Misunderstanding Mississippi, 1964:
The Freedom Schools and the Transformation of Deweyan Democracy
Aaron Schutz

DRAFT   DRAFT   DRAFT    DRAFT   DRAFT 

	This is very much a draft.  The core of the paper, as you will see, is much more complete than  the beginning and the end, which are largely rough place-holders.  The paper also could be organized better.  For example, I should probably start by talking about the Freedom Schools before I discuss Dewey, and the section on Goodman and Neill doesn't quite fit where I have placed it.  However, I think the general argument is clear.  Sorry I have to send it in this form, but I have to turn to another paper which is hardly written at all. . . .  Thanks!

Introduction
	In my introduction, I will discuss how Dewey developed a particular model of democratic education, especially in his Laboratory School at the University of Chicago at the end of the 19th Century.  Dewey's vison of democratic education included a few key components.
	Essentially, Dewey envisioned communities organized around shared problems that were explored collaboratively.  Each individual would contribute their unique perspectives as the community struggled with its problems, trying out particular solutions and learning from the results of its actions.  Each individual was supposed to develop her unique identity through participation in such collaborative efforts.  Although Dewey acknowledged that every community would need to develop its particular model of democracy given the demands of different contexts, the basic form of democracy he promoted changed little in the nearly half-century after he left the Laboratory School.
	One key aspect of Dewey's vision, noted by many others, it its stress on collaboration over conflict.  While Dewey understood that conflict was often unavoidable, his approach sought to avoid it as much as possible, envisioning a world oriented towards common problems and not conflict between groups.   In part this resulted from the fact that, as a priveliged white member of the upper-middle-class himself, Dewey largely developed his vision in contexts populated by the children of others like himself, even though his larger social goal was always to promote the development of a fully democratic society that produced equality for all.  The essentially middle-class flavor of his vision was something that Dewey never really acknowledged or understood (see Schutz, 2000).

After Dewey:  The Radical Left Critiques Education
	Dewey often complained that educators generally misunderstood his call to foster "freedom" in schools.  In Experience and Education, for example, he argued against so-called "progressives" who thought they could simply leave children to develop by themselves without guidance.  In fact, teachers in his Laboratory School were continually guiding students, providing them with challenges to solve and helping them develop their solutions through collaboration.  He would have been aghast, then, at those who emerged as the key educational thinkers after his death in 1952, especially Paul Goodman and A. S. Neill.  
	While different in many ways, both Goodman and Neill promoted something quite similar to the bad "progressive" model Dewey had so vehemently critiqued.  Both Goodman and Neill hoped, in their own ways, to promote a more vibrant democratic society and more equality in the world.  However, they focused not on the need to teach skills of collaborative democratic engagement but on the ways in which middle-class children were damaged by the meaninglessness and "violent "authority of modern society and adults.  Although Goodman, at least, saw himself as an inheritor to Dewey, Neill and Goodman's  goals were more individual and psychological than Dewey's--they wished to create healthy human beings who could engage freely and openly with the world.  (In fact, although Neill wanted a better society, he didn't see his work as failing if he fostered the development of "free" individauals who had no interest in social change.)  For Neill and for Goodman, the central problem of society was not exclusion from the American or British dream of success, but the distorted, meaningless "rat race" of success itself.  In fact, Goodman believed that middle class students, because they were trapped in this meaningless dream, were actually more oppressed than blacks in America (Mattson 120)  Goodman and other radical white scholars of his time there was a tendency to romanticize the position of those like blacks in the south who, through their oppression, had escaped the distortions of the technocratic modern world (see, e.g, Friedenberg).  
	Although Neill wrote about education from a British perspective, Goodman explicitly sought to express and provide a coherent framework for the often inchoate complaints of  a generation of middle-class students who were struggling against the hermetic 1950s world of their parents.  Goodman saw himself as a spokesemen for these students, and the enormous popularity of his work on northern campuses during the 1960s, especially his Growing Up Absurd, indicates the large extent to which he was successful.  

The Mississippi Freedom Schools, 1964
	During what was called "Freedom Summer" over a thousand mostly white volunteers from elite northern universities participated in voter registration campaigns and taught in small Freedom Schools, among a range of other activities.  They lived under constant threat, with violent incidents occuring almost daily throughout the summer.  In Mississippi this group of relatively naive and inexperienced volunteers "confronted a major problem, organized and adopted aims, invented tactics, and had some impact on thawing cold-war culture" (Anderson, p. 84).  While the number of volunteers was relatively small, students left behind in the North followed their experiences closely.  "In a very real sense ," McAdam noted, "the volunteers were not the only ones to go South that summer. . . .  [T]he entire country had visited Mississippi courtesy of the national news media" (117-18).  In fact, in the fall, the volunteers were welcomed "back at many universities as 'civil rights heroes'" (p. 88?).  Freedom Summer thus provided a "boot camp for an emerging movement" that would emerge in years to come among white students in the North.
	About 200 of the Freedom Summer volunteers taught in small Freedom Schools across Mississippi.  In church basements and other makeshift spaces, the white teachers worked with black students to create "public spaces" where the youth could engage each other in dialogue about their lives, oppression, and possibilities for action and social change.  The stories of the Freedom Schools became an integral part of the collective "mythology" of the 1960s, providing a concrete example for later proponents of alternative education.
	Freedom Summer, largely organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), emerged out of desperation.  For a number of years SNCC activists had worked to nuture grass-roots resistance among local Mississippians, and although later scholarship would indicate that they had been more successful than they realized (e.g., Payne), a level of despondency had begun to set in as they crashed repeatedly against the seemingly unmovable force of white racist resistance.  Despite horrific treatment, including repeated beatings and killings, the national media and the federal government seemed unwilling to enage with the oppression of the deep South.  Many members of the movement were uncomfortable with the idea of bringing a large number of whites into the state--fearing, for example, that they would dominate local people and damage SNCC's efforts to promote local leadership.  But although "many remained dubious," faced with crisis they finally agreed to the Freedom Summer plan, hoping that bringing in a large number of whites would "force the government to act as a buffer between organizers in the black community and repressive southern governments, and compel Lyndon Johnson, running for president, to commit himself to civil rights before the 1964 elections" (Payne, p. 302, 301).  
