- Joined
- Mar 11, 2016
Sudbury Schools/Free Schools
Free schools, also called Sudbury schools, first started to emerge in the counterculture movement of the 60s/70s. These weren't just hippy schools where students followed a new-age or "make love not war" curriculum, these were schools with no formal curriculum or teachers, mixing of students of all ages, and where students had the absolute right to determine what (if anything) they studied.
Sudbury Valley School (SVS), the first Sudbury school, was founded in 1968 by Daniel Greenberg, a physicist with no education or child development background; from there, thirty-plus schools in multiple countries have opened based on the exact same model. This OP is going to focus on SVS, but the thread's open to dirt/discussion on any of the Sudbury/free schools.
Mr. Greenberg did an interview with a British station, some of the highlights from which were:
* Greenberg believes that children should be given the same autonomy and credence as grown adults from the age of 4 (+ or -).
* Adult supervision is not a given, and students can spend the day playing videogames if they want
* Honor system used for attendance, students only need to show up 5 1/2 hours a day (legal minimum) and have significant flexibility in arrival/departure time.
This is already playing with fire, but it gets worse somehow: The Sudbury Valley "school" isn't there to educate or support kids, and in some ways it even encourages bad habits.
http://archive.is/vF6i http://archive.is/QyrAu
* Learning is a byproduct of students doing what they want, rather than a goal or focus.
* Students work (for free!) in the front office. This is not unique to Sudbury Valley either, Philadelphia Free School also puts its students to work on jobs normally done by full-time staff
* Students hold bake sales to get equipment they need, rather than ask staff what they can arrange.
* Students are expected to figure things out on their own, without guidance from teachers (assuming the linked story isn't made-up of course).
* Videogames are good for developing minds, and children know to gravitate towards the ones that benefit them
I know these links are all related to Sudbury Valley School, but it was the model and philosophy that every other Sudbury/free school copied-they all share the same exceptional form of "teaching"/"learning", governance, and even age mixing.
Like many other lolcows, Sudbury Valley School reacts very negatively to criticism even if true.
* In mid-2001, a "60 Minutes" reporter filmed an episode at the Sudbury Valley school. Footage showed exactly what you'd expect: no classes, kids running wild because, well, they're kids, and minimal adult supervision. Rather than fix the situation, the school banned reporters from campus.
* In Spring 2011, a Boston-area paper described SVS as "A School With no Rules", resulting in severe butthurt from students and staff but no rebuttal to the allegations.
One thing specific to Sudbury Valley School is that it encourages, but not requires, students to write a thesis in their final term there. For any other high school, that would be unusually heavy work; for this school, it would be a good rebuttal to accusations of no learning/structure. But since we're in exceptional individual territory, it's a complete farce. I can't find detailed requirements or guidelines, but the examples I've found are maybe eight pages long with no citations, focus, headings, or conclusions, and even written in 1st person. Not even 9th grade standards of length or professionalism, and they have the gall to call it a "thesis" written by a "high school graduate".
With all this in mind, of course the students don't turn out well: Sudbury Valley won't even confirm its students are all literate & only has anecdotal evidence to claim its model works.
Other free/Sudbury schools:
http://archive.is/UEh8V (Brooklyn Free School)
* Students teaching classes on advanced subjects
* Mother of a student there wants him to be happy, rather than academically successful.
* Some parents hire private tutors to teach basic material like long division and spelling, because the school will not cover it on its own and children won't necessarily want to learn it on their own
Popular model with hard-left sites: http://archive.is/8xJnf
Links:
Sudbury Valley School's webpage
Website about the Sudbury model in general
Waldorf (Steiner) schools
Waldorf schools, also called Steiner schools are a whole different brand of crazy: if Sudbury schools are disorganized communes, Waldorf schools are isolated cults. Whereas Sudbury Valley was founded by a counterculture physicist with no idea of how kids work, Waldorf schools were founded in the early 1900s by an artist with no idea of how kids work by the name of Rudolf Steiner. This was new-age self indulgence before new-age self-indulgence was a thing.https://waldorfeducation.org/waldorf_education
* The whole philosophy, behind the schools, Anthroposophy, is just a more verbose form of
or a new-age religion: "At the heart of Anthropsophy is the belief that humanity has the wisdom to transform itself and the world, through one's own spiritual development.... Waldorf [e]ducation holds as its primary intention the ideal of bringing forth - in every child - his or her unique potential in a way that serves the further development of humanity".
* Arts are taught & integrated from a young age, and supposedly "experienced" rather than just taught. By integrated, I mean students "self-express" what they've learned through art, rather than moresane typical methods like homework or quizzes.
* The alphabet isn't introduced until first grade, and reading doesn't begin until the end of first grade.
* Tying into the above, Waldorf schools introduce foreign languages before kids can even read and write English.
* Schools "teach" eurythymy, the "art" of making music and speech visible, especially the tone.
*Students have the same teacher for five to eight years at a time, well beyond the point where students normally have a dedicated/specialized teacher for each subject.
* No exposure to computers for younger students, and parents are encouraged to limit media/computer access at home too, even for teens.
* Of course Waldorf schools don't track students' SAT or ACT scores; students who want to do well on those need a private tutor.
I had to direct link above because the pages do not work with archive.is or the Wayback Machine. AFAIK that's not a sign of bad programming, that's something the webmaster would have to gone out of his/her way to include; I also got asked for login credentials a couple times on their FAQ page. These people are nuts. Here's the robots.txt for those with more tech knowledge than I.
Link to Waldorf Schools of North America
EDIT 1: Added headers & Waldorf/Anthroscopic school info, changed title to reflect it. Thanks to @DykesDykesChina for the suggestion.
