Teach your children well

Alternative Schools in British Columbia 1960-1975: A Social and Cultural History
by Harley Rothstein

Victoria: Friesen Press, 2024
$30.99 / 9781039135574

Reviewed by Patrick A. Dunae

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This engaging, well-written book offers a novel perspective on educational reform, attitudes towards child development and the counterculture in British Columbia during the Age of Aquarius. Harley Rothstein argues that alternative schools, established by non-conformist parents and teachers, influenced the development of mainstream public education in BC. Offering a thorough and extensive (660 pages) account of alternative schools, the book also deals with youth disengagement, self-actualization, recreational drugs, and teen-age sex.

Rothstein’s book is based on his Ph.D. dissertation, completed twenty-five years ago at The University of British Columbia (UBC). The bibliography has been updated for this version, and the book incorporates interviews with hundreds of parents, teachers, and former pupils.

“The quest for a new child-centred and humanistic education in Canada was born in British Columbia in the first years of the 1960s, significantly earlier than in the rest of the country,” Dr. Rothstein writes. “Alternative schools in BC were also more prolific and varied than in any other province.”

The alternative school movement drew upon three principal historical concepts: Romantic, Progressive, and Therapeutic. Romantic ideas were shaped by the ‘naturalistic’ philosophies of French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by perspectives on child development articulated by British educator A. S. Neill. At Summerhill, Neill’s ‘free school’ located in Suffolk, England, students were permitted to pursue activities of their choosing; attendance at classes was voluntary, and governance was conducted democratically by all members of the school community. Progressive concepts originated from the work of American psychologist and educator John Dewey, who advocated for a ‘child-centred’ environment enabling students to express their ‘natural’ impulses. Therapeutic techniques were introduced through the human potential movement of the 1960s.

Rothstein analyses the governance, curriculum, routines, and guiding philosophy of over a dozen alternative schools within this framework.

The first and arguably most significant venture was the aptly named New School. It was conceived in Vancouver at a New Year’s Eve party in 1960 by several professors from UBC and their spouses. The academic couples, most of whom had recently arrived from the United States, were joined by other parents, including social worker Norman Levi and his American wife. “The timing was no coincidence,” Rothstein notes, having interviewed the progenitors: “The Chant Report, the end result of a major Royal Commission on Education, had been released on December 29, 1960. The dissatisfied parents objected strenuously to the report’s traditionalist approach to the ‘three Rs’ and its relegation of the arts to frill status.” Deriding the BC public school system for being “dull and disagreeable,” the progressive-minded families resolved to establish a school of their own.

New School began operations in September 1962 at the Peretz School, a socialist Jewish educational and cultural organization located in Vancouver’s Oakridge neighbourhood. Later, parents of New School students acquired a building on Commercial Drive in East Vancouver, which served approximately four dozen elementary school children in Grades I to VI. Tom Durrie, a University of California (Santa Barbara) graduate, was appointed director in 1967. He recalled that Neill’s book, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960), was “was all the rage in those days and I preached the gospel with great enthusiasm and, dare I say, panache.”¹

New School operated without a syllabus or much formal structure; grammar, handwriting, and textbooks were not part of its curriculum. As the Vancouver Sun noted (12 May 1967), “[i]t’s like recess all day in Vancouver’s New School.”

New School pupils were not always well-behaved. A former teacher recalled “screaming matches…chairs broken up, desks sawed in half.” “I began feeling that I was living in the land of Lord of the Flies.” A schism among parents prompted Durrie and his supporters to establish a separate academy on Saturna Island. New School was re-constituted as a teacher co-operative, and efforts were made to encourage better behaviour among pupils. The ambience of New School also changed when American charter families who had moved to Vancouver for career opportunities were superseded by American parents who came for political reasons and to avoid conscription in the US Army during the Vietnam War. Although American teachers and parents at New School were a minority, they “exerted a significant influence in bringing with them a whole range of counterculture values in a more intense form than their Canadian counterparts.”

