An educational experiment founded by anarchists, libertarians, socialists, and other freethinkers, the Modern School Movement sought to implement anarchist, free-thought, and libertarian ideas in independent schools throughout Europe and later in the United States between 1901 and the late 1930s. The founders of this movement hoped for a total transformation of society through education. They emphasized selfreliance and freedom of students in direct contrast to the formality and strict discipline in state-sponsored and traditional classrooms of the time. Modern Schools developed primarily to serve children of working-class people as well as children of anarchists and socialists. The founders sought to abolish all forms of coercive authority and develop a new society through the voluntary cooperation of individuals. The movement itself started in the late 1800s, and its original U.S. adherents survived until the 1960s. A small Modern School reunion meets at Rutgers University each year. The Modern School movement started in France in the late 1800s. Much of the original thinking for the movement came from experimental education techniques outlined in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, published in 1762, but the writings of the English anarchist William Godwin exerted a greater influence. Louise Michel took those ideas and started a school in Montmartre that she described as an alternative to the "souldestroying institutions, the bourgeois school" (Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays). The typical school of the time set very definite rules, accepted only children from privileged backgrounds—and usually only one sex—and had programs that appealed only to the upper social classes. Notably,