Free schools, also called Sudbury schools, first started to emerge in the counterculture movement of the 60s/70s. These weren't just hippy schools where students followed a new-age or "make love not war" curriculum, these were schools with no formal curriculum or teachers, mixing of students of all ages, and where students had the absolute right to determine what (if anything) they studied.
Sudbury Valley School (SVS), the first Sudbury school, was founded in 1968 by Daniel Greenberg, a physicist with no education or child development background; from there, thirty-plus schools in multiple countries have opened based on the exact same model. This OP is going to focus on SVS, but the thread's open to dirt/discussion on any of the Sudbury/free schools.
Mr. Greenberg did an interview with a British station, some of the highlights from which were:
* Greenberg believes that children should be given the same autonomy and credence as grown adults from the age of 4 (+ or -).
* Adult supervision is not a given, and students can spend the day playing videogames if they want
* Honor system used for attendance, students only need to show up 5 1/2 hours a day (legal minimum) and have significant flexibility in arrival/departure time.
This is already playing with fire, but it gets worse somehow: The Sudbury Valley "school" isn't there to educate or support kids, and in some ways it even encourages bad habits.
http://archive.is/vF6i http://archive.is/QyrAu
* Learning is a byproduct of students doing what they want, rather than a goal or focus.
* Students work (for free!) in the front office. This is not unique to Sudbury Valley either, Philadelphia Free School also puts its students to work on jobs normally done by full-time staff
* Students hold bake sales to get equipment they need, rather than ask staff what they can arrange.
* Students are expected to figure things out on their own, without guidance from teachers (assuming the linked story isn't made-up of course).
* Videogames are good for developing minds, and children know to gravitate towards the ones that benefit them
I know these links are all related to Sudbury Valley School, but it was the model and philosophy that every other Sudbury/free school copied-they all share the same exceptional form of "teaching"/"learning", governance, and even age mixing.
Like many other lolcows, Sudbury Valley School reacts very negatively to criticism even if true.
* In mid-2001, a "60 Minutes" reporter filmed an episode at the Sudbury Valley school. Footage showed exactly what you'd expect: no classes, kids running wild because, well, they're kids, and minimal adult supervision. Rather than fix the situation, the school banned reporters from campus.
* In Spring 2011, a Boston-area paper described SVS as "A School With no Rules", resulting in severe butthurt from students and staff but no rebuttal to the allegations.
One thing specific to Sudbury Valley School is that it encourages, but not requires, students to write a thesis in their final term there. For any other high school, that would be unusually heavy work; for this school, it would be a good rebuttal to accusations of no learning/structure. But since we're in exceptional individual territory, it's a complete farce. I can't find detailed requirements or guidelines, but the examples I've found are maybe eight pages long with no citations, focus, headings, or conclusions, and even written in 1st person. Not even 9th grade standards of length or professionalism, and they have the gall to call it a "thesis" written by a "high school graduate".
With all this in mind, of course the students don't turn out well: Sudbury Valley won't even confirm its students are all literate & only has anecdotal evidence to claim its model works.
Other free/Sudbury schools:
http://archive.is/UEh8V (Brooklyn Free School)
* Students teaching classes on advanced subjects
* Mother of a student there wants him to be happy, rather than academically successful.
* Some parents hire private tutors to teach basic material like long division and spelling, because the school will not cover it on its own and children won't necessarily want to learn it on their own
Popular model with hard-left sites: http://archive.is/8xJnf
Links:
Sudbury Valley School's webpage
Website about the Sudbury model in general
Waldorf (Steiner) schools
Waldorf schools, also called Steiner schools are a whole different brand of crazy: if Sudbury schools are disorganized communes, Waldorf schools are isolated cults. Whereas Sudbury Valley was founded by a counterculture physicist with no idea of how kids work, Waldorf schools were founded in the early 1900s by an artist with no idea of how kids work by the name of Rudolf Steiner. This was new-age self indulgence before new-age self-indulgence was a thing.https://waldorfeducation.org/waldorf_education
* The whole philosophy, behind the schools, Anthroposophy, is just a more verbose form of
or a new-age religion: "At the heart of Anthropsophy is the belief that humanity has the wisdom to transform itself and the world, through one's own spiritual development.... Waldorf [e]ducation holds as its primary intention the ideal of bringing forth - in every child - his or her unique potential in a way that serves the further development of humanity".* Arts are taught & integrated from a young age, and supposedly "experienced" rather than just taught. By integrated, I mean students "self-express" what they've learned through art, rather than more
* The alphabet isn't introduced until first grade, and reading doesn't begin until the end of first grade.
* Tying into the above, Waldorf schools introduce foreign languages before kids can even read and write English.
* Schools "teach" eurythymy, the "art" of making music and speech visible, especially the tone.
*Students have the same teacher for five to eight years at a time, well beyond the point where students normally have a dedicated/specialized teacher for each subject.
* No exposure to computers for younger students, and parents are encouraged to limit media/computer access at home too, even for teens.
* Of course Waldorf schools don't track students' SAT or ACT scores; students who want to do well on those need a private tutor.
I had to direct link above because the pages do not work with archive.is or the Wayback Machine. AFAIK that's not a sign of bad programming, that's something the webmaster would have to gone out of his/her way to include; I also got asked for login credentials a couple times on their FAQ page. These people are nuts. Here's the robots.txt for those with more tech knowledge than I.
Link to Waldorf Schools of North America
EDIT 1: Added headers & Waldorf/Anthroscopic school info, changed title to reflect it. Thanks to @DykesDykesChina for the suggestion.
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