' s P r o b l e m 4
From the first day, Pegasus' status as an educational
institution was neither obvious nor given. Although the
parents played a key role in setting up the school pro-
gram, even they were often unsure of the school's
success in implementing their original goals. The
parents' brief to the board of education had stated:
"Pegasus is more than a school, it is an effort to give
substance to the educational philosophy embodied in
the Hall-Dennis Report and the Free School Move-
ment . . . . We want a school where the child is viewed
as unique and of non-comparable, non-measurable,
worth, and is taught by persons who value the dignity
of children. Such a school must allow the child to
develop a good feeling about himself as a learner; must
create an atmosphere where he is challenged intellectu-
ally and be structured so that the teacher can become
closely involved with the child and sensitive to his devel-
opment. The school at all levels must concern itself with
the student's awareness of himself and others, with
expansion of his sensory awareness and the develop-
ment of his enjoyment of learning."
By viewing the child as "non-comparable" and
"non-measurable" these parents rejected the efficient
and for-all-practical-purposes effective educational
techniques employed in most schools today; yet this
same quote suggested an alternative, although in some-
what problematic terms. Quantitative evaluation and
progress were to be replaced by the student's growing
"awareness of himself and others," "expansion of his
sensory awareness," and "enjoyment of learning" as
educational goals. But given the intangibility of these
goals, members failed, at first, to recognize as their
central problem the organization of an environment in
which one could see the successful accomplishment of
these goals.
In the first months after Pegasus opened, members
devoted their undivided attention to the production of
some recognizable social order. And until the problem
of social order was resolved, members experienced a
debilitating sense of anomie. Confusion, disillusion-
ment, skepticism, and above all an inability to compre-
hend the problems they faced caused members to
despair at the prospect of ever seeing a school where
this social blight now stood. In January, a series of
events and a reorganization of school affairs changed
the remaining parents' despair to faint hope.
The new year, 1971, found Pegasus' only male
staff member relieved of his duties; simultaneously a
new teacher made his debut on the three-teacher staffP
A field note from early in January illustrates the effect
of the new teacher:
"A new teacher and a new outlook for parents. Things
seem to be running more smoothly now, than they
were before Christmas. One parent suggested that the
vacation and some rest was useful. A new enthusiasm
is present. The new teacher Paul Arnaud has
brought in a group of animals and a large cage. In
addition he has rearranged the rooms. There is a new
log book, in which resource personnel write their com-
ments.
A new institution: the staff meeting before and after
school. These meetings lend a sense of coherence to
what goes on in the school, especially in light of the
spatial arrangement of rooms and the consequent
separation of teachers from one another throughout
the day."
Yet, for all the concrete organizational change that
took place after the Christmas vacation, the most pro-
found change took place in the members' social rela-
tions. Whereas prior to January the members had
exhibited an equivocality in their conversations with
one another, shortly after the new teacher's arrival a
new positive form of speech emerged and pointed the
way toward a visible social order. Let me explain.
I use the term "equivocality" here not in opposition
to univocality but in contrast to the possibility of
dialogical speech. In the absence of a dialog, equivo-
cality and univocality amount to the same thing, a
nonvisible social order. Only in the context of a dialog
does visible social order become possible, since it is
through dialog that the polar prospects of good and
evil or right and wrong conduct make sense. Further-
more, as Durkheim has shown us, the social order is a
moral order in which two possibilities-----e.g., the normal
and the pathological--play upon one another, and
thereby spin off new social (organizational) forms.
Finally, only a dialogical moral order provides for
social action. Because dialog simultaneously exhibits
the tension of being-with-an-other and being-for-the-
serf (as opposed to the naive being-together of uni-
vocality and equivocality), it creates a speech that is
social action. This form of action, then, arises from the
fundamental splitting of self from other (a loss of
homogeneity) and leads to an active recollection of a
membership on a dialectical ground.
During the free school's first months, everyone--
parents, teachers, and indirectly the children--had a
say, an equal say, in defining, organizing, and making
sense of school daily life. Yet from this incessant,
equivocal talk there emerged no definable sense of
"schoolness" that members could readily see. The
equivocality of members' talk gave these discussions the
character of loose mouthings with a topical relevance
but with no deeper (semantic) moral ~ound from
which a visible social organization could spring. The
solipsism of a "do your own thing" free school philos-
ophy apparently stifled organizational potential in
 Pegasus' first four months.
How, then, did the free school members come to
see something, where formerly nothing could be found?
