The problem I had with the educational system in my time (about 20 years ago) is computer knowledge wasn't taken seriously, so I missed out on having some guidance to push me towards my ultimate interest - electronics, computers, programming, things in tech. Of course, I still like knowing about a lot of other things, but school really doesn't grab your interests. Ideally, it should be setup so students can capitalize on areas of interest.
On second thought, if computer and tech knowledge had been made available to me early on, I probably wouldn't have had the life course in the educational system that I did. Depressing to think about.
Best of luck and I hope it is legitimately successful for the students.
I agree with the sentiment here, but I wonder if it wouldn't be more accurate to say it would be for everyone, except that some people have already had their natural driven curiosity ground out of them by sour experiences at school or poor home life prior to getting the change to try this.
Somehow I find that extraordinarily unlikely, but I suppose it is possible. From my experience and what I've seen in other people, it's never that the curiosity in them gets pounded out of them, rather it is that they're not ideally granted the opportunities to capitalize on their curiosities.
Point I was wanting to make: there's a lot of us that didn't really get that "prod" in the right direction, or even had the opportunity to study in such a focused manner.
And I sure as hell wish I had that opportunity back in the day.
I'd like to have this hypothesis tested. The popular school system is a formula for destroying children's interests (by turning learning into mandated work), corrupting intrinsic motivation (by rewarding obedience) and replacing learning (as in discovering and understanding) with memorizing facts, procedures and rules.
It's a bit unfair to blame someone who's been force fed against their will, at times when they weren't hungry, food they didn't like, in a humiliating manner ... It's unfair to blame such a person for lack of appetite.
I'd like to have this hypothesis tested. The popular school system is a formula for destroying children's interests (by turning learning into mandated work), corrupting intrinsic motivation (by rewarding obedience) and replacing learning (as in discovering and understanding) with memorizing facts, procedures and rules.
It's a bit unfair to blame someone who's been force fed against their will, at times when they weren't hungry, food they didn't like, in a humiliating manner ... It's unfair to blame such a person for lack of appetite.
"They are fully democratic and focus on producing empowered self directed citizens..."
Word.
I've run democratic teams. The empowerment is real. I can't explain it; it feels like magic. Those experiences have transmuted me into a full throated advocate for democracy.
Democracy, in its multitude of forms, is very much a technology. Just like arabic numerals, management, offset type, etc.
"No grades or grade levels..."
I'm hoping your sudval.org link says something about achievement models for education, as an alternative to testing regimes and grades.
My son is an Eagle Scout. He wasn't a very good K-12 student, but he rocked the Scouts. That achievement is largely self-directed, but also structured with concrete outcomes. With plenty of mentoring both up and down. I wonder why learning can't be more like that?
As John Taylor Gatto explains, it is because our education system was designed back in the 19th century to produce factory workers who would follow orders and do the same boring thing all day long.
And if a majority of wolves vote for a sheep dinner?
If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus - voting doesn't have to have centre stage. Voting makes sense for simple decisions, where little discussion is needed. It's a pretty poor way to foster participation (You voted, you lost, you can't complain).
That said, sometimes the sheep needs to be eaten. If that is taken literally, that a group votes to eat one of its members - the situation should be rather extreme - like people stranded without food. One might agree to draw straws. But it would be much better to avoid such situations in the first place...
Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured.
If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus, voting doesn't have to have centre stage
And yet in practice, the only reason for a political party to hear all (including its opposition) and to seek consensus is to seek the number of votes need to pass a rule. Therefore, in practice, voting does take the center stage.
> Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured.
It's a shallow form of participation. Being educated, informed, and being part of the decision process - drafting bills, finding alternatives - forming political parties, being part of committees , being available for election, all the work that is done before a vote his held is arguably more important. And if most people aren't involved in that part, you don't IMNHO have what can reasonably be called a real democracy.
It's of course much easier to just present "the people" with the choice of a red or green bike shed, rather than discuss alternative economies that might make the nuclear plant less relevant.
