ABSTRACT
If anarchism is about allowing people the freedom to organize their affairs as they see fit, as Goldman argues, this understandably makes it difficult for anarchist writers to sketch a substantive vision of how children’s education should be organized. Several anarchists, however, did offer substantive ideas on what features education should have in an anarchist social order. Perhaps the one that flows most obviously from basic anarchist principles is that education should leave children as free as possible from teacher (and adult) coercion—physical, social, and emotional. Other anarchists were similarly sensitive to the importance of children’s freedom. Other anarchist writers were convinced that conventional methods of teaching too often treated students as passive memorizers, whose duty was to obey teachers’ authority. For instance, Leo Tolstoy founded a “school for peasants” in Russia around 1860 (the date is uncertain) near his home at Yasnaya Polyana.
