4 ms·
The wikipedia quote is correct. Your assessment seems to be not based on anything. Ask yourself, what is harder to learn: (1) knowing who you are and how to wor
by jostylr 13y ago
The wikipedia quote is correct. Your assessment seems to be not based on anything. Ask yourself, what is harder to learn: (1) knowing who you are and how to work with others or (2) solving an algebraic equation?
They pretty much all learn how to read, write, do arithmetic. Those who want to go to college (about 80%) do so without difficulty, learning what they need in a few months. They are serious, engaged students in college because they know why they are there. They find college kids goofing off to be quite a mystery. They are free to become themselves when they are supposed to -- puberty. That's what that stage is for. Most schools prevent the self-exploration that is necessary to allow for that. So then it gets delayed until people's 20s.
--
Visit such a school and you will see that they are much less nasty than those in a public school. Bullying is virtually unheard of. They work together as a community and take responsibility for it. They are collectively responsible for all the policing and judgement of others as well as themselves. They adjudicate quite fairly.
I saw 8 year olds wrestling with determining an appropriate punishment for their friend vs. their own desire to help their friend. They really struggled to find a balance. 8 year olds. This is an issue that a lot of adults struggle with.
They also write themselves up when they break a rule. They all buy into building a community. The school I visited was full of energy and respect.
So you can either choose to believe the fiction of "Lord of the Flies" or believe the results of forty years of actual experience with the model.
- notahacker 13y agoI can't help wondering whether the Sudbury School model would work quite so well in encouraging moral behaviour if it was filled with problem kids with gang affiliations rather than the offspring of well-to-do parents with a deep interest in finding their kid a suitable environment.
- jostylr 13y agoI think you are right that that is an issue. But what school does handle that well? Also, the value of Sudbury is community. If someone is in a gang, they already have that (I presume). They do have experience with "troubled" kids doing just fine and thriving, but these are a small number injected into an otherwise pleasant environment. They also do occasionally expel students. But I also remember a story from the Jerusalem Sudbury school in which one of their students left and fell into drugs, etc. Later, the founder of the school asked the kid if they had failed him. He said "failed me? You were the only ones that didn't fail me. You are the reason I sought rehabilitation instead of dying on the streets. I always carried you and the school with me, voices of support." Take from that what you will. The most important thing is to have a good environment for students to come into. People adapt to their environments, for better or worse. If you were to take a single gang member away and put them in a strongly functioning Sudbury school, I would give them great odds of succeeding. But if you plopped a number of gang members into such a community, I bet that would be a major problem. The hardest part for a Sudbury school is starting and dealing with huge influx of students. It takes time to assimilate to such an environment. There is also another big question along these lines. The students at Sudbury learn the R's quite well on their own. But their parents are generally well-educated, demonstrating the value of those skills. Would kids from homes without those values do so well? Again, injecting a single kid from such an environment into a Sudbury school would be much more likely to succeed than having a majority of the school from such an environment. But, as far as I know, no one has attempted it. Perhaps someone should.