How To Start Your Own School

"The next lesson we learned was that if these ideas were ever going to amount to anything, we had to get deeply involved ourselves." Robert D. Love 1960

Engage education
In 1960 a small group of families in Wichita KS got better acquainted with education as members of a small private school courageously started and single-handedly operated by a dedicated educator in memory of her son.  In time, that small group split off in an event that might be called evolutionary educational mitosis.

What do we mean by evolutionary educational mitosis?

Or ... to put it simply, those few families

It was almost natural. The result of that event in 1960 was a series of similar events starting many new schools over the ensuing decades of ... you guessed it ...  evolutionary educational mitosis. And with the dislocations and discontent provoked by COVID, the starting of new schools by small groups of families and teachers is once again becoming a cultural phenomenon which is making waves and headlines at many levels of society as it gathers momentum.

Connect it to family
The reason for the inevitable renaissance of "school starters" is that education is fundamentally bound up with the ecological family ... and every generation of every family in nature does it ... sometimes the same way as before and other times differently. This link between family and education has been probed in depth by the likes of professional educator Christopher Lasch in his books Haven in a Heartless World and Revolt of the Elites.  It was voiced more simply by parent and school-starter Robert Love in his book where he warns us:

"Many modern institutions fail the public precisely because they do not operate from a solid philosophical base. [They] do not uphold any consistent, logical set of principles ... they prefer to keep their options open."

... then goes on to state the principle on which he believed a school should exist:

"Run it independently of everyone but students, parents and teachers. Period."

Pass it on
The movement to promote education by starting schools has actually been in place for decades in various forms under many names other than Horace Mann's common schools ... including Milton & Rose Friedman's School Choice initiatives,  John Holt's Growing Without Schooling, Raymond & Dorothy Moore's Home Grown Kids, Doug Wilson's Logos School and more recently the [Jeff] Yass Prize for Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding and Permissionless [STOP] Education or James Tooley's Really Good Schools: Global Lessons for High-Caliber, Low-Cost Education ... to mention only a few of the many who have entered the fray.

Robert Love's publisher, children and a few friends hope to honor his educational legacy by launching this website to connect school starters with practical articles and resources that can help them do what might otherwise seem impossible ... START THEIR OWN SCHOOLS.  Of course, we cannot be everything to everyone, but we can be some things to some people.  Our bias upfront [which we will attempt to observe and explain in this website] is that

We see schools as living organisms arising spontaneously from, enabled sacrificially by and caring deeply for their members ... not perpetual institutions defined and maintained by committee agendas and financial resources [public or private] which are external to their vital and personal daily metabolic functions. So if you dream about leaving a brick and mortar legacy for others, then this website is probably not for you ... there are others more qualified than us who can help you with that ... and it is not necessarily a wrong choice for you to make. 

But if you want to get started quickly,  operate inexpensively and build on the natural educational strength and integrity of the ecological family ... then, perhaps, we can be of assistance. Let's begin where all learning starts ... with some grammar.

Becky "Love" Elder,  Northfield School    office@northfieldschool.com