During this formative period, Bob Barker arrived from upstate New York. Uniquely among the cohort of early idealists in BC, he had taught at Summerhill. The Barker Free School opened in September 1966 for children aged five to twelve. It operated from a rented storefront in North Vancouver before moving to a farmhouse in Aldergrove, BC. Formal learning was discounted since Barker “staunchly defended the child’s right to choose whether or not to engage in academic work.” “Time was unstructured and fluid, the primary aim being to enjoy the day.” Parents accepted Barker’s approach, although their children did not learn to read, and expressed disappointment when the Barker Free School closed due to financial challenges in 1969. Barker’s work influenced several other alternative schools.

Helen Hughes, founder of Windsor House School (1971) in North Vancouver, shared several perspectives on child development with Barker. The school operated as a parent cooperative, predominantly managed by women, and involved active parental participation in daily activities; consensus-based problem solving; and a commitment to individualized instruction that enabled students to progress at their own pace. There were disagreements among parents concerning the prioritization of literacy and numeracy, as well as the appropriateness of permitting children to watch television during school hours. The initial belief that children would independently regulate their television viewing proved overly optimistic. Despite some early challenges, Windsor House School prospered with the support of local families who “distrusted the public school system.”

Craigdarroch School, established in 1966, was the vanguard of alternative schools in Victoria. Founded by David Hummel, a lawyer, it began operations in an old house near Craigdarroch Castle. “The primary aim of Craigdarroch,” according to its prospectus, “is to create an atmosphere where children can teach themselves how to learn.” The school served an upper middle-class demographic, noting that among approximately twenty families, there were six physicians, four lawyers, and three university professors. Joan Schwartz, the head teacher, came to Victoria from California in 1965 with her husband, a University of Victoria faculty member, and perceived Victoria’s public school system as “backward and excessively rigid.”

Schwartz held a teaching certificate from UC (Davis), but some of her assistants were unqualified. She saw their lack of experience as beneficial “since they would not be constrained by conventional public-school values.” Their teaching duties were not onerous. “Students spent much of the day playing. They dressed up in costumes, listened to music, and played an assortment of indoor games, but most of their time was spent outside building forts, digging in the sand, and generally hanging out and having a good time.” Craigdarroch School closed in 1969 after governance disputes between the founder, board members, and parents.

The schools mentioned served parents with young children. For families with older youths, there were alternative options at Knowplace, Ideal School, and Total Education.

Knowplace was established in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood in 1967. The Knowplace student body comprised “the sons and daughters of intellectuals, artists, and adults leading politically active and unconventional lives.” But many of the teenage students were lackadaisical and Knowplace closed after a few years. Other disaffected youths were drawn to Ideal School which opened in 1972. Gary Nixon, a political activist and independent school tutor, was the founder. It was more structured than many other ‘free’ schools but was still unconventional. “Most students ended up at Ideal because they felt different somehow from the mainstream, and this encouraged an ethos of exclusiveness.”

Total Education (1971) originated with Anglican youth workers in Kerrisdale and was endorsed by the Vancouver School Board. “Students came to Total Education for many reasons,” Rothstein says, “but all had in common a feeling of being ignored by the system. They were dropouts, kids on probation, countercultural kids, kids with drug problems, kids in foster or group homes, ‘street kids,’ bored kids, kids who were rebelling against authority, kids making their own way.”

Total Education students had an opportunity to learn about ‘country ways’ at a farm on Bowen Island in Howe Sound, about thirty kilometres from Vancouver. The property was owned by one of the parents, a Vancouver high school principal. Total Education also rented a farm at Powell Lake on the Sunshine Coast about 175 kilometres north of Vancouver. “The farm had been the site of a 1960s-style commune formed by a group of young Americans who had come to Canada to escape Vietnam, pollution, and materialism.” The commune leaders included a couple of graduates from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania: Mark Vonnegut, son of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, and Peter Seixas. Vonnegut returned to the USA while Seixas joined the teaching staff at Total Education in 1974. Seixas was later a professor in the Faculty of Education at UBC.²

Argenta Friends School (1959) and Vallican Whole School (1972), both situated in the Slocan Valley of southeastern British Columbia, provided a bucolic learning environment. Argenta was founded as a Quaker settlement, and its school educated California students who lived with local members. “Some students hardly noticed they were in a different country,” a teacher recalled, “but most staff members saw it as a ‘Canadian experience,’ leaving many American values behind.’” The Vallican venture, also a conduit of American countercultural values, had “the characteristics of a typical Romantic school, particularly the laissez-faire attitude of the adults toward student learning and the voluntary nature of all classes.” Indeed, at Vallican Whole School “adults engaged in spirited debates about whether students should be allowed to decide if they would learn to read.”

