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:
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“The first rule of education for me was discipline. Discipline is the keynote to learning. Discipline has been the great factor in my life. I discipline myself to do everything—getting up in the morning, walking, dancing, exercise. If you won’t have discipline, you won’t have a nation. We can’t have permissiveness. When someone comes in and says, “Oh, your room is so quiet,” I know I’ve been successful.”
—Rose Hoffman, U.S. public school third-grade teacher. As quoted in Working, book 8, by Studs Terkel (1973)