If all talk is equally compelling--so that when a ques-
tion of deviance arises it can be suitably answered in
any way one pleases--then no talk is compelling. No
vocabulary or semantic community can exist in the
absence of some preferred speech and, likewise, a
preferred speech can arise only from some way of
naming the troubles and problems that beset the com-
munity. (Here I use the term "community" to connote
the potential inherent in the search for a suitable
language.) I am saying, then, that one needs a language,
a vocabulary, a way of expressing one's experience of
the "thatness out there" before one can talk about a
free school community or anything else. How, we must
ask again, from this prehistoric social agNomeration,
could a recognizable school begin to take shape?
McHugh (1970), in an analysis of deviance,
delineated the primal movement of social order in
speech:
"Something has happened . . . certainly, but the first
ensuing question is 'What h a p p e n e d ? ' . . . There being
at least two outcomes, the procedure is not univocal.
This is to say that at some prior point deviance is a
charge, not just a description." (p.158)
McHugh's notion of deviance includes anything that
would make us exclaim, "What happened?" and for
this reason it already postulates some, perhaps crude or
unformulated, idea of the normal as well as the extra-
ordinary or strange. It furthermore presupposes some
vocabulary in which one could sensibly couch an answer
to this query. By postulating at least two outcomes (and
I suggest that many more than two possible outcomes
would fail to produce the question to begin with),
McHugh opens the way for a rejoinder. The alternative
to this dialectic is the vague uncertainty and anomie that
members experienced in the first days of Pegasus'
career. I must agree with Paul Goodman (1972), who
wrote, "For a society to act as a collective is largely
pathological" (p.33).
The equivalence of members' speech during the free
school's first four months meant that no school culture
could evolve. By the New Year, however, the firing of
one teacher and hiring of another suggested that some
crude stratification system was beginning to exist in the
school. From this point on we can begin to see the
development of a dialogical social order. By investing
themselves with hiring-firing ability parents took
responsibility for judging the adequacy of school life
after four months of uncertainty and confusion. In fact,
the parents' investiture of authority in the parent-body
actually characterized their conception of community
control. Until January, however, this power had re-
mained only a hidden possibility.
But if parents alone had the ability to decide upon
the adequacy of school life, thus forming a constituency
or audience, then the professional teacher must be
understood as a political actor or demonstrator of
school affairs. Here, then, in this relationship is the free
school's dialogical potential; here is the organizational
mechanism through which both a community and a
vocabulary of motives developed. 6 This parent-teacher
division of labor resulted in an endlessly talkative
political and social world wherein charges, counter-
charges, accounts, and demonstrations circumscribed
the mundane daily life in the school. Under these
dialectical conditions, neither equivocality nor univo-
caiity was possible. Accordingly, the parents' assertion
of their discriminatory power, as well as the new
teacher's assumption of responsibility for demonstra-
tion, represented the free school's first crude organiza-
tional beginnings. Upon this fundamental dialectical
field, the free school culture became elaborated.
Now this constituency-demonstrator relationship
can also be found in the conventional school, where
teachers produce grades or visible (gradable) results
---e.g., essays, shadow boxes, drawings for a poten-
tially critical or inquiring audience of parents. But in
the conventional setting, the privacy of the classroom
sanctuary prevents any serious questioning of educa-
tional methodology. (This of course is what makes the
contemporary popular literature---e.g., John Holt's
[1964] critical expos6 of unseen, traditional teacher
practices--so interesting. These formerly unseen, un-
analyzed educational practices incite us particularly
because they have remained clandestine and uncriti-
cized for so long.) The traditional parent-teacher
relationship coalesces primarily around the end product
of education, while educational practice assumes a
special unspeakable status.
In the free school as envisioned in the parents'
brief, the method itself was the end product. Educa-
tional practice was taken as an end in itself so that
discussion centered around teachers' methods, prac-
tices, and relationships with children. In Pegasus, the
infra-structure of the educational process--e.g.,
teacher-student relations--was brought to the light of
day and constituted the nexus of community interest.
The teachers' experiences in this school took on a curi-
ously public character, as their personal relationships
and responses to students became grist for the parents'
conversational mill. This represented a distinct differ-
ence between the free and conventional schools.
Furthermore, it pointed to the free school members'
collective narcissism; their sociable conversation folded
back upon itself through the endless discussion of school
social relations.
Having isolated the constituency-demonstrator,
parent-teacher relationship as the crucial one in the
formation of free school culture, we need to discuss the
way in which a recognizable, reportable social order
evolved out of this relationship. To understand this
evolution, we should first examine the concept of
responsibility.