	There is not space, here, to explore the complexities of SNCC's vision (see Carson).  It is important, however, to emphasize that SNCC was an essentially youth driven organization that rejected the hierarchical and charismatic leadership approach of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). (Their disparaging term for King was "the Lawd.")  Instead of focusing on dramatic actions and marches meant to generate media attention, SNCC field secretaries lived for extended periods of time in their communities, walking the streets, talking with local people, and building personal relationships.  

Deweyan Democracy and the Genesis of the Freedom Schools
	From its beginning, SNCC believed that "learning and action" were "synonymous" (p303); and the ultimate goal of SNCC organizers was to "make themselves superflouous, catalyzing activism" among local people "without institutionalizing [SNCC's]  . . . leadership" (P299).  The specific idea for developing Freedom Schools as a part of Freedom Summer began with Charlie Cobb, one of SNCCs young field secretaries, who wrote the project's "Prospectus." Cobbb pointed out that Mississippi's schools for blacks were the worst in the nation.  Mississippi teachers, he argued, had a "complete absence of academic freedom" and generally provided an education "geared to squash intellectual curiosity," generating "social paralysis in both whites and blacks" (P303-4).  Students "learned to accept inadequate conditions as unchangeable facts of their lives, to distrust others (particularly whites), to be cynical, and to expect to be ill prepared to function in their society.  The possibility that students might someday function as active agents for social change was unheard of--and undesired" (Cobb cited in DM 214).  "Too often," Cobb concluded, "young people felt that no one, especially adults and leaders of the community, wanted to hear what they had to say" (Cobb cited in CC48).  
	Cobb presented Freedom Schools as an opportunity to "fill an intellectual vacuum in the lives of young Negro Mississippians." He hoped the Schools would help students "articulate their own desires, demands, and questions" (P304).  His "Prospectus" was fairly vague about the form Freedom School education would take, however, arguing only that "some of the newer ideas now circulating in educational circles, whatever they are, might be incorporated into this program" (cited in P 304).  
	Miller (2000) has argued that the Freedom School plan represented an "independent African American critique of schooling, and that organizers “owed little or no debt to  [popular contemporary white educational critics like] Neill or Goodman" (22?).  It seems improbable, however, that key Freedom School organizers had no knowledge of these radical critiques of education.  While many of SNCC’s field secretaries were from the South, the central figures of the organization, who tended to dominate policy, were extremely well educated and often came from the same elite Northern colleges that later provided most Freedom Summer volunteers (Carson, 1995).  In fact, at a Spring meeting just prior to Freedom Summer, SNCC activists acknowledged "in their own words" that the Freedom Schools represented "'the closest thing in the United States to Paul Goodman's 'anti-college' where students learn because they want to learn, learn in order to do and to discover who they are'" (Perlstein, 2002, p. 252).  
	Nonetheless, Miller (2000) was right that SNCC’s vision of activist pedagogy did not draw extensively from the contemporary work of liberal scholars like Goodman, since they had at fundamentally different goals.  As I noted above, unlike SNCC, instead of protesting poverty and oppression they tended to focus, instead, on the limits of the thoughtless rat race of middle-class society, sometimes even romanticizing black culture under southern oppression and paternally advising blacks to resist the siren call of "success."  
	Instead, from its beginning SNCC drew on a range of different social traditions, "adopting ideas from the Gandhian independence movement, and from the American traditions of pacifism and Christian idealism" (Carson, 2).  They sought  an egalitarian  "social order of social justice permeated by love" (Lawson cited in Carson) and an organization without centralized, dominating leadership.  In their relationships with each other and with local people, they sought to enact a "beloved community" that contrasted starkly with racist domination.  While these ideals had begun to break down under the constant onslaught of oppression experienced by activists in the South by 1964, they still deeply informed the Freedom Summer.  In fact, the overall project was led by Robert Moses, perhaps the most eloquent defender of SNCC's vision of an ideal, non-authoritarian community.
	In many ways, SNCC's perspective on egalitarian social action during this period fit quite well with Dewey's vision of collaborative democracy.  In their day-to-day-engagements with local people and each other, SNCC field secretaries sought to enact values of collaboration and individual development that often resembled Dewey's.  As an early SNCC participant said, SNCC's ideology (to the extent it had one) had "to do with freedom, it . . . [had] to do with democracy, in terms of people participating in decisions" (King, 147).  Writings on SNCC give the sense of a continuous and engaged dialogue within and between staff and local actors about the context they lived within and possible actions they might take, punctuated by actions that challenged oppression and precipitated reactions from authority.  
	SNCC activists also often visited Myles Horton's Highlander Folk Schools and helped to spread Citizenship Schools developed by Highlander across the South.  In the 1930s, Horton had returned to the South from New York City, where he had worked with a range of major theorists of his time, including Neibuhr and Dewey, to create Highlander.  He hoped to contribute to the empowerment of poor people in the South.  Horton drew from a range of different sources, including his own early efforts at community education and his visits to Folk Schools in Scandanavia.  However, his vision was especially indebted to Dewey, with whom he kept up a long term correspondence.   
	Much like Dewey's, Highlander's 
model of participatory education was based on the conviction that responses to oppression had to grow out of the experiences of the oppressed.  In order to generalize from their experiences and discover solutions to their problems, oppressed people had to analyse them collectively.  Highlander's task was not to dictate 'correct' answers to activists, rather staff asked questions in order to to kindle exchanges through which grass-roots activists could articulate concrete concerns, and develop actions. (P306)
In Highlander workshops, participants were encouraged to contribute their multiple perspectives to shared problems.  By asking strategic questions, facilitators encouraged the development of possible solutions which participants tested against their own experience and often through role-playing.  At the end of a workshop, participants were asked what they planned to do when they returned to their communities and encouraged to return at a later date process the results of their actions and plan futher engagements (see Adams, 1975).     
