8 ms·

The anarchic experimental schools of the 1970s

farber 12y ago
In "The Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1974), there is an interesting discussion about the idea that removing university grades would provide a better education. "[A student at a grade-less school would] be a free man. He wouldnt need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and theyd better come up with it. Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldnt stop with rote engineering information."
- ars 12y ago
  Isn't this basically what auditing classes does? It's often free as well.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Its the inevitable result of grade inflation.
  - frobozz 12y ago
    Yes, but at the potential expense of grade-bearing classes, and because grades seem to be important, grade-bearing classes tend to take a higher priority than interesting non-grade bearing ones. At university, I audited several modules, and there were many that I wanted to attend, but couldn't, either due to timetabling clashes with the classes I was supposed to attend, or because the process for attending classes in disciplines entirely unrelated to my subject was prohibitive. When the workload expected of me grew too great, I reduced my participation or dropped out of my audited classes. With the removal of grades (and compulsory modules) entirely, I might have dropped some of my graded modules in favour of others.
teddyh 12y ago
This is about the UK. There is apparently something like it in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School
- icelancer 12y ago
  Hmm. One about 45 minutes away from my house. I have a 3 year old son and I am deeply troubled with the ideas of where to send him for school. I may look into this, thank you.
  - mpthrapp 12y ago
    As someone who went to a Sudbury school as a child, I highly recommend at least giving it a look.
    - icelancer 12y ago
      I will. It looks like my local chapter has been very successful and has had to move three times to larger accommodations. I have read their list of rules and it definitely reads as though children voted for them, but they are very sensible. I look forward to visiting next year!
      - mpthrapp 12y ago
        Do you mind if I ask where you're from? That sounds like the one I went to. Also, my email is on my profile if you have any questions.
        icelancer 12y ago
        I'd prefer not to disclose publicly, but your email is not actually in your profile. You can email my throwaway, mike.anon at hotmail dot com.
- ljosa 12y ago
  Last year, we visited and considered the Subbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts (the original one). A friend's daughter goes there. What we learned is that there has been a shift in philosophy over the years. There used to be a role for adults as facilitators: they suggested activities that they thought the children would like and benefit from, and they helped bring them about. These days, there is a deep distrust of any idea coming from an adult. Even a suggestion is seen as compulsion. When children show interest in academic pursuits, it is often assumed that the parents have set them up to it. That is also seen as compulsion, and the activity is discouraged. As a result, the school is full of art and music, but the chemistry lab that was once there is gone, and the library is stale. Instead, we ended up sending our daughter to Macomber Center for Self-Directed Learning, also in Framingham. It was started a couple of years ago as a response to what had happened at Sudbury Valley, and has kept the active role of the adults.
hoggle 12y ago
Is it freedom when I can't make an informed decision on what to do with my life? Is it freedom when I inherit the values of those who teach me, making them the foundation of my (sub-conscious) thinking?
- anon4 12y ago
  Is it an intelligent post when it's arguing semantics vapidly?
- calibraxis 12y ago
  This is just a news article, with no real details. If we investigate the relevant lit, we might see explorations and experiments regarding what levels of guidance assist children best. As for pedagogy, a good one can support children in thinking for themselves, with the support of teachers who no doubt think differently than the child. Clearly better than the craven child abuse (caning) that normal school administrators believed in.
ars 12y ago
Why do they always make these experimental child-driven schools for the "bad" children? The truants, and the misbehaved. Why not try it for the "best" children? Those who have a real desire and ability to learn, but don't necessarily fit in in a regular school. Provide classes, and let the child decide which to go to. Give exams, but don't record the grade - just give it to the child so they know how they are doing.
- lordbusiness 12y ago
  Montessori is built specifically on these principles, and is widely adopted [citation needed ;-)] by parents of gifted kids who struggle with the grind of the regular school systems. (At least, in the western world). Also, home schooling is growing in popularity in many progressive countries, largely to cater to child-led learning.
  - lodewijkadlp 12y ago
    Montessori turned into regular education when it touched regulation and general stupidity. Nothing left of these principles.
  - hamai 12y ago
    (Engrish ahead...) I have great memories from a Montessori School I went to as a kid. Spent most of my childhood education there. It was a big house, each room was dedicated to a subject and students would change rooms, big shared tables and very few students per room. I also don't remember grades or at least no focus on it. When I got to a normal school it was one big room packed with tiny individual chairs, all classes happened in that room, everything was easy, suddenly I was a "top student" and grades were a carrot to chase after. I didn't turned out exactly a Noam Chomsky but I find it funny he had this same experience while going from an alternative education to a traditional one. I think he talks about it in this interview: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20130326.htm http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20130326.htm
- DanBC 12y ago
  Governments are not brave. England has about 17,000 primary schools and about 4,000,000 primary school children. (ages 4 to 11). This group would be amazing for randomised controlled studies of teaching methods. But teachers hate being told how to teach[1]; parents would not like the idea that their child is getting the placaebo teaching method[2]; and governments are not brave enough to try it.