I manged to get several thousand people a better pension by using the democratic process but I suspect as a dual wonk/nerd I am in a minority.
I did half consider going to work in the HOC if one of my colleagues had got the speaker ship.
In representative democracies [1], they usually don't get involved at all. You delegate your rights to someone else (eg members of parliament), who then act on your behalf, so to speak.
The alternative of direct democracy [2] is much rarer.
This is exactly my point - real democracy means engaging in the political decision process on all levels, and taking/feeling a sense of ownership of/to it.
> It's a shallow form of participation.
It's not a form of participation at all.
>Being educated, informed, and being part of the decision process - drafting bills, finding alternatives - forming political parties, being part of committees , being available for election, all the work that is done before a vote his held is arguably more important.
You are arguing about how the right to vote is exercised. With the right to vote as a given, I would agree with you on all of the above.
However, none of the above is relevant without the right to vote (and other rights), hence why I'm arguing that the right is more important.
That's just one mechanism. Your right to participate is also ensured by freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the ability to get your name on the voting ballot.
Another very prominent example would be freedom of press.
How do you currently choose new hires? Decide to ship (go/no go)? Probably something like Roman Evaluation.
How do you triage defects or choose features? Probably something like Approval Voting.
Ie vote on your priorities and what you want to get done. Then use a prediction market (possibly on a very informal level, if it's a small group), to decide on a policy to reach those goals.
And then that party proceeds to blackmail everybody all the time.
Thus all the governments need to pander to this particular party and they get to gridlock the government whenever they feel the smallest slight or displeasure.
Of course they can, they just choose not to. What you are saying is that the parties are choosing a blackmailer over a self-declared "enemy". That's a choice, it's not inevitable.
Besides, if the political landscape is diverse enough, a minority coalition can be a boon for everyone: it means that the ruling parties must actually learn to cooperate with the opposition instead of dictating policy for the duration of their term.
However our political landscape is polarized to a degree where minority coalition has no chance of doing anything.
Not that any political problem could solve people acting as idiots.
There are many ways of doing this, with various suitability depending on context, but e.g. one alternative is simply to guarantee the right of withdrawal - if you can always remove yourself from the group if a decision is unacceptable to you, a majority will need to seek compromise if it wishes to avoid shedding members. Other alternatives include requiring super-majorities for particularly important decisions, guaranteeing rule of law and basic human rights.
The problem lies there, not with democracy - whatever system you use, such an assemblage is going to screw the sheep over.
In a democracy, there's at least a sense of shared responsibility, and hence in real life there'd be a dampening of the wolf's id by each one's conscience.
In monarchic or oligarchic systems (and these terms don't have to be restricted to governments), the top person(s) will still probably end up being a wolf in such a condition, only now the other wolves would be "just following orders" and be more efficient in making dinner.
If that happens, you don't want to live in that society anyway, under whatever system. In other words, this is an extremely pessimistic view of human society.
What if the sheep can't arm themselves? What if the wolves are better armed?
There's also a question of whether there is such a thing as "basic human nature" at play. As long as we are driven to compete with each other for access to the most desirable mates, etc., it seems there might always be some cause for humans to attempt to stomp on one another in various ways. Even if there was no shortage of material goods, food, water, etc., I suspect we'd still find some kind of basis to compete on, which could still lead to conflict.
Money. There isn't enough of it. America would rather spend it on other "more important" things.
The problem is not that we aren't buying enough education; it's that we're being sold a counterfeit.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
We just blow it on administration-heavy bureaucracies and demonstrably failed methods.
Not to mention sports. The absurd amounts of money, attention and time poured into college athletics especially never ceases to amaze me. Even at the high school level, many students focus way too much on being "discovered" by talent scouts so that they can get scholarships to colleges they want - grades be damned.
