When Baran Yousefi describes her school years in Iran, she speaks softly, as though the story came out of secret rooms. Her teachers had to keep their names off lists. The government might close the school at any time. They couldn’t advertise or put up a website; word spread in whispers. Graduates were allowed no recognized diplomas. For two decades, the founders risked arrest for a simple act: inviting children into shared decision-making. “There’s a place for students who think differently,” says Baran Yousefi.
I Zoomed with seven leaders from the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO — their motto is “education revolution”) as we spoke with Baran after-hours from her 12-student start-up school in Ottawa, Canada. Having access to young, hardworking alternative educators like Baran, watching them emerge from sometimes desolate arenas, is a beautiful and revelatory gift one must not take for granted.
When she appears on the screen, she looks wide-eyed behind her glasses — curious, as though she’s waiting, cautiously. It’s not skepticism, exactly, but more like a quiet readiness to be astonished. You know this openness must shape the way she listens to her students with one ear, listens to the outside world with another.
Baran, an Iranian-born-educator, is the co-founder of The Peace School in Ottawa. She speaks with the carefulness of one who has known danger and cruelty but chooses creation over bitterness. A warrior. Back home, she may not have prevailed in the struggle. Here in “the free world,” her classroom, as she describes it, feels like a refuge disguised as a seminar — calm and deliberate, peace a long time coming. She says she is tired. She is only 23, wears the affect of someone of more years, and you want her to smile.
As she opened up, I felt privileged to have this glimpse into another, essential, and often hard or overwhelming world — a world where, for many, school means sanctuary.
It struck me as a world I wanted to represent well and more deeply, not skim over like the endless daily news “feed[tv1] .” So I have drawn broader insight from the scholars Olguín and Sanders-Smith, in their eye-opening article on refugees from Teachers College Record (Olguín & Sanders-Smith, 2021). Since 1975, roughly 3 million refugees have resettled in the United States, and schools often greet them with too little context about their pre-migration lives or the disruptions that have followed. (According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, by late 2024 more than 123 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, e.g., through war, persecution, or disaster.)
As a child, Baran attended Iran’s first humanist school, the “Peace Participatory School” in Tehran, Iran, operated from about 2005 to 2023 under Dr. Nasser Yousefi, her mother, as principal. I would love Isabel Allende or Khaled Hosseini to tell Baran’s story, but in their absence, I can see her walking to school in Tehran. The air carries the scent of diesel, dust, and fresh bread from corner bakeries. She walks briskly, eyes cast down, schoolbooks pressed against her chest under a chador or manteau. Every crossing a calculation, knowing that schools like hers were sometimes being watched. Reaching the gate, on some days locked without explanation, other days, maybe parents waiting anxiously outside, uncertain whether lessons would continue or be shut down again. Inside, even the act of learning — reading poetry, talking freely, exploring humanistic ideas, even redesigning the school day — could feel like resistance.
Her eventual, miraculous graduation and college acceptance in Canada.
After Baran completed college, both she and her mother emigrated there — Ottawa, Canada.
Today, they are creating a small, democratic school inspired by those same ideals Baran grew up with. I do not know if she and her mother felt forced to flee (as refugees) or if they simply found their way to Canada for greater freedom, but I do know this: theirs is a full circle — from a movement that had to hide underground to one that can now speak freely, linking local learning with the United Nations’ “global goals for peace and sustainability.”
If you are not free to teach these unabashedly, you are not in a democracy or a free country.
The Underground: What is Peace Education?
One refugee account from Olguín & Sanders-Smith describes armed men with red scarves standing before schoolchildren as parents wept at the gates — a school assembly turned siege. We know humanistic schooling was not welcome or legal where Baran grew up, as in a great many parts of the world. We learn that her school was shut down several times by the government and they had to tread lightly, and I don’t know how much to probe her into this past, which could contain trauma.
In Baran’s case, that refusal to comply took courage. The humanist school she attended in Iran now serves 150 students, but it still operates under threat. When officials demanded it close its high-school section, they complied quietly to protect younger students. “Every day,” Baran recalls, “we came home from a battlefield.” Of course, as every teacher and parent knows, the real battle was for joy and voice, not defiance.
