Freedom to Learn

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Freedom to Learn (FTL) is a statewide education program in Michigan helping schools create high performing, student-centered learning environments by providing each student and teacher with direct, consistent access to 21st century learning tools.

The program was started in 2002 when the Michigan Legislature and governor dedicated state and federal (Title II, D) funds to a Demonstration Phase. Seeing the positive early results, the state expanded the program in 2004. Michigan has allocated over $30 million in federal and state funds to include over 23,000 students in 100 school districts and 191 buildings - primarily middle schools.

• Freedom to learn is also "the freedom of the learning generation." There was a great thinker, Leo Tolstoy, and he wrote:

Don't be afraid ! There will be Latin and rhetoric, and they will exist in another hundred years, simply because the medicine is bought, so we must drink it (as a patient said). I doubt whether the thoughts which I have expressed perhaps indistinctly, awkwardly, inconclusively, will become generally accepted in another hundred years; it is not likely that within a hundred years all those ready-made institutions-schools, gymnasia, and universities -- will die, and that within that time there will grow freely formed institutions, having for their basis the freedom of the learning generation.^[1]

— "Education and Instruction," Leo Tolstoy, 1860.