Freedom Schools

The original Freedom Schools were organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Beginning in 1961, SNCC worked to get Black Mississippians registered to vote, but they faced overwhelming opposition from state and local authorities. Mississippi was the most segregated state in the nation, and many people believed that the state would never change as long as it remained isolated from the rest of the United States.

To focus the nation's attention on Mississippi, SNCC organized Freedom Summer in 1964. Hundreds of volunteer college students, White and Black, came to Mississippi from all over the country. Many of these volunteers served as teachers in Freedom Schools, which were a major part of the summer program. SNCC activists established the Freedom Schools because they believed in the power of education to change people and to transform communities. The main goal of education according to the Freedom School model was to encourage students to question the system of oppression that kept them poor and isolated and to enable folks to think for themselves so that they could change their own lives.

The original “Prospectus for a Summer Freedom School Program,” written by Charlie Cobb in 1963, claimed that while the Black children of Mississippi were deprived of many things, the fundamental injury was a complete absence of academic freedom with students forced to live in an environment geared to squashing intellectual curiosity and different thinking. Cobb concluded that if the movement wanted to break the power structure of the Old South, it must be concerned with creating counterinstitutions to stand in opposition to and one day even replace the old, unjust, decadent ones that made up the existing power structure.

SNCC organizers argued that all education is political, that there is no such thing as a neutral education. Education stands for something and against something else. SNCC was educating for the uprooting of an oppressive system, and they said so explicitly.

The Freedom School curriculum included an academic component as well as arts, recreation, and cultural activities, but the core was what they called the citizenship curriculum, a sustained inquiry into politics and society. In the published version, the academic part takes 2 pages, the citizenship section 25 pages.

The citizenship curriculum is a question-asking, problem-posing affair: (a) Why are we (teachers, students) in Freedom Schools? (b) What is the freedom movement? and (c) What alternatives does the freedom movement offer us?

These were called the basic set of questions, followed by a secondary set: (a) What does the majority culture have that we want? (b) What does the majority culture have that we do not want? and (c) What do we have that we want to keep? Note the use of we in this context—this is consciously intended to build a sense of solidarity, a need for systemic change, and to oppose the notion that individual achievement and private accumulation are by themselves worthy goals.

The 1964 Freedom School curriculum was based on dialogue—teachers listened, asked questions, assumed that their students were the real experts on their own lives: Why? What's the problem? What's the evidence? How do you know? Is that fair or right? What are you going to do about it? It was a pedagogy of lived experience with the goal of allowing people to collectively question and then challenge their life circumstances and situations.

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