someone77 12y ago
Summerhill: a Radical Approach to Child Rearing is an awesome book and explains how a free school works and why. The Summerhill school has been around for decades and is successful, and probably inspired all of the schools discussed in the article (the book was published in 1960). It optimizes for pyschology --- not pedagogy. This is why it is free: freedom but not license, which to Americans, would be better stated as: an environment without submission and without domination (so, as opposed to an anarchic school, teachers are not submitting to arbitrary demands of children). A healthy degree of assertion develops in this environment. I've seen Sudbury graduates describe this type of school as a generator of entrepreneurs --- they start businesses afterwards and become successful (although from the Summerhill point of view, success is having a happy and flourishing life). I've found many papers across the years, while researching this topic, that, added together, support the idea that learning is affective and pyschology should be an organizing principle of the school.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  Yes, the article discusses and describes Summerhill, and mentions that it inspired the school that's the main focus of the first part of the article: > There is really just one genuine free school left. Summerhill is a boarding school in Suffolk that inspired Ord to set up Scotland Road.
lodewijkadlp 12y ago
I've been student at "De Ruimte Soest" and I'm a fair bit more educated about the "movement" than the one who wrote a one-off article pretending it's only a single school! It's called Democratic education in it's present shape. It has been shown kids end up no worse than kids in other schools. (I just finished a BA comp.sci at the University of Utrecht) On mobile, but ama I guess?
robotkilla 12y ago
Off topic, but did anyone else notice that the BBC's video player's audio control goes to eleven?
- kazagistar 12y ago
  I mean, if you are making an arbitrary numeric scale, might as well make it rock.
japhyr 12y ago
One change I'd like to see in education is a wider use of competency-based education. In this approach, students earn their credit when they have mastered the material for a course, not just at the end of a semester. This approach can be made to work for high-performing students, and low-performing students. Master the material in a course in half the traditional time? Earn your credit then. Need another month to master the material? Take that time, and earn your credit when you're competent in the material. Most of us know the adage that "work expands to fill the time we are given to accomplish it". This is perhaps nowhere more true than in school. Take the time component out of learning assessment, and let people progress at their own pace. Most students are capable of working much more efficiently than they do, but there's no incentive to do so. In fact, there's a disincentive for most people; if you finish early, the teacher will probably just give you more work. Some good teachers motivate strong students to finish early so they can move on to more interesting work; I've heard far more stories of teachers who respond to early completion by just offering more of the same work. If you're curious about this, a good place to start reading is on the Competency Works site: http://www.competencyworks.org/resources/recommended-reading/ http://www.competencyworks.org/resources/recommended-reading...
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  The barrier to implementing this would surely be teaching resources, how do you teach a class if all students are at different stages in the course material? You would need to have very small class sizes.
  - japhyr 12y ago
    You are certainly correct in identifying one of the challenges to implementing this kind of model. But the reality is, that students in most classes are at different stages of understanding. We're just used to a model where everyone is expected to be at the same place all the time, and tend to bore the students who are "ahead" and frustrate the students who are "behind". There are other models, which address this issue of pacing and differentiation effectively. Sorry to not give a more complete answer at the moment.
  - saraid216 12y ago
fennecfoxen 12y ago
"Odd thing it is—the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’ You mustn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school ... and it’s all correct!" -- C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945
jtbigwoo 12y ago
We weren't quite as experimental, but my high school was built around an "open" plan where there were no walls between classrooms (except the noisy or smelly classes like wood shop or chemistry.) Classes would have a designated space to bunch their desks around the teacher's desk and a free-standing chalkboard. The system was supposed to allow students to overhear lectures from neighboring classes and teachers to team up or answer questions for each other. It was a fairly miserable failure. Unless your teacher was really loud it was too hard to hear lectures. It was too hard to concentrate during tests and too easy for one disruptive class to ruin six other classes. (On a minor note, most teachers really hated only having one chalkboard instead of a whole wall.) By the time I got there (twenty years after the school opened), there were temporary walls everywhere and the school had mostly switched back to a traditional layout.
kingkawn 12y ago
A few weeks ago I painted a mural with the students at the Albany Free School in upstate NY. The school was founded in the late 60s, with a setup that is similar to what is described in this article. I found that the students interacted with me and the project in the way I'd expect confident adults to do. They had a self-possession that I have almost never experienced in children, and rarely find in adults. A curriculum primarily centered around freedom had given them the opportunity to learn to listen to and trust their own internal narrative. After spending a number of days working with them I was convinced that all people, children and adults, need freedom of choice in their lives. Not because of the products that come out of it, but because of the people that emerge from it.
BenderrTheRobot 12y ago
Based on the terms and phrases used, I might consider using another term to describe these experimental schools instead of anarchic.

