i_love_jc

"The parents intentionally give their children this autonomy and freedom because they believe it's the best way to motivate kids." This is basically the philosophy behind self-directed learning: unschooling as well as learning communities like Sudbury schools, liberated learners centers, and agile learning centers.

I work at one of these schools, and our kids are really good at paying attention. ADD is a real thing and still affects some of them, but we also have a lot of kids who were diagnosed with ADD and it turns out when they are interested in what they're doing, their attention span is completely normal.

I don't know how things work in Germany, but in the US all prestigious universities will consider, and have admitted, homeschoolers or others with nontraditional transcripts. This school would be no problem at all for a US university as long as you're able to demonstrate that you can compare well to others in what you've accomplished or learned.

Or to really dig back into history, Bronson Alcott's school, Leo Tolstoy's school, and the schools founded by anarchists in the 1920s. The latter and Summerhill are really more radical than the one described here.

You're very right that our school system as a whole hasn't made any progress in that direction, but I do find it a somewhat hopeful sign that there are now quite a number of democratic schools based on Summerhill and the similar Sudbury model. 40 or so Sudbury schools (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sudbury_schools), probably a hundred or more under the loose umbrella of "democratic" and associated with AERO.