The process of assigning responsibility, beginning
with a charge laid by an observer, requires an answer
or an account from the actor. In the early months after
Pegasus' opening, neither parents nor teachers accepted
responsibility for the setting, although charges and
counter-charges were laid, a situation that resulted in
chaos. Teachers claimed that they could hardly be held
responsible for Pegasus' disorder, because as teachers
they had no prior training that could have prepared
them for this setting. This ploy of course worked only
temporarily, until parents felt that the teachers had had
enough experience to avoid the pitfalls of the school's
crude beginning. When it became apparent that
teachers still could not alleviate the confusion through
reasonable behavior or intelligible account, they were
held responsible for the school's failure, and were seen
as either incompetent or lazy.
This account of the parents' actions illustrates their
common-sense search for some visible order as well as
their unabashed confidence in their ability to judge the
adequacy of that order. "This is to say that members,
judgers, assessors, and labelers have a notion of the
behavioral possibilities in any scene, and beyond that,
a notion of the actor as an agent of his own behavior"
(McHugh, 1970, p.152). Thus, upon his arrival in
January, Paul, the new teacher, assumed full responsi-
bility for organizing the school in response to the
parents' general charge that "nothing is going on in that
crazy place." But in addition, Paul's action was oriented
to the specific vocabulary that parents used in order to
express their sense of the school's failure: first, parents
felt that "no one was ultimately responsible for the state
of the school," second, "no one followed through on
activities," and third, "the school showed a lack of
cohesiveness." Paul's specific answer to the parents'
charges defended his own claim to competence by
supplying a vocabulary and a syntax for a sensible
reading of the school's social world.
In responding to the parents' charges, Paul did not
simply demonstrate the inevitability of these conditions,
as his predecessor had done. On the contrary, through
the ad hoc construction of a curriculum, he provided
members with a way of seeing new facets of school life.
After Paul constructed the curriculum, the school itself
remained essentially unchanged, but the curriculum
provided a powerful medium through which he
defended himself against parental charges, r Curricu-
lum, then, can be seen as a common-sense teachers'
tool, which provided both topic and resource for
teachers' accounts.
This curriculum worked a veritable miracle for
teachers in the free school. Whereas during the first
months of operation, teachers could only shrug at
parents' vitriol and weakly invoke lack of time for
preparation, understafling, inexperience, etc., as
reasons for their obvious failure, they now had a power-
ful, positive, visible, and pragmatic way of demonstrat-
ing social order.
The curriculum stood as the teachers' visible inter-
pretation of the school and proved parental claims of
irrationality to be unfounded. This feat was accom-
plished through the teachers' display of the school
program's theoretic roots. The curriculum closed off
any debate over teacher competence (theoretic ability)
and required that charges be reviewed in light of new
evidence. With the introduction of this new paradigm,
teachers made visible what parents heretofore had over-
looked.
By displaying ability as a theoretic actor, one who
knows the common-sense rules that govern free school
teaching, Paul became an active agent in the definition
of school reality. The teachers, by demonstrating their
theoretic ability and thereby accepting responsibility
for the school's condition, entered into dialogical rela-
tions with the parents. Through the medium of the
curriculum this dialog evolved into some recognizable
community social order.
Pedagogy, Curriculum,and Evaluation
Basil Bernstein (1971) suggested an approach suited
to the study of this education environment; he examined
"three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy, and
evaluation," which are related through an "educational
knowledge code t h a t . . , refers to the underlying prin-
ciples which shape [them]" (p.47). For our purposes
this knowledge code refers to members' vocabulary (the
underlying principles) of motives and members' com-
mon-sense invocation of these motives in order to
produce schoolness (the three message systems).
Education and knowledge become reportable events
and achieve objective existence only through mundane
social interaction: both knowledge and educational
praxis are the result of members' pragmatic sense-
making practices.
Bernstein demonstrated the relationship between
knowledge codes and social organization through an
examination of the sociological assumptions inherent
in these codes. "Irrespective of the question of the
intrinsic logic of the various forms of public thought,
the forms of their transmission, that is, their classifica-
tion and framing are social facts" (p.49). Although I
agree that educational forms (the assumptions under-
lying the three message systems) obtain fact status in
Durkheim's sense, my interest is in the production of
this factual school reality. That this or any other school
exists as an essentially unquestioned reality for mem-
bers I do not dispute; however, I am concerned with the
ways in which the school comes to obtain such a pre-
ferred status.
We begin, then, by examining the three message
systems in light of members' vocabulary of motives, and
by viewing these systems as the result of accounting
practices and demonstrations that make these phenom-
ena visible for anyone to see. In particular, we focus
upon the obvious division of labor in the free school--
the distinction between parents and staff in order to
see how this division of responsibility produced a
dialogical social and moral order.