Other posters have pointed out that there's plenty of spending in schools, but it is in frivolous activities on the periphery of education. They did not mention facilities, which I believe is another huge point of financial irresponsibility when it comes to how municipalities fund their schools. Any town pointing to a dilapidated school as proof of need for a new one is among the least likely to be a good steward of that school, given that it is deferred improvements and maintenance, not age, that really causes problems (to a point, of course). Worse yet, they move these schools to huge complexes on the edge of town so that no one can reach it without a car or bus. Then they get to spend more good school money on buses.
Sadly it had to close due to lack of funding at the end of the war. There is a short documentary made before closing showing the student parliament and school life - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg7TJ2WRndM
There is no veto. There is simply discussing the issue and revisiting it if necessary. While it is always possible that a disastrous decision will be made, anecdotally, it seems to be exceedingly rare.
Students want the school to succeed. They want to be safe and respected. When you start from those places, bad decisions rarely happen if someone points out why they are bad. Of course, like any group, we may all think a decision is good when, in fact, it is bad. But if someone has a good view or argument, everyone listens.
I have learned that democracy is not about voting. True democracy is listening and being heard. It is a bit like in Buddhism and how simply witnessing and acknowledging emotions will often lead the way to a good outcome.
The absolute core of the school is accepting, without question, that each student is responsible for themselves. Once everyone really gets that, bad intentions melt away.
It is important to have a strong environment for students to experience mutual respect. Starting a Sudbury School is very difficult. But once it starts, as long as a small percentage of new students is added at a time, they will acclimate to the environment and accept the idea of balancing the needs of the many with the needs of the one which is ultimately the balancing act that we all must struggle with.
On many occasions, students have come to School Meeting with a rule that staff did not like. Sometimes during the discussion the staff have their minds changed. Other times, the student might change their mind. Still other times, the rule gets passed and the staff come to see that it is a perfectly good rule.
We also have a jury-style system (Judicial Committee) for rules. It is a body that the staff turn over the responsibility of adjudicating rule breaking and sentence making to. When some students make a mess (no cure for that, I am afraid) and I feel angry, I go and write them up. My anger passes and by the next day, I am okay with whatever our JC comes up with. It is generally fair and equitable.
Students almost always plead guilty if they did it, but if they did not do it, they will certainly say so. And we all get to suggest a sentence, but the members of JC decide on what it will be. They debate thoughtfully and generally rule wisely.
I have seen plaintiffs ask to drop a case while defendants ask to keep it. They want to admit to wrong doing and move past it. There is no shame, just lessons to be learned.
It is the most humane and fun environment I have ever been in. Students learn how to be part of a community, how to accept responsibility for themselves, and how to learn.
They may or may not learn academics; it is their choice. Academics, it turns out, is rather easy to acquire for children coming from a place of empowerment and respect.
To grow up accepted is a powerful foundation to accomplish anything.
There is a lot of entrepreneurship involved in their pathways.
Our first graduate wanted to become a pastry chef and upon graduating our school, apprenticed to become one and is now a pastry chef at a well-respected restaurant. Our only other graduate just graduated from the college of his choice so it is a bit early for that one. From SVS, of recent fame is Laura Poitras, of Citizenfour.
My impression is that they embrace life with eyes wide open. If they happen to work for a bad outfit, they will understand why they are there (need the money, perhaps) and be open to moving on. They keep their power, always carrying around a memory of this accepting community in their hearts, motivated to take on challenges in their lives.
I am sure there are good stories and bad stories amongst the alumni, as with any group. But I would be willing to bet that the spark of living in the moment is almost universally present in all of the ones that attended a Sudbury school for most of their 5-18 years.
As for politics, a person can have a lot of power by taking actions, organizing, doing the hard work of establishing a movement. They learn at our school, presumably, that while voting is important, it is not nearly as important as being actively involved in the community, in talking with people, in making the connections that lead to results. Even bad bosses can be politicked for is not a bad boss just someone who is suffering and could use a helping hand?