In "The Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1974), there is an interesting discussion about the idea that removing university grades would provide a better education. "[A student at a grade-less school would] be a free man. He wouldnt need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and theyd better come up with it. Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldnt stop with rote engineering information."

ars 12y ago
Isn't this basically what auditing classes does? It's often free as well.
- VLM 12y ago
  Its the inevitable result of grade inflation.
- frobozz 12y ago
  Yes, but at the potential expense of grade-bearing classes, and because grades seem to be important, grade-bearing classes tend to take a higher priority than interesting non-grade bearing ones. At university, I audited several modules, and there were many that I wanted to attend, but couldn't, either due to timetabling clashes with the classes I was supposed to attend, or because the process for attending classes in disciplines entirely unrelated to my subject was prohibitive. When the workload expected of me grew too great, I reduced my participation or dropped out of my audited classes. With the removal of grades (and compulsory modules) entirely, I might have dropped some of my graded modules in favour of others.

teddyh 12y ago

This is about the UK. There is apparently something like it in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School

icelancer 12y ago
Hmm. One about 45 minutes away from my house. I have a 3 year old son and I am deeply troubled with the ideas of where to send him for school. I may look into this, thank you.
- mpthrapp 12y ago
  As someone who went to a Sudbury school as a child, I highly recommend at least giving it a look.
  - icelancer 12y ago
    I will. It looks like my local chapter has been very successful and has had to move three times to larger accommodations. I have read their list of rules and it definitely reads as though children voted for them, but they are very sensible. I look forward to visiting next year!
    - mpthrapp 12y ago
      Do you mind if I ask where you're from? That sounds like the one I went to. Also, my email is on my profile if you have any questions.
      - icelancer 12y ago
        I'd prefer not to disclose publicly, but your email is not actually in your profile. You can email my throwaway, mike.anon at hotmail dot com.
ljosa 12y ago
Last year, we visited and considered the Subbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts (the original one). A friend's daughter goes there. What we learned is that there has been a shift in philosophy over the years. There used to be a role for adults as facilitators: they suggested activities that they thought the children would like and benefit from, and they helped bring them about. These days, there is a deep distrust of any idea coming from an adult. Even a suggestion is seen as compulsion. When children show interest in academic pursuits, it is often assumed that the parents have set them up to it. That is also seen as compulsion, and the activity is discouraged. As a result, the school is full of art and music, but the chemistry lab that was once there is gone, and the library is stale. Instead, we ended up sending our daughter to Macomber Center for Self-Directed Learning, also in Framingham. It was started a couple of years ago as a response to what had happened at Sudbury Valley, and has kept the active role of the adults.

