The People's Free School
An open source model for community political education.
Disce ut liberes. Learn in order to be free.
What it is
The People’s Free School is a model for adults to study together. It can be started anywhere, by anyone, with no money, no institutional sponsor, and no expert in the room. This Github repo contains what you need to begin: the principles the school operates by, the methods that make it work, a growing library of readings and other materials, and templates for running sessions. You can use it as it stands, adapt it to your community, or fork it and make it your own.
How we learn
Adults learn differently than children. We come into the room carrying lives, jobs, families, organizing experience, questions we have been turning over for years. A session at the Free School begins with what the room already knows and moves outward into what we want to understand better.
There are no professors here, and no students in the usual sense. Everyone in the room is both a learner and a teacher. What we know, we offer. What we don’t know, we ask about. The work of understanding the world is collective work, and we do it together.
Our work draws on five ways of approaching any subject. We share our own experience with it. We learn its history. We engage the theories and frameworks that help us make sense of it. We look at what is happening on the ground and what people are doing about it. We consider what it might mean to change or transform it. These five approaches give us a way to study any question seriously, from how the economy works to how a neighborhood organizes itself.
Reflection runs through everything we do. We open each session by checking in with where we are. We close by asking what shifted, what stayed with us, what we want to return to. We track our own thinking, individually and as a group, and we make space for understanding to deepen over time.
What we study
The curriculum is shaped by the people who show up. The library here is organized around themes that matter to working people: how capitalism works, labor and organizing, race and racial capitalism, gender and the household, imperialism, the state and political power, mutual aid and movements for liberation, ecology and the climate crisis, and the practice of liberation itself. When a study circle forms or a question pulls people together, we draw from this library and from whatever else the room needs.
Where this comes from
The People’s Free School stands in a tradition older than any of us. Two figures in particular shape what we do.
Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School in the mountains of Tennessee in 1932. For three decades, Highlander was where the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and Appalachian community organizers came to study together. Rosa Parks attended Highlander before refusing to give up her seat. Septima Clark developed the Citizenship Schools there, teaching literacy and constitutional knowledge to Black Southerners preparing to register to vote. The state of Tennessee closed Highlander in 1961 for its interracial organizing. It reopened as the Highlander Research and Education Center and continues its work today.
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator who taught Brazilian peasants and workers to read and, in the same motion, to read the world they were living in. His book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written in exile after a military coup, became one of the most influential works on education ever published. Freire’s central commitment was that education is never neutral. It either domesticates people to accept the world as it is, or it equips them to transform it.
Horton and Freire met later in life and recorded a series of conversations that were published as We Make the Road by Walking. We recommend it as the first reading for anyone considering starting a school. It models the kind of dialogue our sessions try to create, two people thinking together across difference, each teaching the other, neither claiming the final word.
Who it is for
Anyone. No prior reading required. No fees. No prerequisites. If you are an adult who wants to understand the world more deeply, in the company of others doing the same, you belong here.
How to begin
Start by reading We Make the Road by Walking. Find a few people who want to read it with you. Meet, talk, see what surfaces. When you are ready to go further, the How to Start a School guide in the Github repo will help you take the next steps.