If you are familiar with central European state education systems you would know that a school without compulsory attendance, bells or marks and in which students create their own path through their educational development is very different from the norm. ASSA – an abbreviation of Autorska Szkola Samorozwoju (the School for Individual Development) is something of a phenomenon in Poland, and I suspect, beyond Poland too.

The school, based in Wroclaw, was founded by Daniel Manelski and Darek Luczak in 1990. Daniel Manelski is a passionate defender of an individual's right to realise their own potential, he is an educational visionary, and a distinguished figure on the Polish alternative educational scene. Now in his seventies, his is a colourful life story which includes a spell in prison and a period of several years self-imposed solitude in a house in the Beskid mountains of southern Poland.

As head teacher of a Wroclaw grammar school Manelski had been bending or breaking the accepted rules for running schools in Poland, doing away with the bell between lessons and with the system of marks – a major source of anxiety for all school children. After lessons Manelski and Luczak (then a student at the school) would meet to work out their ideas for the foundation of a radically new school. It was to be based on their own philosophies and convictions and on the experience they had gained from being part of a school which respected the pupils and honoured their individuality and freedom of choice, against the backdrop of a public education system which denied them.

When Manelski was still a teacher he began to see that school is not, in fact, necessary; that it is a system which humiliates, deprives students of their dignity, coerces and incapacitates them. He began to doubt whether the only way was state-run compulsion. Later, when working as a grammar school headmaster he began to negate everything about school as he found it. This negation meant identifying the main principles of the system and then doing away with them. The main principle he found was the system of rewards and punishments, in other words; behaviourism. After some time he completely did away with discipline in his school. Students could come and go as they wanted, testing was abandoned. Nobody failed a year, everybody took the school-leaving exams. And suddenly it was as if school had disappeared

The school Manelski and Luczak conceived was due to open in December 1981. However, the day after having received official approval from the Polish Ministry of Education the State of Martial Law was announced in Poland, the backlash to the freedoms that the Solidarity trade union had wrested from the Communist government. Daniel Manelski found himself arrested and then imprisoned for several months. He had to wait almost a decade before the opportunity to open the school arose again. It was officially opened in 1990 and has Ministry of Education accreditation to award the Polish secondary school leaving certificate.

I visited ASSA in June 2002, on graduation day (it's a 16-19 secondary school). The school is housed in a low building with wheelchair access – rare in Poland. Inside, classrooms open off both sides of a corridor which runs through the whole building. On the numerous notice boards lining the walls there are announcements of extra-curricular activities and information about when teachers will be available to examine students wanting to gain credits for subjects. The graduation ceremony was quite different from what I'd seen at other Polish schools. Instead of formal blouses and skirts or suits the students were dressed in a whole variety of styles, including combat clothes and basketball gear (as well as one of two students in the traditional black and white). The absence of uniformity at this school – literally and metaphorically – impressed itself on me.

Students can attempt to be credited for a subject as many times as they wish. The humiliating procedure of being kept back to repeat a year does not exist in ASSA. Students can join the school at any time during the school year. The school has a number of physically disabled students

The head teacher, Ula Krzewska-Horbowy, told me that new students often go through the same process after a few months of being at the school. After weeks and months of spending more time at home than at ASSA and being relatively passive it begins to dawn on them that nothing is going to happen unless they make it happen themselves. They see responsibility for their future (educational and otherwise) lies in their hands. This fundamental psychological realisation transforms into the motivation that starts to drive them positively towards their own development. During my conversation with Ula she had to leave the room briefly to talk to a student who had just graduated. She explained afterwards that he had been fighting to overcome a drug habit during his final year and hoped he would manage to keep up the fight after leaving the school.

According to Darek Luczak three types of students attend the school: failures, emigrants and mariners. The first category are young people who have achieved little or no success in any other schools they've been to, people with very low self-esteem, passive, with learned helplessness. For them ASSA is the last chance. Coming to the school is not a positive choice, but rather the end of the road. The next group are those students who were unable to feel comfortable in school, to find their place, as it were. They looked for a school that they would fit into but only found an unbending, autocratic system. The final group, by far the smallest, but in a sense the group for which the school was founded according to Manelski's original conception, are those who know precisely what they want from life at that particular stage of their intellectual and personal development. They choose ASSA consciously as the place that will best help them to realise their own personal goals.

ASSA is linked closely to the Towarzystwo Dzialan dla Samorozwoju (the Association for Individual Development), where educators, academics and people sympathetic to the philosophy of ASSA take part in workshops and publish books and other informational materials about the school.

I was surprised to discover that few people come to see how ASSA functions and learn about its ways. I had expected it to be like other radical alternatives to state schools like Summerhill or Sudbury Valley, with a steady stream of visitors through its doors, but no. In fact ASSA doesn't have a good reputation in Wroclaw. People know it as a school which attracts students with a record of failure or an inability to adapt to the state system.

As I write this I've just completed my first week teaching English in a Polish middle school. I just wanted to describe two incidents that typify what you can see every day in most Polish schools and what ASSA works against. A teacher had pinned a sheet of paper on a public notice board with a list of names and scores from a placement test that the new first-years had just written. Then there was a student in my class taking the same placement test. I knew her from her last school and also knew that she would be sure to get one of the highest scores and qualify for the better of the two groups without too much trouble. Nevertheless she was visibly stressed and anxiously asked me how many points she would need to get into the top stream, worried that she might not make the grade and end up in the weaker group. In ASSA, Daniel Manelski and Darek Luczak aimed to create an environment where students wouldn't have to go through this type of humiliating experience and where competition between students, and the stress that goes with it, has no place.

I have been immensely impressed by what I saw at ASSA and what I've read about the school. It's a place which doesn't turn anyone away, a school where an individual won't be humiliated or pushed around by an inflexible, inhumane system. Students can make choices and take control of their own education.

David French

I made use of Monika Figiel's book; Szkoly Autorskie w Polsce in writing this piece.

Below are some quotations from ASSA's promotional literature translated from Polish.

"Without compulsory attendance at lessons, no marks or end-of-term classification, you start to develop a sense of responsibility for yourself and others; the awareness of the need for individual development and the skills of decision-making, planning and independent learning"

"Discover the motivation to learn inside yourself – no-one's going to force you to learn."

"At ASSA you aren't left to yourself – you choose a teacher or tutor who you trust, who you like and who you can rely on in any situation, not just in school"

ASSA
ul. Dluga 61
53-633 Wrocław
assa@tdds.assa.wroc.pl
www.assa.wroc.pl