Pedagogy and Curriculum
Recent publications in the field of education---e.g., Holt
(1964), Kohl (1969)--have described conventional
education as the practice of child management. Further-
more, conventional education is based upon an eco-
nomic conception of learning, such that learning can
be measured as a quantity of knowledge acquired over
time. This view does not seem outrageous, since educa-
tional advancement and achievement can apparently be
measured. Surely we accept the results of such measure-
ment, although perhaps with some urbane skepticism, as
somehow a reasonably accurate account of educational
practice. The conventional practice of education speaks
in a language of quantity, progress, and measurement,
and members organize their social world accordingly.
Learning in the conventional school can therefore
be described as the organized practice of producing
gradable behavior and, ultimately, a grade. But even
with this obvious description in hand, we should not
fail to recognize that educational practice is an answer
to the questioning, potential or real, of some group or
individual who asks, "What is going on in the school?"
The answers "learning" or "knowledge transmission,"
with production of a set of test scores and averages as
suitable evidence for one's claim, however, are only two
of a myriad of answers to this question.
The free school teachers posed a somewhat different
answer to this question, and for this reason one could
conclude that "learning," as we conventionally apply
this term, did not take place in the free school. Learning
was absent simply because the mechanism or social
organization for producing it was absent. From the
school's inception the search for some alternative free
school social organization, as an alternative to the
quantitative production of learning, occupied members'
time.
The curriculum, as an overt demonstration of
responsibility, order, and continuity, represented a
direct answer to the parents' charges of teacher failure.
A closer look at this curriculum illustrates the way in
which free school teachers employed this tool in the
evolution of a social order. Through the lens of the
curriculum, free school teachers brought into focus a
visible order, defined by certain spatial and temporal
parameters, and through the invocation of a vocabulary
of motives teachers made possible a free school social
order, as well. Curriculum, then, represented an
objectification of the school's social world; however, it
also remained open-ended, requiring interpretation at
every point of inquiry. It thereby invited inquiry
through its very indeterminacy.
The first crude semblance of a curriculum was
drawn up by the teachers in February 1971. I later
dubbed this attempt the "blackboard program." This
program became part of an ongoing dialog between
parents, teachers, and interested administrative per-
sonnel. Put most simply, this program consisted of the
teachers' first collaborated effort to organize a
schedule of activities. This schedule, written on a large
movable blackboard, represented the first attempt to
account for and organize the many, often conflicting,
activities scheduled during a week. One of the teachers
explained the purpose of this schedule by noting that
it was designed to "avoid conflicts between on-going
activities, facilitate planning, and generally coordinate
the program." If we adhere to Bernstein's (1971)
definition of curriculum, as "the principle by which
units of time and their content are brought into spatial
relationship with one another" (p.48), this schedule
certainly represented a first ad hoc curriculum. From
the teachers' point of view, the board provided an index
that could be brought out and left in full view of the
school to show everyone what the school looked like.
In this way it served primarily as a counterclaim to
parents' complaints.
A closer look at the teachers' schedule showed that
it not only prescribed a spatial and temporal order for
members, but it also prescribed a common-sense view
of the social world through which members interpreted
one another's actions and to which members geared
their activity. First, let us examine the particular organi-
zation of this social world as it evolved from the
teachers' curriculum, and then the vocabulary of
motives, centering around the notion of "involvement,"
a term that was used by teachers to explain members'
actions. The reflexivity of the teachers' practices should
be apparent. Neither the blackboard curriculum nor the
teachers' accounts of members' involvement in school
affairs stood independent of one another. When the
teachers increased their ability to define free school
reality through demonstration, they altered both the
actual environment and their verbal accounts of this
environment. In so doing, they made student involve-
ment visible to interested observers. Hence, involve-
ment became the focus of members' collective interest
and the source of the free school vocabulary of motives.
"Involvement in what?" one might well ask. In-
volvement in the activities that comprised the curricu-
lum-schedule. The teachers used the notion of an
"activity" in a special sense, so that participation or
nonparticipation in activities denoted, respectively,
normal or deviant behavior in the school. Thus by
understanding the activity as primarily a morally sanc-
tioned event, as well as a spatially and temporally
defined one, we see that members' actions were inter-
preted through a vocabulary of motives that used a
common-sense understanding of involvement and non-
involvement. Involvement was not merely what some-
one was or was not doing; rather, it was an interpreta-
tion of members' actions used by teachers and parents
to index normal child behavior. Involvement or non-
involvement could be understood only with reference
to the teachers' conception of legitimate activity. A
problematic group of boys in this school, the "hall boys"
as they were called, provide a good example of how
noninvolvement was applied to behavior as a label and
as a charge.