Saturna Island Free School was “the most profound example of Romantic education” in British Columbia. Established by Tom Durrie following his departure from Vancouver’s New School in 1968, the school’s prospectus stated: “Here is a place where children can learn about life by living, free from the artificial restrictions of classrooms, rules, autocratic teachers, and timetables.” The school operated from an old farmhouse, which served as both dormitory and dining hall for approximately twenty students, primarily from the United States. Staff consisted mainly of young Americans who received nominal compensation along with accommodation. The environment at the school was found to be unconventional by some visitors; one student’s guardian remarked: “It is not a school; it is more like an animal farm.” Reports from public health officials expressed concern about the condition of the farmhouse, while neighbouring residents noted the uninhibited behaviour of students: “Stories abounded about teenage girls riding horses around the island naked.”

During the Age of Aquarius, the use of recreational drugs such as LSD and marijuana was common. There was a notable emphasis on sexual freedom, and school policies regarding student conduct often lacked clarity. Although Argenta Friends School discouraged sexual relations among students, Rothstein notes that “the proximity of forest, fields, and abandoned cabins made the policy unenforceable.”

Sexual practices among adults at Vallican were generally informal. The school was originally established in a private residence previously occupied by individuals participating in a group marriage.

A former teacher at New School said that parent meetings “would often turn into ‘love-ins.’…There were plenty of affairs and breakups…it was the age of free love.” Camping trips for students, a mainstay of urban alternative schools, were fun for adult chaperons. “There would be caravans of Volkswagen vans,” the former teacher recalled: “Parents would sit around [the campfire] smoking dope and flirting with each other.”

Adolescent students and staff members were often close in age, hence a propensity to socialize. At Ideal School, graduating students went skinny dipping together. At Saturna Island Free School “a female staff member in her mid-thirties became romantically involved with a sixteen-year-old male student.” Their relationship continued openly within the school community for nearly a year before the couple moved to a nearby island. “The boy’s family threatened legal action but eventually accepted a financial settlement.” The couple eventually married.

Before it closed, Saturna Island Free School was tilting towards a therapeutic model. Fritz Perls, the German-born psychoanalyst who developed gestalt therapy, established a branch of his Esalen Institute at Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island in 1969, with staff from Saturna Island Free School participating. Related methods for self-actualization, involving encounter groups and sensitivity sessions, were practiced by parents and teachers in several alternative schools. At Windsor House School, children under the age of ten participated in self-actualization activities. “One year the school bought foam bats that the students used in the basement to hit each other, a psychotherapeutic practice at the time.”

Alternative schools were eligible for grants from federal government programs such as the Company of Young Canadians (1966) and Opportunities for Youth (1971). Nevertheless,most of the schools struggled financially. Advocates anticipated better days when the New Democratic Party (NDP) formed government in BC in August 1972. Philosophically, the NDP was more sympathetic to the counterculture than the conservative Social Credit party which had governed the province since the early 1950s. Despite this, funding obstacles persisted due to legislative constraints faced by the Minister of Education, Eileen Dailly. However, the appointment of Norm Levi as minister in the newly created Department of Human Resources proved beneficial. Levi, an instrumental figure in the establishment of New School in 1960, selected Marilyn Epstein, a fellow New School parent, as the government’s Coordinator of Children’s Resources. They approved short-term programs that helped alternative schools.

