Here, an idea of your own is a subversion that must be squelched.
Charles Cobb, “Notes on Teaching in Mississippi,” 1964
In the summer of 1964, more than forty Freedom Schools opened across Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer. Their curriculum — edited and preserved by Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Reid Gold — is one of the clearest examples we have of a progressive, experiential education built to make students agents of their own liberation. Not skills for their own sake. Skills for freedom.
This is not a parallel to our work. It is a bloodline.
SNCC field secretary Charles Cobb proposed the Freedom Schools in December 1963, drawing directly from the SCLC citizenship schools — which are the Highlander citizenship schools, carried into SCLC by Septima Clark. The Freedom School Curriculum is the written descendant of the workshops we mapped in our Highlander crosswalk. Highlander gave the movement a residential method. The Freedom Schools turned that method into a curriculum — units, guiding questions, case studies a volunteer teacher could pick up and run in a church basement in the Delta. The campfire, written down so the fire could be lit anywhere.
We read it and recognized our ancestors again. This page is a crosswalk between the Freedom School Curriculum, the Highlander Folk School, and the Stimpunks Learning Space — read as lineage, not convergence. Forgetting is a tool of white supremacy. Memory is the work.
About the Freedom School Curriculum
The curriculum had two tracks. An academic track — reading and writing, mathematics, science — and a Citizenship Curriculum of seven units, adapted by Noel Day and Peggy Damon-Day from work Day had developed during the Boston school boycott. The schools aimed at three things: to teach basic skills, to “implant habits of free thinking and ideas of how a free society works,” and to “lay the groundwork for a statewide youth movement.” The curriculum committee made a striking decision early: testing would not be used, because traditional evaluation methods were judged “as oppressive as traditional teaching methods” — both producing fear, submissiveness, and loss of self-respect. Academic substance, self-determination, and collective action, with the measuring stick thrown out.
Schools as the Apparatus of Oppression
Schools as institutions were part of the apparatus of oppression.
Charles Cobb, on Mississippi’s segregated schools
Cobb’s diagnosis of Mississippi schooling is, line for line, our diagnosis of neuronormative schooling. The schools taught Black children to stay in their place. The lesson, Cobb wrote, was that silence is safest, so volunteer nothing.
Read that as an Autistic kid reads it. Mask. Suppress the stim. Don’t volunteer the monotropic deep-dive. Stay in your place. The Freedom Schools were built as the counter-institution to a system engineered to manufacture compliance — which is the system we build against, too. Broken systems, not broken people, with a 1964 dateline. They even threw out the tests, naming evaluation itself as a tool of submission. That is the anti-behaviorist stance whole: what counts cannot be counted, and the counting wounds.
| Freedom School Curriculum | Stimpunks Learning Space |
|---|---|
| Schooling as an “apparatus of oppression” | Broken systems, not broken people |
| “Silence is safest, so volunteer nothing” | Masking and compliance refused |
| Testing rejected as oppressive | Critique of behaviorism and measurement |
| The Freedom School as counter-institution | The space we build instead |
What counts cannot be counted, and the counting wounds.
Stimpunks Foundation summarizing the Freedom School Curriculum
The Questions Are the Paradigm
What do we have that we want to keep?
Secondary Set of Questions, Freedom School Citizenship Curriculum
The Citizenship Curriculum ran two sets of guiding questions through all seven units. They are its spine, and the second set is almost eerily ours. Students were asked to name their own reality and to contrast it with the reality of more privileged whites — to see the power structure and analyze how it worked.
The Basic Set is purpose-first: why are we here, what is the movement, what does it offer. The Secondary Set is the neurodiversity paradigm in three questions. And the last of them — what do we have that we want to keep? — is the question the deficit model never lets a neurodivergent kid ask.
| Freedom School Curriculum | Stimpunks Learning Space |
|---|---|
| Basic Set: Why are we here? What is the movement? What alternatives does it offer? | Purpose-first, passion-based learning; the place where we belong does not exist, so we build it |
| Secondary Q1: What does the majority culture have that we want? | Access to substance, agency, epistemic justice, and real tools — what the standard environment hoards |
| Secondary Q2: What does the majority culture have that we don’t want? | Refusal of assimilation, masking, and the deficit model |
| Secondary Q3: What do we have that we want to keep? | Monotropism, sensory ways of being, Autistic culture — what the majority pathologizes and we protect |
| “Name your own reality” | Epistemic justice; lived experience (the L in ARLES); nothing about us without us |
Reading the World, Made Transferable
To implant habits of free thinking and ideas of how a free society works.
Goals of the Freedom Schools, 1964
The curriculum taught problem-solving through case studies that tied classroom knowledge to the wider political, social, and economic world — the Nazi power structure mapped against the Mississippi one, statistics on housing and income and health set beside the student’s own life. This is Freire enacted before Freire was translated: reading the world precedes reading the word. Our Why Sheets and crosswalks are the same instrument — literacy in the systems, not only in the words.
