The Freedom School was located in Colorado, United States, offering a series of lectures by libertarian theorist Robert LeFevre from 1957 to 1968. LeFevre extended this work to the related Rampart College, an unaccredited four-year school, in 1963. Both shared the same campus. In 1965, a flood devastated the campus, and the school and college were moved to Santa Ana, California, where they lasted until at late 1975. They were succeeded by the Rampart Institute. LeFevre stepped down as president in 1973, succeeded by Sy Leon. A new Freedom School was established in January 2010 to carry on in the LeFevre tradition.
The Freedom School was also the name of the fictional school for runaway youth depicted in the 1971 film Billy Jack and the 1974 sequel The Trial of Billy Jack.
Freedom Schools were sometimes used for alternative schools set up by civil rights activists in the southern United States in opposition to the racial segregation in public schools which was mandated at the time by Jim Crow laws.
Famous quotes containing the words freedom and/or school:
“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)