Are you free?

Are you “free”? What a daft question! Do you work in a “Free School”? What a daft name! Why are they so called? “Free” is a fibbing word. Like much educational verbiage, it flatters to deceive and can mean just about anything. Free? Free to do what? To wander blithely through the groves of academe with your own cutting-edge pedagogy? Fat chance. To teach how and what you want? Like Creationism? Or Darwin was wrong, the Enlightenment never happened or that gays cause Armageddon? 

Let’s hope not. And free from what? Oppressive Curriculums? Local Authorities? The more delinquent children in the inner city? Or does the word carry a more philosophical resonance? Are Rousseau or Sartre or Illich in the mix here? Perhaps my old comp was free. Famously progressive, “the Socialist Eton”, we were a bit too free for some and had to be “turned around”.