I susepct your real question, and it is quite telling about our society, is "If you were going to end up a slave, would you rather have some freedom first or not?"
Grandparent's point was that that is, by far, not the only choice.
Why is that naive? What's stopping them from redefining work? I would venture that adults emerging from these type of school systems will be very well armed to call bullshit when they see it and not comply with it for the sake of belonging. I think you underestimate just how many good organizations, teams and opportunities are out there.
Or maybe I'm also too naive (and that's really not a passive aggressive statement, I actually mean that that could also be the case!)
EDIT: That said, I'd be very curious to learn about the challenges the alumni run into when leaving school too!
(I've been reading HN for years. I know agreeing or appreciating something is handled via upvoting. Sometimes it's just not enough and a human connection is more important than the HN guidelines).
I agree with this so strongly - do you have any ways in which you've seen these thoughts or ideas shared or written in some form?
I am also curious about something I hope you can answer. I guess (big assumption!) that most of these pupils share similar backgrounds, like families with good/high education, high income, etc. How would it work if we put these kids together with students with different backgrounds, e.g., parents with severe problems, very low income, bad language, etc.?
And how do these kids react when one or two bullies (a group of outcasts (?)) of try to overpower the democratic "state"? Or ... what happens when one kid more "ambitious" than others is trying to manipulate them? How do they react?
Do you have any articles about this?
I think the basic answer is that they seek out a challenging and satisfying life. They can get along with people and are generally more emotionally stable.
At Arts&Ideas as well as the Philly Free School, we are working to support those who have low incomes. We have one student who was even homeless for a time this past year. We have parents who have been recently bankrupted, unemployed, etc. We also have some well off parents as well.
For the most part, it is hard to spot the kids that have different backgrounds. Everyone is accepting of others. Sometimes students from challenging backgrounds get stressed out about the insecurity at home and the students around show them compassion and acceptance which goes a long way towards eliminating the stress.
I have never witnessed anyone try to overpower the democracy. It is possible in theory, but it just doesn't seem to happen nor do we have a group of outcasts. Occasionally, someone will dislike something about our system and try to change it in a way that the community would not want. It gets voted down. But by letting the disgruntled have a voice, their disgruntlement seems to dissipate.
There was a time when a group wanted to get a gym bar. They outnumbered everyone else in the room, but through discussion, it was made clear to them that they had to think this through a lot more. They did, came back later, and got it in a way that the community was comfortable with. They did not try to overrule with their numbers.
It can be hard to understand, but when one is in a culture of cooperation instead of competition, winning at the expense of others is not a path often traveled.
There is a lot of reading one can do from Sudbury Valley School. For the low income experience, you can see if Philly Free School has anything. Urban Sudbury Schools are still pretty new so there just isn't too much out there yet about it.
When parents and school disagree on the degree of autonomy children should have it puts quite some stress on the child. That's why the Sudbury-like school I went to does have a discussion with the parents beforehand on wether this kind of school really is what the parents want for their children.
Also a deal breaker is unlimited screen time. Or the freedom to go off-campus (with an age appropriate buddy system). Or any number of other things that giving a human being responsible freedom really means.
It is easy to give freedom to those whose actions you agree with. But that's not really freedom. Being happy with letting people make choices that you strongly disagree with is when you know you truly believe in freedom.
Of course, there are always boundaries to freedoms which is where it gets messy. We base our rules on the good of the community, not the individual. But even that can be abused. It takes honest dialogue to work it all out.
All parents have to face a time when they must let their child be free. We advocate for that being earlier rather than later. Some embrace it, others don't.
What we try to convince parents about is that they can best support their child at our school by enjoying their time with them at home and accepting them for whomever they choose to be that day.
And if a parent is into mathematics, then they should share that joy just as they might share the joy of whittling wood toys because they want to share their passions, not because they want the child to learn those passions.