To the casual observer, these boys seemed remark-
ably busy and involved in what they were doing. In fact,
these boys appeared to be more eagerly engaged in
their projects than were many other students in the
school. They usually played floor hockey, traded
hockey cards, and generally spent their time together;
thus they obviously comprised a friendship group and
appeared to thoroughly enjoy themselves. On the basis
of this evidence, these boys clearly seemed involved.
However, the teachers' two criteria for legitimate
activity in the school clearly defined these boys as
uninvolved, ergo deviant: the first criteria was temporal
regularity of activities and the second held that all
activities should take place in the classroom.
In contrast to the hall boys' haphazard, hedonistic
orientation to daily life in the school, the programmed
activities built into the school a temporal order that
persisted over time, and that guided members through
their day. The "ongoingness" of activities and of the
program in general represented a serious parental and
teacher concern; one teacher called this her "Eriksonian
bias for regularity," but we might call this a Schutzian
fact of life in the natural attitude.
For Schutz, of course, members in the natural
attitude take for granted their social world "at hand as
typical, that is, as carrying open horizons of anticipated
similar experiences" (1967, p.7). Repeatability, con-
fortuity to certain typical expectations, and the as-
sumption that things will continue pretty much as they
have in the past characterize members' perspective in
the attitude of daily life.
The natural attitude supports action by making
unproblematic the projection of future experiences. The
aptness of members' typical formulas for action augur
the success or failure of such action. We now see the
significance of the curriculum's temporal order, and we
can understand the teachers' interest in organizing a
temporally regular social world. The activity becomes
a pre-given structure that, once organized, provides a
ground upon which everyday action and projects may
be cast. In this sense, curriculum becomes, as Bern-
stein has said, a form of knowledge transmission or a
social fact. The very taken-for-granted influence of the
curricular temporal order and its coercive effect upon
members' actions lent this schedule the status of an
objective reality.
On more than one occasion members expressed the
need for a curricular, thus temporal, spatial and inter-
personal order. As one teacher stated:
"Baby's trust doesn't just have to do with parents, it has
to do with the world. Do you trust the world as a
regular place? The world's a place that is not very trnst-
worthy these days. But maybe the school has to be a
trustworthy place . . . . Trustworthy should mean it
works in certain ways so that I can begin to act and
anticipate the consequences."
The curriculum represented a schematic and, most
importantly, a public account of the social world into
which one could gear one's actions with some assurance
of success. It provided information about time and
place, and, in addition, it bespoke continuity and a
sense of future. As I previously suggested, the evolution
of curriculum meant a shift from asocial, prehistoric to
social, historic time.
Suddenly, with the advent of the curricular order,
Pegasus became a three-dimensional social world of
past, present, and future. By exhibiting continuity
through activities, the curriculum lent support to actions
and projections. Moreover, it existed as a series of
typifications that lent a certain determinacy to the
fleeting changes that took place each day. As Schutz
(1967) said:
"Exactly those features which make them [in this case,
events] unique and irretrievable in the strict sense--
to . . . common-sense thinking--[are] eliminated as
irrelevant for the purpose at hand. When making the
idealization of 'I-can-do-it-again' I am merely interested
in the typicality [of events]." (p.21)
In fact, my participation in and observation of this
school have shown that the curriculum-timetable only
barely approximated, or typified, the complexities of
everyday life. It was the child's peculiar orientation to
the school social structure that insured that even the
best curriculum would present only a schematic outline
of actual social life. Many of the children (at least
one-third of the student body, who were in the primary
grades) could neither read nor tell time. As one parent
cried in desperation, "My kids don't know what's going
on in the school, even though they'd like to attend
planned activities." While the teachers' schedule served
as the most important version of daily life for many
children, other less sophisticated practices--such as
wandering--were used to make sense of the school.
Even scheduled activities had a natural time span, only
approximated by the program. Pottery, for example,
began at one o'clock as outlined in the schedule; how-
ever, it ended not at three o'clock, but whenever a child
finished his work. The len~h of time spent on a project
depended largely upon the individual's span of interest
for that particular session. Furthermore, while pottery
began at one o'clock with a few students, the popula-
tion gradually increased in size until, at about two
o'clock, as many as 30 students were participating. The
activity ended somewhere around three o'clock when
clean-up began and the stragglers were chased out. This
"activity curve" held true for most planned activities,
including French, film-making, folk singing, and math.
These two complications suggest that a great deal
of student time was spent between activities, either in
transition from one activity to another or somewhere
else in or out of the school. If activities took place only
here and there, and if other things went on in the
interstices between activities, then we need to specify
the spatial location of activities in order to delineate
legitimate versus nonlegitimate regions of the school.
