ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION People’s School seeks to make learning personal BY BEN YASTER

On a Tuesday evening, 10 women convene in an old South Providence warehouse. Mostly in their early-to-mid 20s, and dressed in shorts and tank tops, save for a mother covered in a chador, they find a pile of multi-colored and textured fabrics in a back corner, and fire up three nearby sewing machines. A few women begin running fabric through the rapidly stamping machines while others talk above the sewing stammer, giving advice about design and technique. This is the fourth meeting of "Basic Sewing," a weekly class at People’s School, a nascent community-learning center, but there is no apparent distinction between teacher and student.

According to Adam Reich, the 23-year-old Brown alum who helms the People’s School, "Basic Sewing" illustrates the school’s egalitarian approach to learning. "Many of us are used to education looking a certain way; we’re turned off when there isn’t someone standing at the front of the room pouring information into the heads of people," he says. "The People’s School is about planting the idea that people can learn from each other as organizational infrastructure."

This effort began last fall as a series of free classes held by organizations like the American Friends Service Committee and South Providence’s Direct Action for Rights & Equality (DARE). Housed now in a Broad Street space donated by the nonprofit City Arts!, the People’s School offers 10 weekly courses, ranging from "Radical Jesus," a seminar reexamining the New Testament, to "Opinion Writing" (a class that I facilitate). The school is using its new space to build an alternative library with independent and generally left-leaning books and magazines that might not be found elsewhere, like In These Times and Labor Notes. The library also offers personal computers with Internet access.

Reich became interested in the idea of a free, open school while working with juveniles transitioning out of the Rhode Island Training School through AS220’s Broad Street Studio. While many of the youths resisted returning to public schools they found dull or restrictive, Reich was also stirred by frustrations with his alma mater. "Most of the interesting things I learned at Brown didn’t require a $40,000 tuition, but people having conversations," he says. Reich says he learned more about race and class from private conversations about lived experiences, for example, than in blasé discussions during public policy courses. "A lot of academic discourse is about masking the personal," he explains, "while a lot of my learning has revolved around the personal."

Marshall Clement, a researcher for the Family Life Center, a nonprofit that aids released prisoners returning to South Providence, helps to coordinate the People’s School. Leading a class about the criminal justice system in the spring of 2003 at DARE, Clement found the experience enriching when activists, faith-based workers, and ex-offenders joined the class to speak about their lives. "Prisoners talked about their direct experience, kids talked about family members that were incarcerated," Clement says. "Most of us had no sense about what it’s like awaiting trial. Facilitating was much more powerful than spouting statistics."

Yet for all of the focus on inclusiveness and conversation, Reich and others notice that the People’s School is not as diverse or as widely populated as they’d like. Reich says that college-aged people make up a disproportionate part of the effort, in part because current and recently graduated Brown students are facilitating half of the summer classes. He hopes to recruit a more diverse group of facilitators from the South Providence community in the fall. (For more information, visit www.peopleschool.org.)