A lot of parents in this culture have a problem with letting academics be optional. And by academics, I mean mathematics. No one seems to care much about anything else except maybe parents of 5 year olds and reading.
I have years of experience dealing with adults who have been traumatized by math education. They come to me believing they are bad in mathematics, that they cannot handle it. In a single semester, I get them from 7th grade algebra up through calculus and statistics. They start doing guesstimations in their daily lives. The nightmares of the math monster under the bed fade away and they are empowered. So what exactly did their K-12 academic education do for them?
Even the ones who do well, one has to wonder at the spoon-fed nature of traditional teaching. The hard part of learning is not answering the questions, but asking them in the first place and getting started in the right direction. Traditional education sweeps all of that real activity of academics under the rug. They have to. You cannot teach someone those skills. They have to acquire them by their own experiences dealing with their passions and interests. And failure cannot be socially stigmatized.
We want to empower human beings to be their own amazing selves. This is not a message most can embrace, but some do and the results are inspiring.
By the way, about reading, a great article is http://schoolingtheworld.org/a-thousand-rivers/
In those kind of pedagogies (mostly Freinet for me), the adults ultimately do have a veto power. However, when you give kids responsibility, something funny happens - you find that they tend to become very reasonable, and you very rarely have to use veto power. More often than not, it's more renegotiation ("We can't do that today because of X, but what about tomorrow?") than true veto. And provided that you explain things clearly and don't disregard their intelligence, the kids typically agree readily.
Teenagers can be a little more argumentative, but the group is actually very good at taking care of the teenager or two who like to say dumb things just to create a reaction (one of the many reasons why a lot of Freinet implementations like to start and end each day with a group "forum").
One of my friend's daughters is vicious at this. At 14, for a "career and personal planning" project, she stated career her goal as "porn star" and somehow wrangled a skype interview with a 19yo "mentor" in the biz. She has no intention on following this path, but loves how it drives teachers up the wall. "If billy can want to be a soldier and kill people, then I should be allowed to pursue my dream too." She's a perfectly normal girl, but once she identifies an authority figure as weak she turns them into toys. Put her in a free environment and I'd expect resignation letters within the week.
When I was 14, more than half a century ago, I got into trouble for holding opinions that the people her would consider merely progressive. One of my daughters in high school got into insulting her peer group by using a vocabulary they didnt understand. They thought she was praising them. She is now in her thirties and very well adjusted. If she had done such a thing in middle school, I would have been very amused, but her mother would have been absolutely mortified. Probably best that she didnt.
It depends. There is a range of approaches. The classic approach, of which I think you are speaking, is indeed very short term. Girls are paid per day/shoot/scene and that's all. Other girls own and operate their own websites, retaining copyrights, and can generate a stream of income over a great many years. There are women out there in their late twenties still releasing "new" material shot while they were 18. Many who opt for this approach don't do sex, or even nudity, and so don't suffer any health repercussions. But that takes planning and a degree of time/money investment.
I wouldn't encourage the career, but I would fault any teacher ready to dismiss the industry. If you ask kids what they want to do, you shouldn't be critical of answers that conflict with your personal morality.
Someone who ignores our system of justice would be expelled. It happens.
It all depends on whether she wants to be in this environment or not. Most people want to be, but not all.
If she lasted long enough to understand that she could be heard by being her real self, then she would probably stay. But it can take a long time to get through the toxic layers some students have built up over the years.
I hope they don't read Lord of the Flies. I'm not sure that I would want a group of teens, especially peers, to judge me on anything. Didn't Trek TOS also cover this in the episode on the planet without adults?
Keep in mind that your experience is with people who are living in a competitive world. If you belong to a cooperative world, no one benefits by putting someone else down. When treated fairly, they treat others fairly.
For those coming from traditional schools, it sometimes requires a few conversations or JC writeups before they start to have empathy, but most get there fairly quickly.
Moreover, she probably gets social encouragement from her classmates for doing things like this. Put her in an environment where the classmates made the rules, and now she's just a clown surrounded by people rolling their eyes.