The Social Credit party, which returned to office in December 1975, offered more support for alternative schools through the enactment of the Independent Schools Support Act (1977). This legislation was the result of sustained advocacy by the Federation of Independent School Associations in British Columbia (FISA), an organization established in 1966 by representatives from religious denominational institutions, including Protestant Christian Reform church congregations and Roman Catholic dioceses, as well as prominent English-style private schools such as Crofton House for girls and St. George’s School for boys in Vancouver. FISA successfully convinced the provincial government to offer per capita funding to independent schools that satisfied specific requirements: adherence to an approved syllabus—typically an enhanced version of the public-school curriculum—and employment of certified teachers.³

Vallican Whole School met the terms of the Independent Schools Support Act and so evolved as an independent, alternative elementary school within the provincial education system.⁴ Other schools, notably Total Education, Ideal School and Windsor House, were absorbed into the mainstream public school system when the NDP held office in the 1970s. But most alternative schools surveyed here had closed by 1977. The exception was Argenta Friends School which closed in 1982.

The legacy of evanescent alternative schools is significant, nevertheless. According to the author, the schools prepared the way for systemic changes when the social and political climate in BC was amenable. “By 1975,” Rothstein says, “public schools had become less rigid, more imaginative in their teaching methods, and more accommodating of individual student needs and learning styles.” The transformation was most pronounced in School District 39 (Vancouver) and School District 61 (Victoria) but was also evident in smaller urban communities such as Campbell River and Kamloops. “The pioneering example of independent alternative schools between 1960 and 1975 inspired educational change” in British Columbia. “These schools,” Rothstein argues, “were a catalyst for the creation of more choice in public education and for the development of a more open, flexible and inclusive public school system.”

This book represents a major contribution to scholarship on the history of education in British Columbia. As well, it augments works addressing the impact of American social values within the counterculture movement in BC, such as Lawrence Aronsen’s City of Love and Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties (New Star Books, 2010) and Kathleen Rodgers’ Welcome to Resisterville: American Dissidents in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2014).

This book has the potential to serve as the foundation for a documentary produced by Knowledge Network, British Columbia’s Public Educational Broadcaster. The soundtrack for such a documentary might feature “Itchycoo Park” by the English rock group Small Faces, which reached number one in Canada in January 1968. Its lyrics, including “You can miss out school / Won’t that be cool!” and the refrain “It’s all too beautiful! It’s all too beautiful!” aptly convey the exuberance of alternative schools described by Harley Rothstein. The documentary could also incorporate “Teach Your Children,” recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—a song that ranked among Canada’s top ten hits in August 1970. Written by Graham Nash, its lyrics, “Teach your children well…Feed them on your dreams,” would complement the themes presented in this book.

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Patrick A. Dunae was born in Victoria and lives there now. He taught BC history at the University of Victoria and Vancouver Island University. He is the author of The School Record: A Guide to Government Archives Relating to Public Education in British Columbia, 1852-1946 (1992) and editor of The Homeroom: British Columbia’s History of Education website [archived at https://curric.library.uvic.ca/homeroom/]. [Editor’s note: Patrick Dunae contributed an essay on Naming British Columbia, has also reviewed books by Sean Carleton, Linda Eversole, Bethany Lindsay & Andrew Weichel, Jenny Clayton, and Valerie Green, and he reviewed the television docuseries British Columbia: An Untold History for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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1. Rants and Raves of Tom Durrie [blog]: https://tdurrie.wordpress.com/about/ [accessed 24 October 2025]. ↩︎
2. Mark Vonnegut described his experiences at the Sunshine Coast commune in a memoir, The Eden Express (1975). Seixas was a founding director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness at UBC. ↩︎
3. See Victoria Cunningham, Justice Achieved. The Political Struggle of Independent Schools in British Columbia (Vancouver: Federation of Independent School Associations in British Columbia, 2002). Surprisingly, this work is not included in the otherwise comprehensive bibliography in Rothstein’s study. ↩︎
4. In 2008, the school moved from the community centre in Vallican to a new building in the neighbouring village of Winlaw, BC. Now known simply as Whole School, it is affiliated with the Federation of Independent School Associations in BC [FISA]. ↩︎