Alan or Laura Gabelsberg (argable@swbell.net)
Thu, 05 Apr 2001 09:57:12 -0500
I can certainly appreciate your perspective on this, as well as John,
Christopher, and Alan's. I guess I dislike the idea of getting information
on the graduates only from the school itself. That is not to say that I
would not want the school's own version of the facts as well - I DO want to
know what the school considers about its success. It would just be nice to
have more than this one source for this information - forget about having
raw, razor-sharp data to throw around (which is usually impossible to
achieve when talking about education anyway.) Even just having the same
accounts that are contained in Kingdom of Childhood coming from an outside
source would add more impact. On the other hand, I think the point about
not wasting time trying to convince someone who really doesn't want to
believe in this alternative is really true as well. Maybe my question
should have been more along the lines of - why hasn't anyone else already
done this? Why haven't there already been outsiders who have studied the
graduates and published their findings? Any thoughts?
Laura
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-discuss-sudbury-model@aramis.sudval.org
[mailto:owner-discuss-sudbury-model@aramis.sudval.org]On Behalf Of Marko
Koskinen
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 6:08 PM
To: discuss-sudbury-model@aramis.sudval.org
Subject: Re: DSM: objective source of evidence
The problem with numbers is that they really don't tell anything
important about Sudbury Model schools. People who have hard time
believing in the model have equally hard time with it even if they saw
the data. This is because it totally wrecks all that they are made to
believe in. Such an enormous change in thinking cannot happen without
effort and the effort needed is for them to think and usually people who
don't believe in Sudbury Model are also taught not to think for
themselves. They believe in authorities, but if the authority tells them
to think themselves, they are in deep trouble and usually rather try to
avoid such trouble...
So, the the point of the data is mostly to be able to say that it is
available and anyone is free to examine it. But even then many people
say that "it's not from an objective source". And even if it was they
could say "but they are all some special kids, it couldn't work with our
kids", or "yeah, but it's a middle-class school, but how about the poor
kids".
So, the lesson I'm slowly starting to learn is not to waste my time with
people who clearly DON'T WANT TO believe, but rather find people who are
genuinely interested and give them SOME information and let them do the
learning themselves. We cannot make people believe something they don't
want to, so why bother.
Marko
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