	Drawing from years of experience in popular education, during the civil rights era Highlander developed a model for the creation of local Citizenship Schools that followed the basic Highlander model.  Eventually hundreds of small Citizenship Schools across the South taught literacy skills necessary for blacks to pass the racist test barriers placed in the way of those who wished to register to vote while developing, at the same time, contexts where blacks could discuss issues of civil rights and political action more broadly.  Rejecting traditional forms of didactic instruction, teachers in these Schools "began with the problems blacks encountered in daily life and then linked the learning of practical skills to issues of political power and students' capacity to participate in all facets of public life" (P308).  Literacy was learned in the context of collaborative dialogue guided by a teacher who facilitated by asking strategic questions (see Clark, ??; Horton and Freire, ??).  SNCC was deeply involved in this effort, and sent many local leaders to the training center directed by Citizenship School coordinator, Septima Clark, where they learned how to engage people in non-traditional forms of dialogic education.
	Not surprisingly, the instructions to volunteers largely followed Highlander's vision.  For example, in contrast with traditional classrooms, Teachers were told to sit in a circle, providing black youth with opportunities to engage with each other and with authoritative adults (like white teachers) in new and less authoritarian ways.  Furthermore, as at Highlander, the guide given to teachers by SNCC stated that "in the matter of classroom procedure, questioning is the vital tool . . . [and] is the path to enlightenment," emphasizing that "the value of the Freedom Schools will derive mainly from what the teachers are able to elicit from the students in terms of comprehension and expression of their experiences" (Holt 316)  This process was designed to show black youth that "they were already equipped" to address their own problems (DM 216).  

Dialogue and Democracy Under Oppression in the Deep South
	While the educational approaches of Highlander, SNCC, and later the Freedom Schools mirrored Dewey's in many ways, it is also important to acknowledge the extent to which their practices diverged from his model of democratic education.  As I noted above, Dewey’s vision of democracy grew out of his experiences growing up and working within white, middle- and upper-class contexts, a limitation he seemed largely unaware of.  This relatively priveliged perspective led him to consider a particular set of practices more democratic than others.  For example, he emphasized the importance of nurturing the unique identities of individuals within collaborative engagement while downplaying the importance of more monolithic forms of group solidarity.  At the same time, he consistently stressed the possibilities of collaboration over the necessity for conflict and confrontation.  While Dewey understood that practices developed in one context often must change to take account of new conditions, he apparently never engaged with situations that made him question this basic vision of democracy.
	While key Highlander and SNCC staff also came from middle-class and/or educated backgrounds, unlike Dewey they also generally emerged out of religious and cultural traditions similar to those of local people in the south.  In fact, although mostly college students, many of the local organizers came from southern communities much like the ones they worked in.  And all had extensive experience with oppression.  
	As they worked with poor residents, Highlander and SNCC staff encountered limitations of many of the middle-class practices they did bring with them.  At Highlander, for example, Horton and his colleagues quickly discovered that their middle-class, educated ways of interacting could discourage the free engagement of less privileged participants.  They found  that 
poor people were usually quiet around strangers or people considered 'well spoken,' meaning educated. . . .  Only as the staff came to understand the people and their ways of life, did they learn how to hear what people wanted to learn or find within themselves enough security to move away from traditional academic methods.  Once they [the staff] stopped trying to teach the way they had been taught, mutual learning could begin.
Central SNCC figures like Robert Moses learned many of the same lessons.
	At the same time, in the South, Deweyan visions of collaboration between unique individuals met vibrant local practices of group engagement.  Groups like SNCC and Highlander found, for example, they could adapt "a rich church culture to political purposes.  The black spirituals, sermons, and prayers were used to deepen the participants' commitment to the struggle" (Morris, p. 194).  However, these practices focused less on the participation of individuals in a collaborative project, however, and more on public assertion of solidarity and collective destiny, often drawing ideas of "collective deliverance" from the Old Testament (King, 1996, p. 28).  
	Certainly SNCC's basic orientation was towards collaborative democracy.  In meetings they sought to "empower" a wide range of people and not simply a few central leaders, confronting dominant practices of centralized authority.  As Moses (2001) argued, SNCC "meetings had to shift their focus from being places where there was a person or panel of people presiding, delivering information that the rest of the participants listened to and accepted, and become places where people actively engaged the problems that were embedded in various political arenas" (87).  In contrast with the "listening crowds" popularized by most histories of the movement, SNCC "meetings were conducted so that sharecroppers, farmers, and ordinary working people could participate." As black youth later did in the Freedom Schools, in many of these meetings, "folks were feeling themselves out, learning how to use words to articulate what they wanted and needed[;] . . . they were taking the first step towards gaining control over their lives, by making demands on themselves" (81).
	At the same time, however, local traditions of solidarity also played out in SNCC's mass meetings.   To some extent, a focus on collective identity in situations like these was simply pragmatic.  A mass meeting was simply not a context very conducive to collaborative dialogue.  Even within SNCC's Mississippi efforts, then, mass meetings often "served as forums where local residents were informed of relevant information and strategies regarding the movement" (Morris p. 194, italics added).  Furthermore, given the incredible danger faced by movement participants, mass meetings often served not simply as places to plan or to discuss actions but as opportunities "to help . . . participants . . . overcome often paralyzing fear and its displaced expression."  Amidst violence and harrassment, engagement in political action was possible only because it was "generally a collective rather than just an individual action" (King, p. 47).     
Similarly, "the freedom songs" sung in mass meetings, during actions, and elsewhere "were less concerned with conveying information or arguing a position than with expressing resolve and public solidarity . . . . . [They] were particularly striking ways of making a collective presence known to the outside world--and to the participants themselves" (p. 42).  As Payne noted, "in some respects, mass meetings resembled meetings of Alcoholics or Weight watchers.  Groups like these try to change the behavior of their members by offering a supportive social environment, public recognition for living up to group norms, and public pressure to condtinue doing so.  They create an environment in which you feel that if you stumble, you are letting down not only yourself not only your friends" (p259). 
