Documentary to Feature Life in a Free School

When Amanda Wilder was in Grade 5, her father took her to visit A.S. Neill's Summerhill School in England, the oldest free school.

The two days she spent at Summerhill were a shock, she says, as it was hard to understand as a school yet was very intriguing. Children were riding horses and attending pottery, creative writing and woodworking classes, and chose to do these activities.

Years later, Amanda went to Marlboro College, a liberal arts college in Vermont where she had first-hand experience with student-centred learning and designing your own education.

	Filmmaker Amanda Wilder (centre) with Teddy McArdle students Lucy and Ada.

At Marlboro she met Jay Craven, who asked Amanda if she wanted to make a documentary with him about education.

When doing research for the documentary, she met Alex Khost, who was founding the Teddy McArdle Free School in Little Falls, New Jersey.

“I knew when I met Alex and found out he was starting a school that that could be a potentially really rich subject, and it turned out to be,” Amanda tells Axiom News.

Because the school was new, everything was “unfolding in the moment,” she says. On the first day there were no rules and no established classes, and the sense of discovery continued, says Amanda.

Amanda took video footage of the first two weeks at Teddy McArdle, and returned throughout the first two years for more. With questions arising such as what would be the first class and first rule created by a student, Amanda says she filmed until she felt she had the whole story.

“It was a small story that was hitting a lot of large issues, so that’s why I stayed, the story just kept on unfolding,” she says.

Some people are amazing characters, says Amanda, and there were several at the school.

“You rarely see kids doing what they want, and that’s something that’s unusual that this movie shows,” she says.

She says she is not trying to push any kind of agenda with the film, and hopes after people view it they will leave with questions and their own conclusions.

“I hope that people will watch it who think it’s a crazy idea and also people who are totally for it from the start, and that from watching (the film) it leaves them with a more open idea of what learning and a school can be,” says Amanda.

Called Approaching the Elephant, Jay is the film’s producer and Amanda is the director. They successfully raised their goal of $14,500 through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to fund the documentary’s editing, with hopes to raise more to help with costs associated with sound mixing, colour correction, music composition and distribution.

Kamila Calabrese is the film’s editor, and Amanda says the anticipated completion will be later this spring or fall.

The Kickstarter campaign is ending today (Jan. 10). To learn more about Approaching the Elephant, visit http://www.facebook.com/approachingtheelephant.

If you have feedback on this story, contact jennifer@axiomnews.ca or 800-294-0051 ext. 26.