I began by noting that the hall boys represented an
obviously deviant group because their actions showed
a haphazard irregularity that contradicted the social
order of the curriculum. In addition, however, the label
"hall boys," itself, implied some identification of these
boys with a particular region of the school. Thus, the
curriculum typified spatial as well as temporal order
and exerted a coercive influence upon members' choice
of locale.
Although most students spent some of their time
in transition from activity to activity, only the hall boys
contentedly remained in the halls throughout the day.
And since legitimate activities took place in the class-
rooms (except for outdoor or special activities such as
horseback riding) the hall boys lived a de facto illegiti-
mate, hence deviant, existence. But why should this
discrimination on the basis of location occur in the first
place? As we saw earlier, for the teacher free school
life meant life in the public eye. Unlike the teacher in
the conventional school system, whose closed class-
room door sealed out the prying eyes of intruders, the
free school teacher was continually confronted with
inquiries from an endless array of visitors, parents,
administrators, press, strangers, part-time helpers,
children, Hillsborough staff members, photographers,
film-makers, resource people, and curiosity seekers.
Thus, spatial regularity contributed to social regularity
within a trustworthy, supportive, and demonstrably
regular environment. The openness of free school life,
the freedom of movement and the ever-changing ar-
rangements within the classrooms, gave the illusion of
chaos and disorder. However, through a control of
spatial cues, the teacher manipulated the face of class-
room life to counteract this impression.
Activities, because of their location in the class-
rooms, were always within the teacher's, or some adult
assistant's, sphere of influence. Consequently, the class-
room encouraged easily reportable, ergo successful,
behavior and facilitated the teacher's account of social
order. For example, Jean, who taught the primary
grades, was praised as a model free school teacher early
in the second year of the school's existence. In part, this
praise resulted from the orderliness and legibility of
her classroom. With its miniature furniture, typewriter
table, and easily accessible materials, this room soon
became a prototype for a clearly ordered, recognizable
free school setting--and thereby minimized Jean's job
of endlessly justifying and explaining the room to
visitors and inquiring parents.
For teachers, practices such as displaying student
art work, setting up clean tables ready for student
projects, exhibiting animals and plants, putting up
charts, etc., while pedagogically sound, also served to
present a school-like face to interested, and influential,
spectators. The upshot of this very pragmatic interest in
classroom legibility, however, was the classroom-hall
dichotomization of the school; and ultimately, the
evolution of a normal-pathological paradigm based
upon location as an index of social order. This paradigm
was, like the temporal order of activities, built into the
curriculum-moral order.
For a child to spend most of his time in the hall,
to orient his actions primarily to the peer group, and to
remain aloof from legitimate activities in the classrooms
was to call forth the charge of noninvolvement. And as
members of a school in which educational success or
failure was judged on the basis of social relations, the
hall boys' failure consisted in what I call "restricted
sociability.''s That is, they were undoubtedly gregarious
children who had evolved a counter-culture within the
school, yet they exhibited their sociable behavior within
a limited and restricted framework of relationships.
Seldom, for example, did these boys interact with
adults or with children outside their clique, and when
they entered the rooms they often disrupted normal
activities that were under way. They were, therefore,
east as outsiders, who did not know the language of
classroom life. The ideal Pegasus child would exhibit
an "elaborated sociability," an ability to interact with
a wide variety of people in a variety of public and
private settings.9 So, the restricted social contact of the
hall boys and their lack of involvement in normal activi-
ties represented a most stubborn difficulty for the
parents and staff.
The curriculum, of course, provided the framework
for seeing involvement and noninvolvement, yet it was
also open to interpretation and was responsive to chil-
dren's needs. Even at the outset the teachers attempted,
within the curriculum paradigm outlined above, to
"bring these boys into the program," "to pull them out
of the halls and into the classrooms" by altering the
program itself. Although the teachers honestly sought
to expand the curriculum by incorporating programs of
special interest to these boys (e.g, swimming, hiking),
this effort maintained the premises of involvement in
activities that grounded the free school order. Thus, this
programming effort only exemplified the new vision of
social order proclaimed by the teachers through the
curriculum, and foreshadowed the limitations that this
factual new order placed upon members' actions.
Evaluation
By citing involvement or noninvolvement in legitimate
activities as an acceptable account of a member's
actions, the teachers limited their audience to people
particularly concerned with social participation. The
free school parents' quest for an alternative community
through the establishment of this school made the
teachers' paradigm both acceptable and essential.
Evaluation in this context bore only a metaphoric
resemblance to test scores or academic accomplishment;
rather, evaluation was a direct function of the teachers'
vocabulary of motives. Success or failure in this school
relied upon the teachers' ability to construct an ade-
quate account of the student's behavior, using the
vocabulary of involvement. Success was expressed in
the language of social solidarity, membership, elabor-
ated sociability, multivalent relations, and gregarious-
ness, while failure meant reclusiveness, restricted soci-
ability, and nonparticipation in activities.