	Apparently Deweyan practices could also take on new meanings in the context of southern racism.  For example, "an important element of reconstructing the consciousness of . . . [participants in the movement] was simply having them publicly recite their biographies."  But while Dewey emphasized the ways that the contribution of such individual perspectives contribute to and alter the nature of a group's shared effort, recitations during the civil rights movement often served very different purposes.  These recitations often helped "turn private and individual grievances into a collective consciousness of systematic oppression" whereby "individuals created a public face for themselves, which they have to try to live up to" (py281).  While individual contributions certainly affected the collective's sense of their shared effort to one extent or another, in the context of  severe oppression this activity was designed less to alter group norms than to link individuals more tightly into such norms.  
	The myriad individual relationships SNCC activists and Highlander educators developed with and between local participants often seemed similarly designed as much to draw people into the movement as to promote democratic engagement.  By developing relationships to specific actors in the community, staff built trust amidst danger that could encourage participation.  As Payne (??) noted, "for many in the south, attachment to the movement meant attachment to individuals" (py238?).  Dialogue in this context, then, often linked participants more strongly into clear relations of hierarchy and authority at the same time as they promoted democratic engagement.
	Engagements between Highlander and SNCC staff and local people amidst pragmatic efforts to promote change, then, resulted in a fluid collection of practices that shifted given the needs of particular situations.  Individual, collaborative, and collective identities became inseperably intertwined.  To work with local people, Highlander and SNCC needed to value the perspectives and practices of those they worked with, and each side learned from the other.  In this context, dialogue and relationships often fostered solidarity and a vision of collective democratic action against oppression as much as it served visions of collaboration and individual development.  

What Black Youth Brought to the Schools
	Lynd has noted that the "media and historical treatment of the Mississippi Summer Project has been nostalgic, romantic, [and] oversimplified.  The dominant image" has been one "of black and white heroes engaged in a melodramatic struggle with the dragon of Mississippi racism" (traj27).  This tendency to portray volunteers as saviors  often led both volunteers and later scholars (implicitly or explicitly) to undervalue the strengths and skills black youth brought with them.  For example, scholars frequently argue, like Cilcoat and Ligon, that the "summer freedom schools were needed to convert these young people from passive observers to active, critical participants" (cc46).  The truth is much more complex.  As Freedom School teacher Howe acknowledged, "what is surprising is that, in some ways, it took so little to accomplish so much in the Mississippi Freedom Schools" (59).  The fact is that many of the black youth arrived with more political consciousness than the volunteers ever achieved.
	First of all, since "merely showing up for classes could be an act of protest" (LP259), most of the youth necessisarily came to the schools with at least some commitment to political action.  Mere attendance could label one as an "uppity" black, and the number of violent incidents and school burnings that summer would have kept these dangers in the foreground.  Through their participation, then, the students and many of their families showed they were ready to brave significant risks for change.
	Furthermore, in those communities where SNCC had already been working, a significant number of the black youth would have already been tempered in the heat of battle against oppression.  SNCC activists generally found that their most reliable participants were the youth and the aged--both groups with less to lose in the current system.  Children twelve and even younger participated in SNCC efforts.  In fact, in SNCC's first major Mississippi organizing effort, in McComb, it was high school youth who revived the project at one point, organizing a march through town.  Many of these youth went to jail--some for extended sentences.  Later, in McComb, it was a student's poem that shamed the adults into participating more fully to the Freedom Schools.  Not surprisingly, attendence at Freedom Schools increased in those towns where SNCC had been the most active (cite; see LP 268-9).
	Regardless of their political consciousness, students arrived at the Schools with deep understandings of Southern oppression.  As Stembridge stressed in her pre-summer message to volunteers, "all of them [the Mississippi youth] will have a knowledge beyond their years.  This . . . is the knowledge of how to survive in a society that is out to destroy you . . . and the knowledge of evil in the world."  "Because these young people possess such knowledge," Stembridge emphasized, "they will be ahead of you in many ways."  There was, she concluded, then, “little you can teach them about prejudice" (cited in Holt, 324).
	Finally, arguments that the Schools taught largely "passive" black youth how to be political or democratic ignores the rich local practices of collective action and resistance that their own communities had developed through long experience of oppression.  In fact, as I noted above, the youth necessarily brought with them deeply rooted understandings of community, social change, and action that differed significantly from those held by their largely white, privileged teachers.  As Dewey would have emphasized, then, Freedom School lessons on collaborative democracy, as in other SNCC efforts, would necessarily have been understood and appropriated by students through the filter of their prior conceptions.  In other words, the students did not learn exactly what the teachers thought they were teaching.  To the extent the teachers and later scholars have misunderstood this, they have misconstrued what actually happened in the schools.  

The Aims of the Freedom Schools
	Freedom School organizers like Cobb and Stembridge well understood the strengths of the students who would attend the Schools, as well as the limitations of the white volunteers--most of whom had never experienced real prejudice or oppression.  Their understandings of what the Schools could contribute to black youth, then, were structured around the specific skills and understandings that these relatively privileged volunteers might provide. 
	Most basically, the volunteers brought knowledge with them, especially about black history, that the students' education had denied them.  As Stembridge emphasized in her instructions to teachers, the knowledge black youth had "is purely negative; it is only half of the picture and, so far as the Negro is concerned, it is the first half.  It has, in a sense, already been lived through" (cited in Holt 324).  The Freedom Schools were meant to provide the "positive" half, informing students, for example, about important leaders and organizing efforts from their own history, knowledge that, in the context of severe oppression, was inherently political.
	The organizers also sought to help students make more coherent sense of their particular, local experiences, helping them to sort these into patterns and relate them to larger structures of oppression.  The curriculum was explicitly designed to help students link particular events to broader forms of structural oppression (Holt 200).  Freedom School coodinator Lynd hoped that "as the students begin to make associations and as they see the whole pattern of our society emerge, they will be highly stimulated to ask and to ask.  It will begin to make sense for the first time" (cited in DM215).  As Cobb wrote, in a phrase that caught the imagination of many volunteers, the schools were meant to help students make the "link between a rotting shack and a rotting America" (Holt 324).  Fundamentally, “teachers and administrators hoped that by learning to question freely and thoughtfully in the class situation, students would 'develop a new way of thinking and be awakened to their powers of analytic reasoning'" (DDC138).   
