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:
“The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.”
—Julie Burchill (b. 1960)
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)