A Recent Sudbury Valley School Video
A British documentary recently profiled Sudbury Valley school. Here’s the video link.
A British documentary recently profiled Sudbury Valley school. Here’s the video link.
After hearing a short explanation of our school’s philosophy, many people understandably try to link it with something already familiar to them. We have tried to be fair but clear in distinguishing ourselves from other philosophies. However, all the subtleties of these educational models are not laid out and comparisons are not made from every angle.
Although at times Fairhaven School’s ideas may seem new, people have been thinking- and writing- about nature and democracy for some time. After posting my previous post (“Spring Is Building”), I found myself reading Walt Whitman’s collected journal entries, Specimen Days and Collect. Among many other things– it is Whitman, after all–this book details both…
I have been working at Sudbury Valley School since my kids were little. They are older than many of you are now, and those of my grandchildren that are old enough to go to school are going to a school like Fairhaven, and like SVS, in Oregon. So it is clear to me: I trust children. My children trust children. I even trust grownups.
We all think our kids are special and brilliant and couldn’t possibly do the bone-headed things other kids do. As a staff member with two kids at school, I was able to see that my kids—although, of course, brilliant and special—were among peers who were equally brilliant and special, and that my kids were just as capable of spinning tales at the dinner table about why they’d been hauled into JC through no fault of their own.
After sixteen years at Evergreen Sudbury School in Maine and Fairhaven School in Maryland, I retired in June. It was time to go and I have exciting plans, but leaving was hard. (And I hope to be back now and then as a sub.) I was tempted to write a thesis about how school has…
Recently the idea of “Unschooling” has come up in the news, raising suspicions of the education those who are “unschooled” receive. There was an article in the news with George Stephanopolous about this idea of non-traditional schooling. (http://news.yahoo.com/video/health-15749655/parents-defend-unschooling-19235564) People have been confusing this concept with Fairhaven’s model of schooling, so I’m here to explain the…