	More broadly, SNCC sought to contest what the Mississippi youth had learned about education: that their role was simply to "be alert to what the authority wants" (cite).  The white volunteers were to introduce students to a fundamentally different form of education that encouraged questioning, critique, and creative thinking.  The very fact that Schools were largely staffed by white teachers who would not assert their power in the way students were used to was meant to open students' eyes to new ways of interacting with authority and knowledge.  
	In fact, in the charged context of Mississippi in 1964, SNCC argued that the kind of questioning promoted in the Freedom Schools was itself fundamentally political.  As Cobb noted, "to encourage questions is to encourage challenge, which is to encourage overthrow" (cited in DM214).  This was why the public schools generally suppressed such activity.  SNCC hoped that "by learning to question freely and thoughtfully in an open environment . . . students would" be encouraged to extend themselves to 
challenge the myths of [their] society, . . . perceive more clearly its realities, . . . find alternatives, and ultimately, new directions for action . . . .  The idea is to teach Negro Mississippians to take themselves seriously, to articulate their ambitions, and their discontents--in short to instill political awareness" (DM214).
	The key was not simply the asking of questions, however---something the youth would certainly have already done on their own or with a few intimates.  Instead, in the Schools, the organizers sought to provide relatively safe "public spaces" where students could bring their ideas and fears and questions to a larger and more structured context, collaboratively engaging with a range of others, forming new relationships, exploring options for action, and developing a more robust collective voice.  Thus organizers looked both to Deweyan visions of collabora	tive democracy and to local traditions of collective solidarity.
	Organizers did not want the youth to simply talk, however; dialogue needed to be directly linked to the development of political goals and ideals.  As at Highlander schools, for example, teachers were encouraged to use role-playing and drama as tools for transforming their classrooms into into "laboratories where  . . . the skills and practices of practicing citizens" might be " encountered, rehearsed, cultivated and applied" (TE539).  At the same time, by engaging them with different case studies about black history and current events, organizers hoped students would learn "to contend with and solve problems in their communities" (WTH174).  And experimentation was not to simply take place within the classroom.  The Freedom Schools were to be inseperably intertwined with the broader resistance projects of Freedom Summer.  To a large extent, this was unavoidable.  As Sam told the teachers, “students will be involved in a number of political activities . . . [And] these activities will be a large part of the experience which the students will bring to your classes” (sam-holt, 326).  
	In one sense, then, SNCC's goals were quite Deweyan.  They meant to draw from students' experiences and motivations arising out of resentment and bring these into connection with understandings of structural oppression and opportunities for collaborative experimental actions.  At the same time, however, with their efforts to foster forms of solidarity that subsumed individual perspectives in the pragmatic need for collective voice they drew from local traditions of engagement and moved beyond Dewey's vision of collaborative democracy.  

The Accomplishments of the Freedom Schools
	Published writings indicate that, to one extent or another, Freedom Schools embodied many of the characteristics desired by the organizers.  For example, while there was more direct instruction than SNCC had hoped, most teachers also adopted Highlander’s non-authoritarian question-asking method, starting with the experience the students brought with them.  As one teacher summarized, 
the freedom school teacher is a student among students.  He does not have all the answers. . . .  A freedom school teacher knows that education is the drawing out not of blood from stones, but rather of experience and observation from human beings" (Howe 46).  
	Over time, "the experience in the Freedom School was that patterns began to be seen" (Fusco in Holt 334) as students learned to conceptualize their oppression in more structural rather than personal terms.  For example, during a curriculum unit in one of the schools, "as the discussion progressed, more and more the students changed their language.  Instead of the old 'the white folks don't want,' there was 'the power structure has decided'" (Holt 1-4-5).  In fact, as hoped, the Freedom School experience seemed to help many youth "to discipline their thinking . . . so that their action would not just be acting out their frustrations but careful, considered, programmed, revolutionary meaningful action along the lines of the Montgomery bus boycott and African Revolutionary action" (Fucso cited in Holt 336).
	Creative expression and academic work in the Schools was often linked to politics.  For example, one student remembered that "by implementing and using role plays, . . . students began to talk and think about their problems and situations they were in . . . [and] to discuss and propose solutions to the problems they were facing in their communities."  In fact, while this student had participated in SNCC’s political actions before, he felt that his participation in the dramatic activities of the school represented "the first time I really became personally, deeply, emotionally involved in the movement." (TE 540).
	Perhaps most importantly, many of the students and teachers actively participated in the ongoing political projects of that summer, canvassing with voter registration workers, promoting local boycotts, and more.  As SNCC hoped, these efforts generally seem to have been woven organically throughout the curricula of the Schools.  Teachers and students continually related their ongoing experiences to the particular lessons of the moment.  In some schools, students even developed their own independent political projects.  For example, in one case students picketed their public school, seeking to convince their teachers to register to vote and to participate more actively in the movement.   Another group of students encouraged parents to register their children for white schools.    

Criticisms of the Freedom Schools
	While SNCC organizers acknowledged the real achievements of the Freedom Schools, many were also disappointed.  SNCC's initial political vision, some staff complained, was often watered down by the volunteers.  Everyone understood that teachers should not simply tell students what to do or think.  Like Highlander, however, organizers had envisioned teachers who continually and actively fostered connections between classroom activity, oppression, and politics.  Many of the volunteers seem not to have fully grasped that non-"ideological" did not necessarily mean non-"political."  Instead, like the problematic "progressives" Dewey described in Experience and Education, many seem to have misunderstood instructions to avoid "ideology" to mean they should avoid guiding student political engagement at all.  
	There were many reasons why the perspectives of SNCC organizers and the volunteers often diverged quite substantially.  In part because SNCC could offer no financial support, the volunteers were an extremely homogenous group, with very different backgrounds than SNCC organizers.  Nearly all volunteers were white, and most "had exceptionally well-educated parents, . . . hailing from the best universities and colleges in the country" (VFS401).  And the white volunteers were extremely naive about “the challenges and dangers of civil rights work" and largely ignorant about the context and culture of Mississippi (VFS401). 
