Great Article on Sudbury Valley-type School
Education: Class Dismissed
By: Hara Estroff Marano
Summary: It’s every modern parent’s worst nightmare—a school where kids can play all day. But no one takes the easy way out, and graduates seem to have a head start on the information age. Welcome to Sudbury Valley.
“I’ve learned a lot about how my mind works by paying attention to how I unicycle,” Ben declared in preparation for high school graduation. And from the time he was 12, Ben paid attention to nothing so much as unicycling. When students elsewhere were puzzling over, say, the periodic table, Ben, along with a handful of schoolmates, was mostly struggling up and racing down New England mountainsides, dodging rocks, mud and other obstacles. His “frantic fights to maintain balance” demanded both deep focus and moment-to-moment planning. But they gave him something missing from most classrooms today—a passion for pursuing challenges and inhaling the skills and information (to say nothing of the confidence) to master life’s complexities.
Read the entire article here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20060424-000004.xml