Only by keeping in mind this paradigm of normal
and deviant behavior can we understand evaluation of
members' actions; and only through an appreciation of
free school culture and vocabulary can we understand
what education means in this social setting. Writers
from Parsons to Bernstein agree that the result of evalu-
ation is stratification and social differentiation. Educa-
tion places a value on the individual, certifying him as
high]y, moderately, or not competent with respect to
certain criteria. In the free school this valuation was
based upon social ability defined in terms of the involve-
ment paradigm. "Competence" for children, teachers,
and parents meant competent social practice and theo-
retic understanding of the school's social organization.
The hall boys were deviant according to this
criterion because although they were capable of under-
standing the school's demands, they refused to act
accordingly (McHugh, 1970, pp.165-170). The origi-
nal group of teachers, all of whom left after the first
year, also came to be seen in retrospect as deviant,
because although they knew what had to be done to
organize the school, they could not competently do so.
Above all, these charges of deviance must be seen as
social charges that called members to account for their
competence at understanding free school culture.
Evaluation, then, went on continually in this gregarious
setting as members endlessly raised issues that tested
one another's skill at accounting for or seeing the
school. This testing relied upon members' shared
vocabulary and the individual's ability to employ that
vocabulary to tell what he was doing. One's value
increased in this school as one became more and more
accomplished at employing the school vocabulary, in
other words, as one became a more fully involved
member.
Conclusion
The free school curriculum represented an adult's
version of school life that served as an occasion for the
explication of members' actions. In order to draw a
correspondence between the curriculum and the school
social world, teachers used a vocabulary of motives
that emphasized members' involvement or noninvolve-
ment in activities. This view of curriculum--as an
objectification of the social world, an occasion for
teachers to explicate the very reality of which the cur-
riculum was an account--suggests the deeper signifi-
cance of this curriculum. Curriculum was not simply a
way of organizing subject matter in time and space,
but stood as a living center around which the free school
community arrayed its thought and language. If curri-
culum stands as a factual reality, as Bernstein says, it
nevertheless requires endless elaboration through mem-
bers' talk and interaction. In this way curriculum not
only demonstrates involvement, but also provides an
occasion for such involvement as members discuss and
organize the daily life of the school.
Notes
1 While the parents, in their brief, referred to themselves as a
"homogeneous" collective, the word homogeneous deserves quota-
tion marks for several reasons. For the parents, their avowed homo-
geneity represented a strong argument to the school board in their
favor. They used this concept to suggest that they held a unified,
strong, and unanimously accepted alternative pedagogic vision.
Homogeneity, then, represented a bargaining point, since it meant
that they were a united constituency ready and waiting to implement
their preconceived alternative program. I thank Professor G. Bernard
of Laurentian University for suggesting another version of this
group's homogeneity. He noted, after I told him that the parents'
group was comprised largely of upper-middle-class professionals,
intellectuals, and educators, that the French term "bourgeois" rather
well described these people. Neither he nor I used this term to eriti-
clze the parents, but it served to locate their homogeneity, in their
educational philosophy as well as in the social world from which
they and their philosophy evolved. Finally, I should add that the
concept of homogeneity takes on an ironical dimension in the light
of the problems the parents faced shortly after the sehooI opened.
To me this single word exhibits these parents' concern for the
establishment of a school community, as well as their naivete at the
start of this project.
2 Hillsborough is a pseudonym for the suburb of a large, Eastern
Canadian metropolis in which Pegasus is located. While I believe
no part of this paper would distress either the school board or school
members, I have acquiesced to tradition on this occasion and have
changed the names of all persons and organizations in this repo~-t.
I nevertheless feel obliged to thank the members of this free school
for their friendship and their tolerance. Without their cooperation,
m y interest in prying into their personal affairs would have come
to nought.
3 While legally, or perhaps I should say bureaucratically, responsible
for assisting in Pegasus' development, and while generally com-
mitted to the success of the Pegasus experiment, the principal's role
in the school remained problematic. As a figurehead and authority,
he too often symbolized for Pegasus' members the school system's
intrusive control of their program. Finally, in December of Pegasus'
second year, this principal gave up his responsibility to Pegasus; his
health had declined so seriously in this dual role that he finally
was forced to withdraw. For more information on this incident, and
on Pegasus' relationship with the school board, see N o v a k (1973).