	Furthermore, SNCC members and the white volunteers held quite different political orientations.  Unlike SNCC staff, who generally "considered themselves militants or radicals, . . . many of the white students . . . considered themselves more idealistic or liberal" (AND77).  In fact,  
a survey of white Freedom Summer volunteers demonstrated that they went to Mississippi in 1964 because they werre motivated by idealism, religion, optimism, and challenged by the aim of achieving equal rights and human dignity for African Americans.  Virtually none mentioned ideology [or] politics. . . .  "I was apolitical," one stated, and another asked: "Politics? what the hell was that? . . .  I was going to spend my summer 'helping Negroes' . . . sort of a domestic Peace Corps number." (AND65; See McAdam, 1988, p. 47).
	These political differences were linked to divergent understandings of progressive education.  As I noted above, SNCC members had developed their vision through radical political action, actively engaging with oppression in workshops at Highlander, in the Citizenship Schools, and through their day-to-day efforts to convince local people to participate in the movement.  Although few would have read Dewey, I have shown how their vision of progressive education in many respects resembled a  politicized verson of Dewey's collaborative, experimental education.  In contrast,  many of the white volunteers would have been conversant with the popular writings of contemporary critics of traditional education like Goodman.  Even if they had not actually read these works, however, ideas like Goodman's increasingly dominated the intellectual climate on elite universities in the North--in part because these writers intentionally sought to embody the growing dissatisfactions of priveliged youth in America.  
	Although scholars like Goodman sometimes looked to Dewey, as I have noted, they tended to focus more on the need to heal the psyches of children damaged by modern society than on efforts to teach practices of political action.  SNCC also understood the need for psychic transformation--warning volunteeers, for example, that southern public education sought to destroy the "worth" and "dignity" of black youth (CC62).  But in their emphasis on political skills Freedom School organizers mostly stressed the opposite: the incredible resilience and strength of black youth despite the conditions they lived under.  Coming from very different backgrounds and steeped as they were in the ideas of critics like Goodman, however, it is not surprising that the volunteers tended to hear the psychological implications of SNCC's instructions more than the political ones.  As Hinman-Smith noted, “when [white] college students talked about learning from [SNCC activists] Fannie Lou Hamer or Ida Mae Lawrence, the images leaned towards the themes of nature and corruption” (Hinman-Smith, p. 365) instead of  messages of political struggle and structural oppression.
	The tendency of the white volunteers to play down the importance of politics seems to have been magnified by the fact that the dialogic educational settings they would have encountered on their campuses--seminar discussions in courses, for example--were often only weakly linked to actual projects of social resistance.  In fact, at elite universities like Harvard during this time, Anderson reports that "political" organizations were largely "based on the assumption that a rational dialogue between Harvard faculty and Harvard students" by itself would be enough to "save the world from destruction" (Anderson, p. 60).
	Furthermore, while conditions in Mississippi, especially the poverty and the violence, were a shock to most volunteers, most remained at least somewhat insulated from this reality both by their own whiteness and through the actions of local commmunities.  In fact, volunteers seemed especially uninformed about the complexities and strengths of the black communities that hosted them.  One volunteer, returning years later to the community he had worked in, was struck by their general failure of volunteers to understand the strengths and organizational sophistication of the local people who had supported them.  He reported, for example, how some volunteers learned only during the reunion that "an elaborate system had been set up by local blacks to guard the volunteers," and that "in another small Delta town, Black guys who had hung around the freedom house, and who the volunteers thought of as derelicts, turned out also to have been guards" (MM2).  In fact, volunteer Paul Cowen later acknowledged that "we were so intent on transforming Mississippi in a summer that we were unable to relate to its people as human beings."  "There is," he concluded, "a kind of Jesus Christ complex that many middle-class whites bring to their relations with people whom they consider oppressed" (LP 262).  As McAdam noted, "It was almost as if some of the volunteers had come to believe the view put forth by the national media; that it was they who had come to save the Mississippi Negro" (104).
	Through pre-summer training and the written curricula and directives they provided to the volunteers, the Freedom School organizers attempted to guide their pedagogy.  However, the volunteers' one week of actual training focused mostly on helping them understand the Mississippi context and on teaching them how to respond to violence and oppression.  Furthermore, the volunteers were urged not to follow the curriculum in a lockstep fashion, instead organizing their teaching around questions and the experience of their students.  By the time they left for Mississippi, then, "most of the volunteers were scarcely prepared for their tasks" (CBW).  And they received little additional support once they arrived.  Freedom Schools coodinator Lynd exaggerated only slightly when he noted that "our approach to curriculum was to have no curriculum and our approach to administrative structure was not to have any" (ly302).  Even if the Freedom School teachers had received more training, however, it would have been extremely difficult to alter the basic understandings of progressive pedagogy they  brought with them from a lifetime of experience.  As more recent research on teacher learning has shown, even when they receive extensive training, teachers tend to make sense of  new curricula in ways that fit with their prior understandings of teaching (David Cohen, etc.).
	Given the enormous gulf between the experiences and perspectives of SNCC staff and those of volunteers, it should not be surprising that the Freedom School teachers focused less directly on politics than many SNCC staff had hoped.  Longtime SNCC organizer Lawrence Guyot, for example, felt that that the 1964 volunteers "didn't really have the politicalness, the political thrust of people involved in the movement" and complained about "a lot of nonpolitical ideology and a lot of very creative abstract thinking that couldn't be implemented" (CFW118).  During Freedom Summer, then, SNCC's 
initial emphasis on schools as a tool for organization and social action faded into the background and became secondary to the more traditional academic emphasis for the schools.  This happened because those people who took over the planning for the schools, particularly the northern volunteers, acted out of their experience, which was for the most part traditionally academic and light-years away from the Mississippi movement.  To the volunteers, mainly college students and professors, schools were not automatically connected with political action and social change. (VFS403-check reference)
	How do we fit these critiques with the extensive evidence that the Freedom Schools did, in fact, foster political action and understanding among many black youth?  The answer, I think, has to do with the particular context the Schools were imbedded in.  With black students who had experienced oppression and who had explicitly come to the Schools to explore "freedom," simply asking questions about their experience, as Cobb noted, represented a fundamentally political act.  Even the most basic data about black history and the structure of American government was potentially revolutionary.  When connected to students' personal experiences, such information invariably generated political implications.  Furthermore, given the political activities that swirled around the Schools and that many of the teachers and students participated in, practical questions of social action simply could not have been avoided.  As Perlstein (1990) emphasized, “the credibility of pedagogical efforts to promote the synthesis of pedagogical efforts to promote the synthesis of experience, learning, and politics depended on the opportunities for activism that other components of the summer project provided” (p. ?).  Even in the most apparently banal classes--like typing or French--the questions "what should we do?" "what can we do?" and "what will we do?" were always implicit.  In the Mississippi context of 1964, the simple activity of engaging in authentic dialogue in a circle, listening to what each person had to say, and responding honestly merged seamlessly with the struggle for social change.  As one volunteer noted, teachers simply needed to ask students "why or what is the problem.  Then, how are you going to solve it?" (P319) for politics to emerge.  During this political moment, Lynd (cited in Perlstein, 1990) argued, "what they [the teachers and the students] did when they finally got together . . . was secondary to the sort of existential act of having come together" at all (p. 318).

