The News-Leader (MO) covers a presentation by an educator with a radical plan for schools that might be suitable for, oh, about 1% of the student population:
Just hear me out, educator Bruce Smith told a small crowd Monday at Drury University. Students should set their own schedule, work at their own pace and decide, in many ways, what they want to learn. Smith was providing an overview of the Sudbury schools model, which emphasizes independence and democracy - with students and teachers being the governing force and decision makers.
Here we go again. The fetishization of unstructured learning and the assumption that students today always know enough about what they like to choose anything at all.
Smith is a former Columbia high school teacher who left public schools because he thought the system was squashing the natural curiosity in children. The schools stress independent thinking and de-emphasize standardized testing. Students are encouraged to follow their passions.
I wonder if "follow" means "learn the facts about," or if it's okay to just be independently "interested." One could argue that being passionate yet uninformed about a topic is worse than being ignorant and uninterested.
Students ages 4-19 are accepted. There are no formal grades. Depending on state standards, many Sudbury schools do not require standardized testing.
If there are no formal grades, the anti-testing attitude is a given. Grades, and test scores, imply a set standard to which students are being compared. That standard might be a set amount of facts learned, or how other students are doing with the same material, but it's always there. Except at Sudbury schools, where their philosophy sounds like it would make any sort of useful comparison virtually impossible.
After the presentation, Smith fielded audience questions ranging from student-teacher ratios - although there are no specific ratios, ratios are much smaller than in the public school system - to how the system deals with children with special needs.
I wonder if any questions were along the lines of, "What will you do to ensure that my child learns something in your school? What will you do to ensure that they learn something that will allow them to support themselves as mature adults?"
How does a student know if he's graduated - one man asked. The crowd laughed. In order to graduate, students must prepare and defend a thesis over a six-month period, Smith said.
"Say what? What if my child needs more than six months to explore his chosen passion? What if he doesn't express himself well in writing or in speech, instead choosing interpretive dance? What if his style of learning precludes him being required to defend anything about it to impartial observers? Didn't you say that he gets to decide how quickly his education goes? How dare you set such an arbitrary and unmoving standard! My child is special and can't possibly develop his passionate work of, of, whatever it is, on that sort of schedule! "
And if Sudbury school administrators expect never to hear that, I have some lovely, inhabitable lakefront property in New Orleans to sell them.
One parent speaks out in support of the school:
"I would say one of the biggest ones is the ability for my daughter to be able to know herself and make choices and have freedom," Frey said. Frey is against standardized testing, saying it adds stress at a young age, doesn't test children on skills they will need in real life and places an emphasis on learning how to test, instead of learning.
Because, as we all know, life never requires that you be able to withstand any sort of test, or live by someone else's schedule. Making life choices also never requires the drudgery of learning facts. Life involves no stress, and no restrictions on freedom, and no knowledge of standardized-test friendly skills like literacy and numeracy.
Can you imagine how a child who was actually in this system from ages 4 to 19 would do in the real world? The only one I bet would survive would be the natural scientific geek who - to the horror of the school, I would think - would insist on being taught rigorous mathematics and chemistry and biology. This would be the lucky child who understood intuitively that many of the world's triumphs and adult successes don't involve passion and self-knowledge so much as they involve lots of hard work, stress, and precise calculations.
Posted by kswygert at October 18, 2005 11:35 AM