Despite the terror we might associate with it, there’s also something ancient and dignified about education that must go underground to survive. Courageous. The historical accounts of schooling I treasure most come from nations or groups where learning persisted in the shadows — in basements, garages, and even caves. So did artists in occupied WWII Paris, abolitionist teachers reading by candlelight in the American South, the hedge schools in Ireland, and girls’ secret classrooms under the Taliban, and teachers in every era who refused to give up on children’s freedom of thought or an illegal native language. Wherever education has threatened dominant power systems, it has sought its refuge in hidden rooms, borrowed homes. Quiet corners of resistance. It is how native customs and music and ancestral teachings survive the generations.
A personal example, though mild by comparison, is when my own school failed its first accreditation because accreditors judged that we were using what they called “alternative” methods of instruction. At the time, it felt like we had been sent to the margins for daring to trust our students. This can be received as a simple, refugee message: “You are not wanted,” though there is no explicit persecution or punishment. Now, today, “alternative” ways are emerging in pockets of democracy, some hidden, some just unseen or marginalized. I have always cherished some kinship with those teachers who worked beneath the surface, certain that authentic learning would find a way, even if it had to move underground to do so.
Small and alternative schools carry the underground spirit. They often begin outside the establishment — with no large budget, no bureaucracy, no guarantee of legitimacy — driven instead by trust, creativity, and necessity. They exist wherever someone refuses to wait for permission to do what’s right for kids for the simple reason that no one else is doing it, and it needs doing. They are “the resistance. Even some of today’s micro-schools in garages and gardens.
Scholars of refugee education remind us that every “underground” story has three phases: the (hard) life that came before flight, the (sometimes harrowing) dislocation during flight, and the long resettlement after (Olguín & Sanders-Smith, 2021). School families tend to see only the last phase, but Baran knows all three. And peace education asks us to see and honor all three.
Peace as a Design Feature
At The Peace School in Ottawa, Baran now helps design learning environments where peace isn’t just a topic — it’s the architecture. The school’s founders (she and her mother) understand that peace is not just the absence of conflict but the cultivation of empathy, patience, and shared responsibility. The search for universal values.
And she understands the inconvenience of democratic schooling — and of real democracy. In one democratic school, she explains, it took three months for students and staff to agree on a wall color. That might sound absurd in a world obsessed with efficiency and control, but that’s the point. The learning wasn’t about the wall; it was about learning to listen, and to consider multiple perspectives. It was about voices. The same process unfolds when students plan field trips, negotiate project timelines, or set school norms, or help hire teachers.
In this humanist framework, curriculum is not imposed — it’s composed. Teachers, or “facilitators” as Baran calls them, help students find the best resources but resist the temptation to shape their thoughts. A project can last a morning or punctuate an entire year. A conversation about fairness can become a unit on ethics or government. Nothing is rushed because peace, like trust, like Socratic teaching, takes time.
Freedom in Miniature
Baran’s school began with twelve students and aims to stay small, even as interest grows. “We can share resources and ideas,” she says, “but we don’t need to grow large.” That belief — that learning happens best in human-scale environments — is shared by small schools everywhere, including our own here in Encinitas, California.
In a world obsessed by whatever scales up, peace doesn’t scale easily. Nor does democracy. Both require presence, patience, and relationships. The Peace School’s size allows for what industrial education systems cannot: time to hear each voice, to let disagreements breathe, to make meaning collectively.
This is why small schools so often resemble underground movements. They preserve the intimacy that mass systems trade away. They rely on faith rather than funding, including the willingness of parents to volunteer when they can’t pay tuition, and on the resilience of the leaders to press on even when recognition (or funding) lags behind.
Another case study the researchers Olguín & Sanders-Smith share is of a Guatemalan mother and daughter who fled civil war, crossed on foot and by truck, and then met a new barrier: a school office that couldn’t read their records and placed the child back in kindergarten. The family had community ties, but little of their cultural capital “translated.” A local church, not the school, took up their cause.
Bridging Worlds
Baran’s collegiate work in Indigenous and holistic health has deepened her understanding of interconnectedness. She has reached out to Indigenous educators in Canada, whom she relates to but has little access to. She has been well educated and understands: reconciliation begins not with programs but with relationships that take time. Leaders build cultural bridges. They are liaisons who can translate across communities, not regimes imposing from the outside.