hoggle 12y ago

Is it freedom when I can't make an informed decision on what to do with my life? Is it freedom when I inherit the values of those who teach me, making them the foundation of my (sub-conscious) thinking?

anon4 12y ago
Is it an intelligent post when it's arguing semantics vapidly?
calibraxis 12y ago
This is just a news article, with no real details. If we investigate the relevant lit, we might see explorations and experiments regarding what levels of guidance assist children best. As for pedagogy, a good one can support children in thinking for themselves, with the support of teachers who no doubt think differently than the child. Clearly better than the craven child abuse (caning) that normal school administrators believed in.

ars 12y ago

Why do they always make these experimental child-driven schools for the "bad" children? The truants, and the misbehaved. Why not try it for the "best" children? Those who have a real desire and ability to learn, but don't necessarily fit in in a regular school. Provide classes, and let the child decide which to go to. Give exams, but don't record the grade - just give it to the child so they know how they are doing.

lordbusiness 12y ago
Montessori is built specifically on these principles, and is widely adopted [citation needed ;-)] by parents of gifted kids who struggle with the grind of the regular school systems. (At least, in the western world). Also, home schooling is growing in popularity in many progressive countries, largely to cater to child-led learning.
- lodewijkadlp 12y ago
  Montessori turned into regular education when it touched regulation and general stupidity. Nothing left of these principles.
- hamai 12y ago
  (Engrish ahead...) I have great memories from a Montessori School I went to as a kid. Spent most of my childhood education there. It was a big house, each room was dedicated to a subject and students would change rooms, big shared tables and very few students per room. I also don't remember grades or at least no focus on it. When I got to a normal school it was one big room packed with tiny individual chairs, all classes happened in that room, everything was easy, suddenly I was a "top student" and grades were a carrot to chase after. I didn't turned out exactly a Noam Chomsky but I find it funny he had this same experience while going from an alternative education to a traditional one. I think he talks about it in this interview: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20130326.htm http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20130326.htm
DanBC 12y ago
Governments are not brave. England has about 17,000 primary schools and about 4,000,000 primary school children. (ages 4 to 11). This group would be amazing for randomised controlled studies of teaching methods. But teachers hate being told how to teach[1]; parents would not like the idea that their child is getting the placaebo teaching method[2]; and governments are not brave enough to try it.

someone77 12y ago

Summerhill: a Radical Approach to Child Rearing is an awesome book and explains how a free school works and why. The Summerhill school has been around for decades and is successful, and probably inspired all of the schools discussed in the article (the book was published in 1960). It optimizes for pyschology --- not pedagogy. This is why it is free: freedom but not license, which to Americans, would be better stated as: an environment without submission and without domination (so, as opposed to an anarchic school, teachers are not submitting to arbitrary demands of children). A healthy degree of assertion develops in this environment. I've seen Sudbury graduates describe this type of school as a generator of entrepreneurs --- they start businesses afterwards and become successful (although from the Summerhill point of view, success is having a happy and flourishing life). I've found many papers across the years, while researching this topic, that, added together, support the idea that learning is affective and pyschology should be an organizing principle of the school.

