Spiritual Gangsters
By Stuart Grauer

I've always loved the story of the Irish hedge schools.

During the long era of the Penal Laws, when Catholic education was restricted, teachers simply found other places to teach. The romantic version has children gathered behind hedges with some itinerant schoolmaster keeping an eye out for the authorities. Apparently, it wasn't always quite that dramatic. Classes happened in cottages, barns, sheds, wherever they could happen.

But I'm sticking with the hedge. The idea of people sneaking off to make a school when the prevailing system won't give them the education they need has always seemed beautiful to me.

And then recently I opened The New York Times. There was a story about secret schools for girls operating right now in Afghanistan. The Taliban has barred girls from formal education beyond sixth grade, but thousands are apparently still learning underground—in hidden classrooms, basements, and rooms tucked away inside other schools. Teachers, principals and parents are risking punishment to keep them learning.

So, the hedge school isn't just history. Somewhere in Afghanistan today, a teacher is softly closing a door, a few girls are opening books, and school is beginning.

Those are spiritual gangsters.

I keep meeting people creating really small schools: microschools, Montessori schools, forest schools, tiny independent schools, homeschool collectives, schools that don't fit anywhere and sometimes seem mildly embarrassed that they don't have a better category. Many are finding one another through the Small Schools Coalition.

We are not outlaws, at least in the US. We have accreditation and insurance and lawyers and boards and fire marshals. We spend an insane amount of time trying to load in passwords. But underneath all that, some subversive stuff is going on.

You may start out with 7 students. You may have no strategic plan for disrupting education, or any strategic plan at all. You just wanted to know your students.

You wanted them outdoors a reasonable amount. Maybe you wanted adventure, or for teachers to have enough freedom to follow an idea somewhere. I wanted the school to feel like a community rather than an organization processing adolescents. This might not have seemed particularly radical. Then you try doing it.

Over the years at The Grauer School, we discovered that being small let us get away with things. We could change Tuesday. We could put twelve kids around a table and stay there until the conversation was finished. A teacher could notice somebody wasn't quite right that morning. We could disappear into the mountains for a week or take kids surfing. Sometimes we could do something simply because it seemed beautiful.

Try putting that in a strategic plan.

The point isn't that small schools are better because they're small. Smallness is what lets other things happen. It gives us a little room to escape standardization, constant measuring, the assumption that bigger is better, and the belief that if something can't be scaled, it can't be important.

I'm fascinated by AI. But it makes me want to take kids into the wilderness even more. The more extraordinary our machines become, the more interested I am in what they can't do for us: getting lost, figuring something out together, sitting around a fire, arguing around a table, falling in love with a place, knowing and being known. These things don't scale particularly well.

In more countries, and even in parts of our own history, all this has been unacceptable and driven underground—like Native American communities that tried to preserve their languages and ways of knowing while the U.S. government forced generations of children into boarding schools to be re-educated. Enslaved Black Americans secretly learned to read and taught one another despite laws in many Southern states making literacy education illegal. And in partitioned Poland, underground schools and clandestine classes kept Polish language, literature, and history alive when occupying powers tried to suppress them.

The hedge keeps turning up.

I Know A Few Epic Spiritual Gangsters

Deborah Meier has spent a lifetime demonstrating that schools can be small enough for teachers to really know children, and that teachers themselves can be trusted.

My friend Nasser Yousefi started the Peace School in Iran, but the government would not acknowledge or accredited it in any way. He created schools and worked with teachers and communities after growing up amid revolution, war and authoritarianism in Iran. Eventually, he moved his school to Canada. He wrote to me, “The people rebuilt me. They brought me back to life.”

Jukka Mattila in Finland has spent years standing up for small secondary schools, including rural schools with more reindeer in town than people and that larger systems can easily decide are inefficient or expendable. And Jerry Mintz, founder of AERO, has spent most of his life connecting people who refuse to accept that conventional schooling is the only schooling possible. Jerry knows more educational outlaws than anyone I know. And Brian Brolin who teaches at the Challenge Incarceration Program, Minnesota Correctional Facility.

I have appreciated correspondence and unlikely kinship with all these courageous educators. So so many more. They're nothing alike, at all, but they are. Spiritual gangsters don't have a model or a certification. What they seem to share is an inability to accept an educational practice just because everybody else has agreed it's normal.

Are You a Spiritual Gangster? Here's my quick key-out:

• You'd rather know 100 kids well (and maybe their dogs or uncles) than manage 1,000 efficiently.
• You've defended something important that couldn't be measured. (And maybe after that you go out and try to measure it.)
• You believe nature and belonging are the essence of learning… and defending.
• You look at an educational rule and ask, “Wait, what?”
• Someone is skeptical about a school that is small and tells you he prefers schools that are in “the real world,” and you can only think, “Wait, what!”
• You read Emerson: “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
• You think peace education is the whole point.

If some sound familiar, welcome to the gang. No dues.

We're not trying to burn down conventional education. There are wonderful large schools and terrible small schools. But what if children don't need to be managed quite so much? What if they are natural learners if only we let them be?  Maybe teachers can be trusted more. Maybe relationships aren't the soft stuff around the edges of “real” education. Maybe they're the thing itself. Maybe growth and scalability of a school isn't what causes its students to be successful.

And maybe, in an age racing toward artificial intelligence, one of the most radical things a school can do is remain intensely human. And the people prefer the sky to the screen.

Those are spiritual gangsters. The gangster part is the refusal. The spiritual part is what we're trying to protect: beauty, wonder, belonging, wildness, friendship, place, a child's inner life.

The old hedge-school teachers found a protected place and kept teaching. Maybe that's still the job: find the space the system hasn't completely occupied, gather some people there, and be curious together. Just witness. Try not to look too suspicious. If you catch us in that half smile, you’ll know we're spiritual gangsters.

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