In both Iran and Canada, the challenges remain: How do we move from historical authoritarian systems into the emerging democratic ones?
How do we build peace and freedom into structures still defined by competition and/or compliance? Bourdieu (Olguín & Sanders-Smith, 2021) explains: when people enter a new “field” with different rules and power dynamics, their familiar habits no longer map cleanly. To the alternative educator, this can feel like dislocation and unease.
Refugee families face that twice — once in the border crossing, and again in school hallways — and so might students moving from standards- and compliance-based classrooms into democratic ones. I think back to my own early students in our self-directed classroom, a format none had ever seen: some students seemed paralyzed by responsibility for creating their own educational choices. Some teachers seemed paralyzed by responsibility for enabling it. Freedom really frustrates a lot of people.
Baran’s answer is modest and radical at once. It is the answer small school leaders all discover if they are to succeed: start small, listen deeply, and trust your students, repeat.
Good News to the Struggle
The Peace School is one among a growing network of democratic and humanist schools worldwide — what Education Reimagined calls “local learning ecosystems,” where classrooms can extend out into whole communities. Each one is a node in a quiet global shift: from teaching obedience to cultivating agency, from standardized goals to self-direction, from control to dialogue. Baran’s example is hyperbole in action.
Ironically, Ottawa, home of Baran’s school, is where Mohawk Indians have spent around 50 years attempting to reclaim their native educational practices. It started out as a protest but eventually they were saying “this is what we’re going to do, at all cost.” Result? The North American Survival Schools.
Just recently, post-pandemic, there has been an explosion of small, start-up schools like Baran’s across North America — something like 100,000 of them. We thought they’d return to “the system” when the pandemic ended, but many did not. These schools are asking “Who gets to know what?” and “Who decides that?” questions that hit Baran’s school hard when she was a child in an ancient culture. And these new schools and their leaders, at least the ones I know, are asking those questions relentlessly, every day, in all kinds of circumstances in and out of the classroom, every chance they get.
I most certainly won’t equate the work of alternative educators in the U.S. and around the world with the danger faced by refugees, but I will say this: for hundreds of alternative educators I know, the work can feel isolating, marginalized, and often, especially in the start-up years, like a refuge. Refuge: a human right, but only when self-determined.
And here is a final item few of us predicted even a short while ago: while alternative educators rarely face bullets at school gates, we are operating in a moment when policies of our U.S. presidential leadership are a source of displacement. Under the current administration, many more families are being forced to flee, creating new waves of refugeehood — waves to which our small democratic classrooms must respond with compassion, not distance. International students have always been a part of small schools like Grauer, and today’s threats are casting a shadow they cannot ignore, nor can we. International students add tremendous diversity and talent to small schools, and news articles are documenting how some may travel home on a break only to be turned down at the border when trying to return and complete their education.
The research is clear: families forced — or feeling substantial pressure — to leave their homes in search of a place to educate their children freely will need courage and a powerful work ethic. These students bring passion-driven strengths that rarely fit right into whatever we hand them here in their new country. It’s work. And it needs doing.
Peace-by-design, as I learned from Baran, means redesigning the school and classroom forms we find — and it means creating new ones. If underground schools once hid to survive, the emergent movement of today’s small, start-up schools are surfacing to remind us what true education is for: a school in this vision is a profound expression of freedom.
Even if we must flee 6,000 great-circle miles to get there.
In fact, The Grauer School, too, has had teachers who could not return to their homelands — an experience that is painful for them, yet one that seems to deepen their empathy and makes them some of our most heartfelt advocates for students. For they and many students coming of age, this bundle of needs we thought we needed to be happy and function is suddenly not a given, and this awakening can be both devastating and freeing. Both. We are unschooling. From systemic bias. From ethnocentrism and greed. There There can be joy if we make it far enough down that road, though we never know what we’ll find down there. In the end, in schools, “refugee” is a word for the heart: the student searching for identity, the teacher closing the door against anti-creative mandates, the school leader weathering the storms of a system too vast to bear. Warriors. I think the sense of refuge, as it gathers in us, forces us to stand for something.
Baran is standing for the slow, patient work of peace — built not by decree, but by design. This work demands a lot. No, it demands everything. Life coming out of the underground — whatever your underground — can be exhausting, and it keeps reminding us that real teaching is an act of love.
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