jrochkind1 12y ago
Yes, the article discusses and describes Summerhill, and mentions that it inspired the school that's the main focus of the first part of the article: > There is really just one genuine free school left. Summerhill is a boarding school in Suffolk that inspired Ord to set up Scotland Road.

lodewijkadlp 12y ago

I've been student at "De Ruimte Soest" and I'm a fair bit more educated about the "movement" than the one who wrote a one-off article pretending it's only a single school! It's called Democratic education in it's present shape. It has been shown kids end up no worse than kids in other schools. (I just finished a BA comp.sci at the University of Utrecht) On mobile, but ama I guess?

robotkilla 12y ago

Off topic, but did anyone else notice that the BBC's video player's audio control goes to eleven?

kazagistar 12y ago
I mean, if you are making an arbitrary numeric scale, might as well make it rock.

japhyr 12y ago

One change I'd like to see in education is a wider use of competency-based education. In this approach, students earn their credit when they have mastered the material for a course, not just at the end of a semester. This approach can be made to work for high-performing students, and low-performing students. Master the material in a course in half the traditional time? Earn your credit then. Need another month to master the material? Take that time, and earn your credit when you're competent in the material. Most of us know the adage that "work expands to fill the time we are given to accomplish it". This is perhaps nowhere more true than in school. Take the time component out of learning assessment, and let people progress at their own pace. Most students are capable of working much more efficiently than they do, but there's no incentive to do so. In fact, there's a disincentive for most people; if you finish early, the teacher will probably just give you more work. Some good teachers motivate strong students to finish early so they can move on to more interesting work; I've heard far more stories of teachers who respond to early completion by just offering more of the same work. If you're curious about this, a good place to start reading is on the Competency Works site: http://www.competencyworks.org/resources/recommended-reading/ http://www.competencyworks.org/resources/recommended-reading...

jiggy2011 12y ago
The barrier to implementing this would surely be teaching resources, how do you teach a class if all students are at different stages in the course material? You would need to have very small class sizes.
- japhyr 12y ago
  You are certainly correct in identifying one of the challenges to implementing this kind of model. But the reality is, that students in most classes are at different stages of understanding. We're just used to a model where everyone is expected to be at the same place all the time, and tend to bore the students who are "ahead" and frustrate the students who are "behind". There are other models, which address this issue of pacing and differentiation effectively. Sorry to not give a more complete answer at the moment.
- saraid216 12y ago

fennecfoxen 12y ago

"Odd thing it is—the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’ You mustn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school ... and it’s all correct!" -- C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945

jtbigwoo 12y ago

We weren't quite as experimental, but my high school was built around an "open" plan where there were no walls between classrooms (except the noisy or smelly classes like wood shop or chemistry.) Classes would have a designated space to bunch their desks around the teacher's desk and a free-standing chalkboard. The system was supposed to allow students to overhear lectures from neighboring classes and teachers to team up or answer questions for each other. It was a fairly miserable failure. Unless your teacher was really loud it was too hard to hear lectures. It was too hard to concentrate during tests and too easy for one disruptive class to ruin six other classes. (On a minor note, most teachers really hated only having one chalkboard instead of a whole wall.) By the time I got there (twenty years after the school opened), there were temporary walls everywhere and the school had mostly switched back to a traditional layout.

kingkawn 12y ago

A few weeks ago I painted a mural with the students at the Albany Free School in upstate NY. The school was founded in the late 60s, with a setup that is similar to what is described in this article. I found that the students interacted with me and the project in the way I'd expect confident adults to do. They had a self-possession that I have almost never experienced in children, and rarely find in adults. A curriculum primarily centered around freedom had given them the opportunity to learn to listen to and trust their own internal narrative. After spending a number of days working with them I was convinced that all people, children and adults, need freedom of choice in their lives. Not because of the products that come out of it, but because of the people that emerge from it.

BenderrTheRobot 12y ago

Based on the terms and phrases used, I might consider using another term to describe these experimental schools instead of anarchic.