THE FREE SCHOOL ...

by TOM DURRIE

You may see several thirteen year old Californians roaming the Gulf Islands. And if you see them, you'll know they're leftovers from a visit from Pinel School in Walnut Creek to the Saturna Free School on the island. After they left us about a week ago, I wondered how they had been able to reunite the whole, a group of 19 children and four adults, in one place to return to their homeland.

Anyone embarking on a three-week trip from California to British Columbia with that many kids must be either efficiency experts or just lunatics. But joking aside, the kids had a great time visiting Saturna, Pender, Galiano, and even Vancouver Island. They spent five days with us here, and many of the children naturally wished they could go to school here on beautiful Saturna Island. You might be wondering, what the whole free school thing is. There are about six other free schools in Canada and I don't know how many in the States. In March, I went to California to attend a conference on new schools.

Around 30 schools were represented, some “free”, some not quite, but all of them were trying to break with old traditions and find new ways of educating young people. What we try to do at Saturna Island Free School is to give children a chance to experience some of the problems and joys of life in Eal for themselves, and to discover what interests them and what they want to learn, without having someone else's ideas cram down their throats. Everyone agrees that people learn best when they are genuinely interested. I guess we're saying that people only learn when they're interested or, better, when they're doing something really important to themselves. And we try to have faith that pushes or prompts.

We think kids are awesome human beings, and while their energy sometimes drains us, we think they have the ability to take life as it comes and do what is necessary to live it successfully. I never cease to amaze you at the number and varieties of things that “children discover about the information they accumulate, and the knowledge they have. While our place on Saturna is a boarding school - where "school" goes on twenty-four hours a day, Pinel School is a day school. They have nearly seventy students who come from various areas of the San Francisco Bay Area every day during class hours. Their philosophy of learning is much the same as ours – and anyone who has met them would agree that they are a bunch.
To pass the time between Swartz Bay and the islands, some of our Californians turned to music. We are in debt to Dick Flasher, one of Pinel's staff, for the following verse to "The Wabash Canon Ball": exit from Swartz Bay aboard the Pender Queen towards the island of Saturna, the land of blue and green; via Otter Bay on North Pender Island; return to Saturna to be greeted with a smile. Listen to the gurgling, rumbling and moaning, Steam to Saturna in ninety minutes; Cruise the ocean beyond the pine shores, returning home, leaving the blues city behind.