What the White Volunteers Learned
	Anderson and other scholars have argued that Freedom Summer was a "catalytic experience that sparked the movement in the North" (AND 107; see also Mcadam).  Those left behind closely followed the Summer's activities, and volunteers, returning "heroes," transmitted what they had learned to masses of students on their home campuses through their stories and their actions.  After the Summer, protests began to explode on campuses across the North.  Freedom Summer helped spark a critical mass of students who were no longer willing to accept treatment as "second class citizens" by hypocritical bureaucrats who seemed intent on keeping them pacified.
	As McAdam's work shows, those who actually participated were much more deeply affected than those who had watched from a distance.  "Experiences in Mississippi seriously undermined the volunteers' faith in the American political system and undercut their relationships to church, school, and family" (Mc136).  Arriving as Liberals, many returned as radicals, frequently becoming key leaders of movement activities when they returned, constituting "a loose network of experienced activists" (mc161).  Mario Savio, who led the first major subsequent protest in the North, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in Berkeley, was only the most well known of this influential cadre.  
	But "radical" can mean many different things, and social action can take on many different forms.  As I have shown, SNCC staff understood the Summer's tasks and the Mississippi context quite differently from most of the privileged volunteers.  In a very real sense, while SNCC organizers and white volunteers occupied the same physical "space" in Mississippi, they lived in very different experiential worlds.  SNCC staff were very conscious of the volunteers' limitations, frequently complaining about their ignorance, their lack of political savvy, and the way they often tried to take over projects that they didn't understand while denigrating the expertise of those who had been there for years.  In fact, for many SNCC members the Summer solidified their growing convictions that whites had no place in the struggle for racial equality in the South.  The volunteers, in contrast, seemed largely unaware of the extent to which they filtered their experiences through the pre-understandings they brought with them to the South.  
	The volunteers' failure to understand the ways they filtered their experiences in the South emerged most problematically in the tendency of returned volunteers and their followers to draw simplistic analogies between the poverty and racism experienced by blacks in the South and the administrative repression experienced by privileged students on elite campuses in the North.  In his analysis of the relationship between the Freedom Schools and the subsequent Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, for example, Hinman-Smith admitted to 
being simultaneously intrigued, confused, and repelled by the comparison between the Mississippi sharecropper and the Berkeley undergraduate.  Perhaps white college students were too quick to collapse the differences between themselves and Mississippi blacks.
He summarized the problem this way:
In their easy linking of the undergraduate and the sharecropper, and in their focus upon self-realization, they sidestepped the issue of the relationship between their own limited freedom [to play the “flute”] and the labors of the flute-makers of California and the nation. . . .  [I]n the remarkable, wide-ranging conversations of the FSM [Free Speech Movement], there was little analysis of Cal as an elite institution within a democratic society. (p. 534)
By simply equating their experiences with those of southern blacks, northern activists missed the vast gulfs between them in terms of privilege, culture, history, and more, while also glossing over the ways southern political practices were necessarily altered as privileged white students appropriated these in an alien context to serve new situations and needs.  
	A key example of this transformation can be seen in the way privileged volunteers understood SNCC's vision of a "beloved community" of activists.  For SNCC the idea of the "beloved community" was something that developed through direct and shared struggle with others against oppression.  But when the white volunteers came to the South, because not enough black families were willing to take the risk to house them, many ended up living in cramped communal settings.  These "freedom houses" became a context for intense intellectual, personal, and often sexual relationships.  Many returned volunteers sought to recreate this vibrant experience when they returned home.  But while "communal living had a logical, even necessary, relationship to the Summer Project, . . . the practice became less a matter of practical necessity than ideological expression" in the North (mc140).  As they did with many other SNCC approaches, then, the volunteers took a practice that had been imbedded in direct political action and transformed it into something that was perceived as "political" even in the absence of actual social struggle, linking the idea of the "beloved community" with a nascent commune movement among the children of the priveliged. Counter-intuitively, then, SNCC's idea of a band of politically engaged "brothers" ultimately contributed in the North to the emergence of a largely non-political counter-culture in years to come. 
	In fact, while subsequent protests in the North drew from tactics volunteers had learned in Mississippi, these tended to transform practices originally designed to serve collective action into tools for individual development.  Even before they left the South, volunteers seem increasingly to have felt that it was "just as important to free themselves [and their students] from the constraints of their racial or class backgrounds as it was to register black voters."  Increasingly, "a stress on self-awareness and personal liberation," as opposed to political action, "suffused the project" (mc139).   
	This tendency to eliminate direct action politics from the lesson of Freedom Summer was visible in reports of Freedom School teachers.  In an important article, for example, Howe  answered her own question, “what have we to learn from freedom schools?” with a broad statement about the inherent "politics of schools," arguing 
that our schools are political grounds in which our students begin to learn about society's rules.  That, therefore, if we wish to alter our students and our sociey, we must alter our schools.  That if we would have strong and creative minds we must remove chains both from bodies and spirits.  That we as adults and educators have to listen and respond rather than preach.  That we need to share with our students a sense of being open to what each uniquely experienced companion can reveal. (Howe 159)
Here, Howe stresses the politics inherent in what Lynd called the "existential act of having come together."  Simply "being open to what each uniquely experienced companion can reveal" is, she argued, "itself a revolution."  While the importance of action is acknowledged, it moves into the background, and often seems represented as a natural outgrowth of  authentic dialogue (lauter and how).  