4Throughout this paper the term " m e m b e r " applies exclusively to
parents and teachers. This m a y at first seem an incongruous usage,
since it apparently omits the child from membership. Although K o h l , H. R. The open classroom. N e w Y o r k : A N e w Y o r k
the child too is clearly a participant in community life---and a most R e v i e w Book, 1969.
significant participant at that--he holds a special status that has
led me to exclude him from the category of membership. Unlike M c H u g h , P. A c o m m o n - s e n s e p e r c e p t i o n o f deviance. I n
the parents and teachers, who directly engaged one another as H. P. Dreitzel ( E d . ) , Recent sociology. N o . 2 . N e w Y o r k :
cohorts in the construction of a rational, reasonable school reality,
the child contributed only indirectly to the evolution of the school's M a c m i l l a n , 1970. P p . 1 5 2 - 1 8 0 .
formal organization. He was part of the phenomenal field toward Mills, C. W. Situated actions a n d v o c a b u l a r i e s o f motive.
which parents and teachers turned their attention, and in part the I n J. G. M a n i s & B. N . M e l t z e r ( E d s . ) , Symbolic inter-
curriculum merely responded to and reproduced his world. He
influenced curriculum and programming indirectly at this point in action. B o s t o n : A l l y n & Bacon, 1968. P p . 3 5 5 - 3 6 6 .
the community's organization either as an actor to which teachers N o v a k , M . W. Living a n d l e a r n i n g in the free s c h o o l : A
and parents attributed motives, needs, etc., or as an informant
from whom parents and teachers gathered information. The child's case study. U n p u b l i s h e d d o c t o r a l dissertation, Y o r k U n i -
membership, then, requires qualification, since he was often a passive versity, T o r o n t o , 1973.
participant in the organization of an accountable social order.
O n t a r i o D e p a r t m e n t o f E d u c a t i o n . Living and learning.
5We can glean some interesting insights into school life from this R e p o r t o f the P r o v i n c i a l C o m m i t t e e o n the A i m s a n d
incident. As I note later, the parents laid some specific charges Objectives o f E d u c a t i o n in the Schools o f O n t a r i o . T o r o n -
against the staff, and since this teacher was generally viewed as the
staff leader, it might seem that he took the blame for the failures to: T h e D e p a r t m e n t , 1968.
of the entire staff. But this was not completely true. His own per- P a r e n t s ' b r i e f to t h e H i l l s b o r o u g h b o a r d o f e d u c a t i o n .
sistent, dogmatic, and ultimately vapid reiteration of abstract laissez-
faire free school ideology, even in the face of parental discontent, U n p u b l i s h e d p a p e r , 1970.
led finally to his not entirely voluntary withdrawal from Pegasus. Schutz, A. I n M . N a t a n s o n ( E d . ) , Collected papers. Vol.
As this paper shows, the abstract principles of a free school philos-
ophy, given the parents' perception of Pegasus' and their own I: The problem oJ social reality. T h e H a g u e : M a r t i n u s
plight, smacked to parents ever more of escapism and denial of the Nijhoff, 1967.
school's reality. By removing this teacher from the staff, parents
Scott, M . B. S., & L y m a n , M . A c c o u n t s . American Sociolo-
paved the way for some more positive attempt to collectively address
concrete existential school problems. gical Review, 1968, 33, 46-62.
The notion of motive used here agrees with Mills' (1968) usage.
He wrote, "Motives are imputed or avowed as answers to questions
interrupting acts or programs. Motives are words. Generically, to
what do they refer? They do not denote any elements 'in' individuals.
They stand for anticipated situational consequences of questioned
conduct. Intention or purpose (stated as a 'program') is awareness
of anticipated consequence; motives are names for consequential
situations, and surrogates for actions leading to them" (p.356). As
answers to questions--in this case teachers' answers to parents'
questions--motives are accounts. Thus, not only do answers supply
reasons for action, but as Scott and Lyman (1968) pointed out,
through accounts "the individual has committed himself to an
identity and thus seemingly assumed the assets and liabilides of that
role for the duration of the encounter" (p.60). As an act that
commits the teacher to a particular repertoire of future responses,
and as a delimitation of future alternatives for the teacher, accounts
provided the first step in the development of a school social order.
7 This point is crucial. The teachers' actual daily practices, their
participation in art classes, their group discussions with the older
children, their attempt to bring in experts to enrich school life, their
organization of field trips, etc., continued unchanged after the con-
struction of the curriculum. However, with the introduction of the
curriculum, the same multitude of diverse daily events were sud-
denly transformed into a rational program.
8 I have freely adapted this notion of "restricted sociability" from
Bernstein's (1965) concept of a "restricted" linguistic code.
9 The concept of "elaborated sociability" has been freely adapted
from Bernstein's (1965) notion of an "elaborated" linguistic code.

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