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Curriculum
Curriculum development revolved around The Curriculum Conference, which consisted of teachers and directors discussing the type of education that would be taught at the freedom schools. The teachers were to write an outline for their curriculum planning. They were told to keep in mind what life was like in Mississippi and the short amount of time that they had to teach the material. The curriculum had to be teacher-friendly and immediately useful to the students, while being based on questions and activities. The primary focus was questions and discussion rather than memorization of facts and dates. Instructions to teachers included:


 * In the matter of classroom procedure, questioning is the vital tool. It is meaningless to flood the student with information he cannot understand; questioning is the path to enlightenment... The value of the Freedom Schools will derive mainly from what the teachers are able to elicit from the students in terms of comprehension and expression of their experiences.

Since the curriculum conference brought together citizens of different backgrounds and origins, the final curriculum outline incorporated material from different origins and consisted of three different sections.

The three sections of the Freedom School curriculum were the Academic Curriculum, the Citizenship Curriculum, and the Recreational Curriculum. The purpose of these sections was to teach students social change within the school; regional history; black history; how to answer open-ended questions; and the development of academic skills with the ultimate goal of preparing them to vote and take action in their communities.

The Academic Curriculum, split into language and math skills, used real world examples to prepare students to organize and take action. Verbal lessons taught students practical communication skills, like how and when to speak formally and how to use a telephone and asked them to demonstrate using those skills to communicate and work together towards a goal. Writing lessons taught students everything from basic grammar to voter registration documenting, newspaper reporting, and how to fill out social security forms. The math segment taught students basic math by asking them to calculate the number of eligible voters in their area or teaching them to cook meals with specific measurements.

The Citizenship Curriculum was to encouraged the students to ask questions about society through a breakdown of race and capitalism in the U.S.. It was taught through 7 units, that guided students through the realization that there is inequality, how poor whites also suffer under American capitalism, how large institutions oppress everyone but a select few, fighting back through class solidarity, and the current state of Mississippi voting and activism. At the end of each unit, the curriculum came back to two sets of inter-related questions for class discussion:


 * Why are we (teachers and students) in Freedom Schools?
 * What is the Freedom Movement?
 * What alternatives does the Freedom Movement offer us?


 * What does the majority culture have that we want?
 * What does the majority culture have that we don't want?
 * What do we have that we want to keep?

As students developed an anti-capitalist framework, these questions encouraged them to apply what they were learning to their own lives and communities.

The Recreational Curriculum required the student to be physically active. The designers of the curriculum believed that the bonds formed between students and teachers during recreational activity would be foundational to a fruitful classroom experience.

In addition, the curriculum was built to be flexible, giving teachers ample space to change plans, focus on what the students wanted to learn, and teach them how to get involved in direct action.
 * Freedom School students learned how to participate in the nonviolent, direct action protests and thus the learning process extended far beyond the classroom, while students simultaneously were demanding to become “freedom fighters.” In fact, many civil rights activists knew the Freedom Schools were not only a place for citizenship training, but also a site for learning the nonviolent tactics used in the movement…“The boys were taught how to protect the girls from being kicked in the abdomen because that would keep us from producing children. We were taught those kinds of things. We just couldn’t get out and demonstrate, we had to first of all be taught.”

First Year
Freedom School teachers and students remained committed to the Freedom School concept. In early August 1964, plans were being made to continue the Freedom Schools during the upcoming school year, and some volunteer teachers had already agreed to stay. Students decided, however, during the Freedom School Conference in early August to not continue the schools. Yet students implemented the leadership and activism experienced during the summer in their own schools. Some students returned to school and demanded better facilities and more courses. Students in Philadelphia, Mississippi, returned to school wearing SNCC "One Man, One Vote" buttons—for which they were expelled.

In addition, teachers and students canvassed as part of the “Freedom Vote” campaign and they assisted the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s push to get rid of Mississippi’s all white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. They also published articles in student newspapers like the Freedom Star to spread news of the movement. Even after the year was over, many former Freedom School students continued to pour their efforts into voter registration and desegregation movements.