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Missoula Free School shakes a fist at traditional hierarchy to educate the community

Photos by Hugh Carey / Montana Kaimin

Story by Jacob Baynham | March 16, 2007 Montana Kaimin

It’s a ramshackle house, tucked somewhere between the tin-sheet warehouses and tumbling arteries of Malfunction Junction. The fence separating it from the street is made of old bicycle wheels bolted into a barrier of blinking chrome. A sprawling outdoor fireplace cooks quinoa dinners and warms the residents, spitting embers late into the night. A small greenhouse below the porch has a crop of chard, mustard greens, wheat grass and garlic peeping from its loam.

Inside the house, where the air is still tangy with the scent of curried tofu, people bustle around a room lined wall to wall with books. A classical guitar sits in the corner. Atop bookshelves and cupboards, four vases hold the remnants of long-withered flowers.

In one vase, a dozen blood-tone roses stand under a halo of babies’ breath. They were pulled from Dumpsters. Now they are resurrected.

The house is known as the Laboratory for the “crazy, social and material experiments and projects” that come out of it. The house is dispatch headquarters for the Missoula Free School, a small but growing anarchist group seeking an end to the elitism, passivity and hierarchy of traditional education. The house is the home of the majority of the group’s members. Step on in, have something to eat.

And welcome to the revolution.

Wally Catton, one of two victims of a random assault on Higgins Avenue in 2005, is part of the group, a young man as quick with his smiles as he is warm with his hellos. He’d grab you by the hand, but right now he’s covered in papier-maché paste. He settles for a phantom shake, flicks his hair back and introduces his companions.

The room is full of them, all up to their elbows in the construction of giant cardboard puppets for two anti-war rallies this coming Sunday and Monday. One is a caricature rifle that will carry a giant cardboard sunflower in its barrel. It will be held in the hands of a Zapatista revolutionary effigy. Another, Catton’s, is called the “war machine.” It is the bust of a robotic beast with metallic eyes, sharp antennae and a jagged jaw line that drips sinister.

Max Granger, dressed in a black hooded sweat shirt and brown cargo pants, helps Catton support his war machine on the table. Granger nods at the books on the walls.

“It’s kind of an underground community library,” he says. “Hopefully it’s just beginning, but we’re running out of wall space.”

Granger has been part of the Missoula Free School since its conception two years ago. In its infancy, the Free School offered the community classes at no cost, in everything from bike building to herbal medicine to anarchic-feminist theory, without the “bureaucratic, hierarchical and costly nature of formal schooling.”

The original Free School took a hiatus, Granger says, after several of its members left town. But three months ago, it started anew, with hopes that its second incarnation will be a major movement in Missoula.

Granger says the group has retained its original goal – an ideal held by similar free schools nationwide – of promoting active and empowering ways of learning to become a more engaged citizen. Granger says the school hopes to offer both practical classes on topics like gardening, silk-screening, first aid for protests and giant puppet making, as well as intellectual classes on ethics, sustainability, legal rights and more. Classes are taught around town, in places like the Missoula Public Library, the Unitarian Church and the Boys and Girls Club.

The Free School relies on interested community members to teach subjects in which they are knowledgeable. Granger says the group would like to set up gardening classes that train pre-released prisoners to become gardening teachers.

“It would break down the idea that to be a teacher you have to have gone to school for a number of years,” Granger says, “when really there’s a lot of people out there who have never been to school who know a lot more than someone with a degree.”

The Missoula Free School takes its inspiration from philosophers like Paulo Freire, who advocated education as the necessary precursor to any revolution, as well as the anarchist movement in general.

“There’s a huge difference between anarchy and disorder,” Granger says. He cites the Free School and the Laboratory as examples. Both are smooth-running operations, he says, where decisions are made by consensus and unanimity.

“The organization is not top-down. The decisions are made collectively. The work is done collectively,” he says. “The Free School follows the anarchist system because we’re trying in an organized fashion to organize non-hierarchical education.”

Granger is a University of Montana student, along with about three-quarters of the dozen-or-so active Free School members. He studies history and Spanish.

“The university system itself, because of the fact that it’s a bureaucratic institution, even a capitalist institution … there will be problems in that,” Granger says. But he still finds teachers with the ability to blend quality education into the mix.

“The good stuff that goes on at the University is subversive,” he says. “Subversive to the institution.”

And it’s educational practices across the board, not just in universities, that have faulty systems, he said. Public high schools have some of the worst.

“That’s where the power relations are really extreme,” he says.

As Granger speaks, Laboratory-resident Steven Schorzman enters the room, alights upon an overstuffed chair and curls his fingers around a gourd of maté tea. His hair is scruffy, and his jacket is covered in patches, one of which reads “Anti-Capitalist” in Coca-Cola script. On the wall behind him, flush against a heavily laden bookshelf, is a map of the world, turned sideways.

“Partly for space, and partly to make a statement about the racist nature of geography,” Granger explains.

Schorzman takes a pull from his maté and raises his eyebrows to request an explanation.

“Because north is on top,” Granger finishes.

Around the corner, in the kitchen, Erica Dossa suds the last of a pyramid of dishes, while standing alone atop a linoleum-tiled floor darkened with apple crumbles from the night’s dessert. Dossa, who takes her family name from a Hungarian peasant king, is a junior in ecology at UM. She’s been living at the Laboratory since last semester.

“They’re really awesome,” she says of the group, “so I became their friend.”

Dossa says the Free School is teaching people to be more active in their communities. University lectures are too often filled with the same people doing the same things, she says. Dossa wants to be a scientist, although she wouldn’t like to work for any corporation or the government.

Behind her, next to a hanging basket of browning bananas, is a poster on the fridge advertising a rally on Monday at noon on the UM Oval. “FUCK THIS WAR,” it reads. Beside it is a photograph Granger took when hopping trains in the Midwest. The picture is of a new Hummer, dwarfing the pumps at a gas station named “Freedom.”

“I had to get a picture of it,” he says.

Below that picture is another, this one pulled from the Internet. It is of a boy in a dusty Palestinian street, hurling a rock at an Israeli tank barreling toward him.

// posted by Alice @ Friday, March 16, 2007