And the work was meant to be built and shared, not just discussed. The nonacademic track called for student newspapers, drama, creative writing, and a statewide convention to federate the schools into a movement. Make, publish, convene. The Freedom Schools knew the knowledge mattered only when it left the room.
| Freedom School Curriculum | Stimpunks Learning Space |
|---|---|
| Case studies relating the classroom to the world | Reading the world before the word (Freire); Why Sheets |
| Student newspapers, drama, creative writing | Maker and creator culture; zines; creator grants |
| A statewide convention to build networks | The Habitat; convening and federation |
| Skills, free thinking, and a youth movement | Substance, self-determination, and collective action |
Improvised, Not Imported
Most of what happened in the schools was improvised.
Staughton Lynd, Freedom School coordinator, in Sturkey & Hale, To Write in the Light of Freedom
The curriculum was never meant to be a script. Lynd called the guide a backup — a fallback a teacher could reach for when they ran out of things to do with the kids. It was a resource for support, not a set of parameters to obey, and most of what actually happened in the schools was improvised. Sturkey and Hale note that the content and style mirrored Highlander and the citizenship schools directly. The written artifact existed to be reinvented in the room, for the children in the room.
Although the curriculum guide was important as a pedagogical baseline, it was never intended to completely dictate the parameters of classroom instruction and learning. Rather, it was designed to be used as a resource for teachers who needed support. As Freedom School coordinator Staughton Lynd explained, the guide itself “was like a security blanket. When you ran out of things to do with the kids, you might get out the old Freedom School curriculum and think ‘Oh, I can do that tomorrow.’” As Lynd later elaborated, “[I]t was therefore a backup. But most of what happened in the schools was improvised.” The content and style of teaching closely mirrored the earlier educational models of participatory education espoused at the Highlander Folk School and the Citizenship School program.
Pair that with Freire’s own refusal. I don’t want to be imported or exported, he told Donaldo Macedo in Teachers as Cultural Workers; re-create and rewrite my ideas. The fetish for method works against reading the world. A curriculum run with fidelity regardless of the child in front of you is the opposite of reading that child — and it is precisely what manualized, behaviorist programs do to Autistic kids: import the method, run it to fidelity, and call the child the problem when it fails. Our Design Method, ARLES, and the Pattern Library are scaffolds to reinvent per learner, not scripts to follow. The recipe is a security blanket. The reinvention is the work.
This fetish for method works insidiously against the ability to adhere to Freire’s own pronouncement against importing and exporting methodology. In a long conversation Paulo had with Donaldo Macedo about this issue, he said: “Donaldo, I don’t want to be imported or exported. It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without reinventing them. Please tell your fellow American educators not to import me. Ask them to re-create and rewrite my ideas.”
Teachers As Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach
| Freedom School Curriculum | Stimpunks Learning Space |
|---|---|
| The guide as backup, not a set of parameters | Patterns and recipes as scaffolds, not scripts |
| “Most of what happened was improvised” | Reading the learner; local reinvention |
| Freire: “don’t import me — re-create and rewrite my ideas” | Against fidelity-first, manualized curricula |
The Bloodline: Method and Curriculum
I can go home with a vivid mind of how to set up a Freedom School.
Beulah Mae Ayers, Highlander freedom workshop, 1965
The handoff is documented. Cobb drew the Freedom Schools from the citizenship schools, and in 1965 Highlander hosted a workshop on how to set them up. The same people, the same tradition, two divisions of the same labor. Highlander was the residential method — the free space, the workshop, the trust, the regulation. The Freedom School Curriculum was the written artifact — the questions, the units, the case studies anyone could carry. We inherit both halves and keep both: the sanctuary and the recipe.
| Highlander | Freedom School Curriculum | Stimpunks Learning Space |
|---|---|---|
| The residential method | The written curriculum | Both, held together |
| The free space, the workshop, co-regulation | The guiding questions, the units, the case studies | Cavendish Space and the design recipes |
| Trust and the affective floor (ARLES) | Transferable, teachable, portable | Sanctuary and recipe |
Where the Bloodline Asks Us to Extend It
The same turn as Highlander, with one sharper edge. The Freedom Schools crossed racial, economic, and regional borders. We cross neurological and embodied ones. The method transfers; the borders do not.
But the third question — what do we have that we want to keep? — lands hard for us. The Freedom Schools could more assume a shared culture and a shared reality, a “we” already in the room. Our “we” is the part the majority culture insists is not a culture at all, only a disorder. So the question is not just preservation. It is first the fight to be recognized as having something worth keeping — monotropism, sensory ways of being, Autistic ways of moving and speaking and attending. That recognition is the work the deficit model exists to prevent, and it is why we name it.
And the Freedom Schools, like Highlander, ran hot on the verbal — reading, writing, discussion, debate, the convention floor. The hierarchy of fluency, the double empathy problem by another name. Our extension is the part neither could reach: multiple modalities, communication access, and intermittent collaboration, so the question what do we want to keep? can be answered by someone who does not answer out loud.
The Freedom School Curriculum reached its point in action — the voter registration drive, the convention, the statewide youth movement it was built to seed. Knowledge counted when it left the classroom. Ours counts when it reaches the Habitat, the world outside the space. We name the lineage on purpose: Highlander, the SCLC citizenship schools, the Freedom Schools, and now us. We build on each other’s work, as good revolutionaries always do — and we carry the method to the bodyminds it did not yet have the language for.
Read the Curriculum
The full Freedom School Curriculum, with primary source materials and the editors’ historical introduction, is preserved by Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Reid Gold at Education and Democracy.