	Elsewhere in the same article, Howe revealed the extent to which, she, like many volunteers, failed to understand the deep rootedness of racial oppression in the lives of her students when she overstated, as Perlstein (1990) noted, "the power of an egalitarian pedagogy to overcome social divisions."  Howe's "suggestion that 'soon [students] were forgetting about skin colors altogether and thinking about ideas or feelings, about people and events' seems exaggerated" at best (P).  She may have "forgotten" about skin colors, but in the oppressive context of Mississippi where inappropriate interaction with whites--especially white women--could lead to violence or even death, it seems more than unlikely that the black youth would have. 
	In fact, Howe indicated her lack of understanding of the vast differences between her own experiences and hopes and those of the students she worked with in her argument that this "equality" experienced in her classroom was far more important than any "surface movement of Negroes into white society" (Howe, 159, italics added).  Here, even among the poverty, malnutrition, oppresson, and violence of the South, Howe reflected a commitment to visions of popular white radical thinkers like Goodman, implying  that the central task of the Schools was not promoting social change but nurturing authentic dialogue and the development of authentic voice among students.

What SNCC Organizers Learned from the Freedom Schools
	I have already noted how some SNCC staff critiqued the actions of the Freedom School teachers as non-political.  In fact, during the Summer--and afterwards with those few  volunteers who remained--tensions grew between the original largely black members of SNCC and the volunteers.  SNCC staff often resented these priveliged volunteers and complained that they frequently tried to take over projects that SNCC staff had spend painful years developing.  SNCC staff felt they were not given the respect due their long experience, and encountered racist attitudes among the volunteers.
	What little faith SNCC's still had in the white establishment by the end of the summer had also been demolished by their experience at the Democratic National Convention.  Lyndon Johnson and his operatives were able  to prevent the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Party slate that had been elected in parallel to the racist system of voting that did not admit blacks.  It came as little surprise, then, when in 1965 SNCC finally voted to expel its few white members.
	At the same time, many SNCC members were becoming  increasingly dissatisfied with the non-violent democratic approach to social change.  Even while Freedom Summer went on they increasingly lost faith in the possibility pursued in the Freedom Schools--that local people might find solutions to their own problems within their own experiences.  Many SNCC members became increasingly committed to a particular ideology that they wished to disseminate to local people.  Increasingly SNCC and those influenced by this group perceived the position of blacks in America as a problem of colonialism, drawing from the experience of writers like Fanon on the experience of rebellions in Africa and elsewhere,  pursuing an increasingly militant nationalist agenda.  SNCC itself soon ceased to represent a functional organization, giving way to the Black Panther Party and efforts to promote Black Power.
	Writings on SNCC and on the Freedom Schools often bemoan this change and its rejection of a Deweyan vision of democracy.  However, such complaints do not give enough credit to SNCC staff however,  who had, after all, lived through the results of these efforts.  In Deweyan terms, they had done the experiment and found the results wanting.  In fact, the subsequent forms taken by the Black Power movement were often extremely vibrant, as individuals and groups explored ideologies, artistic expressions, and collective organizational strategies designed to promote solidarity among blacks in an oppressive world (Van Deburg, 1992).  Critiques of this change in approach also fail to take account of the fact that it took place at a time when the goals of organizations like SNCC had begun to shift from civil rights of individuals to efforts to contest the structural inequality of a racist society.  As leaders like Stokely Carmichael noted, these new goals demanded new strategies of collective action, demanded solidarity and collective voice of a different kind.  While the new approaches had their own limitations, so had the earlier more "democratic" approaches (Bush, 1999).  Finally, as Perlstein (1999) has noted, those informed by the Black Power vision in years to come did, in fact, experiment with a range of educational approaches, including more Deweyan approaches to education for social change.

The Influence of the Freedom Schools in the North
	In the Black Power movement, those who pursued forms of cultural nationalism reached for many of the same goals as those who engaged in more direct political action.  In contrast, in the North, in the years after Freedom Summer, a split emerged among priveliged youth between those who engaged in political and often militant action (like the Weathermen) and those who increasingly saw politics as irrelevant to an effort to create a new community of love and mutual togetherness--the counter-culture.  And it was within the increasingly non-political counter-culture that the influence of the Freedom Schools was felt, informing the first major left-leaning alternative school movement in the United States, the Free Schools Movement (Miller).  Like the 1964 Freedom School volunteers, organizers of the Free Schools looked to visions of education put forth by thinkers like Neill and Goodman, focusing on efforts to develop authentic and free children within a dominating technocratic society.  
	In his recent history of the Free Schools, Miller argues that Free School pedagogy "largely mirrored" that of the earlier Mississippi Freedom Schools.  And this paper indicates he was largely right.  But it was Freedom School pedagogy as understood by the white volunteers, a vision largely evacuated of politics and and a focus on conflict and social action.  For these whites, Freedom Summer taught a lesson that, problematically, largely fit what the white volunteers had wanted to hear: that merely bringing together  in honest dialogue could be fundamentally political.  This may have been somewhat true in the circumstances of the larger Freedom Summer working with oppressed black students in the South.  But it was much less true--in fact hardly true at all--when one was working with the children of privileged whites in the North.  Priveliged Free School students had little or no experience of domination.  They did not face oppressive social structures designed to keep them down.  In fact, as Goodman and others argued, their problem (if you can call it that in comparison with Mississippi) was the opposite, that they would too easily be accepted into the "rat race" of middle-class success.  
	In the Free Schools, then, the misunderstandings of the Summer volunteers reached their true fruition.  They informed the development of educational settings that were dialogic.  But in the Free Schools not only politics but key aspects of Dewey's vision were also lost.  Students were not directed to collaboratively act upon the world outside their classroms and to suffer the results of their actions.  Instead, they closed themselves off, away from the world outside, seeking to create tiny pockets of counter-culture where individual students and teachers might care for each other, developing a beautiful community largely untouched by oppression, or fear, or violence, or despair.