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Brooklyn Free School on This American Life

Brooklyn Free School (www.brooklynfreeschool.org) was featured in Act Three which starts at the 38 minute, 53 second mark of the MP3 here. Let us know what you think!

ACT THREE. MINOR AUTHORITIES.
Jyllian Gunther visits The Brooklyn Free School, where there are no courses, no tests and no homework, and where the kids decide everything about how the school is run, including discipline. Jyllian is a filmmaker, working on a documentary called Growing Small. (16 minutes)
Song: “If the Kids are United (They’ll Never Be Divided)”, Sham-69

This American Life is a weekly public radio show broadcast on more than 500 stations to about 1.7 million listeners. It is produced by Chicago Public Media, distributed by Public Radio International, and has won all of the major broadcasting awards. It is also often the most popular podcast in the country, with more than a half million people downloading each week. From 2006-2008, we produced a television version of This American Life on the Showtime network, which won three Emmys and is now re-airing on Current TV. We’re also the co-producers, with NPR News, of the economics podcast and blog Planet Money. And a half dozen stories from the radio show are being developed into films.

The radio show and TV show follow the same format. There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but it’s sort of hard to describe. Probably the best way to understand the show is to start at our favorites page, though we do have longer guides to our radio show and our TV show. If you want to dive into the hundreds of episodes we’ve done over the years, there’s an archive of all our old radio shows and listings for all our TV episodes, too.

For more information: http://www.thisamericanlife.org