We were recently commissioned to do a story for a European broadcaster on the Manhattan Free School (MFS). The school believes that children learn best when they can decide how, when and what to learn. We were curious to see what that actually meant and how this emphasis on child-driven education and individual happiness played out. But what we saw, and how the school reacted to us documenting it, re-focused the story into a debate about censorship and the obligations of the journalist.
MFS claims to believe in freedom and co-operation. It's the motto on their Facebook page. That certainly seemed to be the case: The principal welcomed the opportunity to showcase her school, and in e-mail exchanges before our visit, encouraged us to film interviews with the students and the staff.
We did.
What we saw was a mixed bag. What we experienced was startling.
The Free School Movement started in Britain but is now represented around the world. There are two Free Schools in NYC alone. This one is housed in a church in East Harlem and has 23 students and two full-time teachers. The students range in age from five to 18 and spend their days together. There are no grades here...no set curriculum or required classes. And despite its name, the school is not free: tuition can cost up to $15,000 a year.
When we arrived at the school at 9:30 a.m. we found one child napping.
Others were milling around, chatting, listening to music. One of the teachers, who could have been mistaken for a student, was working on a drawing.
At 10 a.m. that Wednesday, the week's sole mandatory activity was to begin: The Democratic Meeting was convened to discuss issues as disparate as how long the school day should run and how secret Santa should work. The meeting went on for over two hours, and while the older kids were discussing and voting, voting and discussing, the younger kids were playing, unsupervised, throughout the school.
We turned the camera away from the meeting and focused it on the hallway where kids (who looked to be five or six) were rollerblading around. Later, while the meeting was still in session, we heard loud music coming from another room. We followed the music and found the same three young kids jumping around on the windowsill and straddling a (hot?) water pipe.
The teacher who was in charge of supervising them realized we were filming and came in shortly after. She told the kids to get down and gently reprimanded them for acting inappropriately. Her exact words were: "If I am going to the Democratic Meeting, and you guys are going to do this, then I have to have a person here at all times..."
Moments later, we wandered into another room to find a youngster, who was no more than five, playing with a Swiss Army knife. Only after he had put the sharp blade in his mouth, and then returned the knife to a drawer, did someone learn what he had been doing. Once again, realizing we were in there filming, a teacher rushed in to see. Once again, he was gently reprimanded. The knife was not taken away or re-housed somewhere he could not access it so easily.
After word about what we had seen and filmed spread throughout the school, some of the students, a teacher, Marta, and the Principal, Pat, approached us to ask that we not use what we had shot. Marta in fact said she was "instructing" us not to use it. Pat, more diplomatic by nature, beseeched us not to, even though she had given us on-camera consent on behalf of the school and the parents to film. She asked if we understood that we could shut the school down if this footage was to air. We heard her out. We told her we understood her anxiety. We neither promised to show nor omit anything.
We left.
Not long after, we started to receive e-mails. Lots of them. First Pat, then parents, inundated us with letters that said they were revoking their consent for us to film, record, or in any way use material gathered that day. We're not sure if the school had even told them what we documented. But we have now been threatened, called "muckrakers" and told that if we do the wrong thing and broadcast the material, they will make our "immoral decision a bane rather than a boon to [our] nascent career[s]." One e-mail even promised to report us to a local congresswoman for child exploitation.
The cyber bombardment worked. After the parents and principal reacted so dramatically, our editors decided to kill the piece. It was too local a story to risk an expensive lawsuit, even with the law on our side.
And so, as of now, the tapes remain unseen and the footage unaired.
But that's an unsettling place to leave things.
What's a journalist to do when children are concerned? Do the parents even know why they are protesting? Do we have a responsibility to take the video of the child with a knife in his mouth to his parents and see what they think? Would you want to know?