The first question

Where do I find these parents, who will risk their children’s futures on my school?

 

This is the first question facing any project of building community or alternative institutions: where do you find the people? Many schemes are never begun for lack of an answer to it; and of those that are begun, most fail for lack of a good enough answer.

 

I do not mean to answer it now. At the moment, I only want to point out that there is no question whether the people are out there. There are plenty of parents who would like to abandon the anxieties and obsessions of mainstream education, just as there are plenty of people who want to build communities, plenty who are fed up with mainstream culture, plenty who believe our institutions are broken and want better ones, plenty who long to step off the path into the wilderness. 

 

The people are there but there is a problem finding them and convincing them that here at last is something real, something worth trying. And why shouldn’t they be skeptical, amid this perpetual clamor of false promises? Anyone who is not wary is not to be trusted: they lack critical faculties.

But before I can pursue this problem any further, I need to frame the issue in a more general way. The school is a real example (in that I do really want to start a school) but it is still only an example. What exactly is it an example of?