When Sean Tevlin discovered The Group School (TGS) in the 1970s, he found “a much needed safe space.” A struggling teen who had dropped out of public school and battled math anxiety, he arrived at the converted industrial garage on Franklin Street in Cambridge, MA with little self-confidence after a learning disability diagnosis. But at TGS, teachers engaged with him, patiently tutored him and rekindled his love of reading. “It opened me up mentally and emotionally,” Tevlin reflects decades later from his living room in Cambridge. TGS, known simply as “The Group” to its students, was unlike any public or private school. “CHANGING LEARNING, CHANGING LIVES” was spelled in giant letters on its white brick walls. Between 1971 and 1982, more than 600 students like Tevlin graduated from this freewheeling schooling experiment, which combined radical democracy, intensive arts programming and a philosophy that embraced students’ working-class background. Students and staff in the main gathering space at The Group School. Photo courtesy of The Group School Tevlin grew up in housing projects. His parents separated amid alcoholism, gambling and mounting debt, and he and his siblings were briefly placed in a Catholic orphanage. By the age of 12, he was cleaning offices and accepting whatever menial work he could find, often skipping school for work. “I often felt alienated,” he says. Without TGS, Tevlin’s trajectory could have taken a very different turn. But at the Teen Center behind a local Quaker school, a new story was emerging. Alison Harris, one of TGS’s founding students and now Tevlin’s life partner, remembers the first meetings in the late 1960s vividly. “In the early stage, we were just a group of kids,” she says. “Pretty soon the topic became what was wrong with our schools.” They met with people from the Harvard Grad School of Education, who came to the Teen Center to facilitate conversation and “essentially try keep kids out of trouble,” according to Harris.  “It was a moment in history, with the growth of a lot of alternative institutions,” says Adria Steinberg, a founding faculty member. “Many of us had been involved in social change movements — anti-war, civil rights — and had a strong sense of inequities in America at that time. We were looking for an educational setting that acknowledged inequity in education.” TGS grew out of these conversations and commitments.  “Historically, the free school movement in America had begun to gel,” Harris recalls of this era of educational ferment. “Discussion started evolving around: Would we like a school? Could we start a school? And lo and behold, we actually did.” The post Is This the Most Radical School Ever Built? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.