I condole with her teachers, at the same very time.
Don't get me wrong, entrance exams for the right reasons are good because it allows for a good fit between student and school. Of course, this assuming that there are more than one style of schooling available.
The more pertinent question is whether the citizens they produce can read and write, know how to multiply and divide, can name the parts of speech, and have at least a passing notion of the history and culture of their respective countries, regions, and locales.
Somehow, I doubt it.
They learn how to read and write. Children are learning machines. They figure out how to do things that are a lot more complicated than learning how to read and write using an alphabet in a culture saturated with writing. A guy I know here in Shanghai has a Taiwanese mother and an American father. He went to American schools all the way through his education. He can read Chinese perfectly, and write when he's using a phone or computer though his handwriting is quite limited. Another guy I know whose parents speak German to him grew up in Ireland and was educated through English. His spelling and grammar when writing in German is not great but he has never studied German other than as a foreign language for an easy grade, nor has he ever lived in a German speaking country. John Taylor Gatto has written that he can teach a 9 year old to read in 40 contact hours.
People learn to perform quite complicated mathematical operations in the course of their lives, through experience. If you're interested in this there's a lot of research on unschooled children. Street children who buy and sell things learn all the mathematical skills they need in their lives, which is most of what most people need.
Knowing the parts of speech is almost perfectly useless. It has no effect on how well one writes, not even for people who are writing in a language they learned after adolescence. The only things that research shows improving writing are practice and critique.
People learn about their culture by living in it. Ditto for their history. As someone with way above average historical knowledge I can also say that history education through at least middle school is worthless. It's pre digested pap with no acknowledgment of nuance or shades of gray.
With the greatest of respect, I do not think a child is going to learn significant mathematics beyond arithmetic by "living". Give them a book and an interest? Sure. A little direction and help? Better. But the number of people who can invent calculus from scratch is pretty low.
> most of what most people need
Ugh.
As to your distaste I feel the same way about many, many things but I'm not the one supporting making everybody "learn" things they have neither interest in nor a facility for.
This is not about forcing an interest, this is about shaping opportunity. The ideal of school is to have provided a well rounded education such that the individual at 16 or 18 can start to make informed decisions about their life.
I get that calculus isn't very useful for the largest proportion of society. I can't remember the last time knowing how to derive the volume of a sphere was useful to me. The concepts, the mode of thought, is useful.
History? Should have been teaching you about sources. Bias. Propaganda. Analysis. Argument. Things you need to learn to be able to generate a position on something in life. I can assure you that my knowledge of medical history through the ages has yet to be useful - but that doesn't mean that what I learned in that class hasn't been?
Maybe I'm wrong, and the rest of the world isn't like me. Maybe the rest of the world are motivated self starters with insatiable curiosity and infinite capacity for broad self directed learning. Me? I'd have picked the couple of things I enjoyed, learned sod all else, and once I realised there were no consequences to slacking off? I'd have done that, heck I did do that.
In other words. Parents make children eat vegetables because we know what is good for them, better than they do at least. Abdicating responsibility for that by passing it off to the child just seems mad
Right on, for example, phys ed. In my school, we had a wide variety of activities over the years. Almost like: here are some physical activities, hope you find one you like so that you can enjoy being healthy.
"History? Should have been teaching you about sources. Bias. Propaganda. Analysis. Argument"
Wow, I always criticize the way history is taught by bringing up Christopher Columbus. They focus on the names of the boats, not the fact that the majority of people, including the leaders of his country, thought he would fall off the world. You brought up an interesting point.
They are fully democratic and focus on producing empowered self directed citizens who understand how to share limited resources and cooperate.
The kids have as much power as any adult or teacher, which I really love -- they say you can't make someone partially equal -- either you share power with them or you don't. No grades or grade levels, students decided what to focus on. Great mini documentary on the website to watch as well.
http://www.sudval.org/