Dear Mike,
Thank you. Another beautiful post.
You wrote:
> I think we need to recognize that we are a small minority
> in a larger community that requires schools and we are a school.
> Freedom, etc. is our basis, but education (learning, development,
> growth, etc.) is what both we and society anticipate of children as
> they move from infancy to adulthood.
The above is a perfect statement of a paradigm that I call education. Looking
at things in that paradigm, we see that we only have a different pedagogy
than other types of schools. In that paradigm the child is expected (we
"anticipate") to learn, develop, and grow. The basic, core view of the child
has not been altered from other types of schools or education in general.
That basic view is that the child is an improver. It is a view that the child
is a developer, a learner, a grower.
But there is a second paradigm. Your statement : "We don't evaluate their
progress" is a near perfect statement of this second paradigm. Sudbury fails
to evaluate their progress, not for days or weeks, but years, decades even.
It is a stunning suspension of the education paradigm. Sudbury, for years and
years, is not doing education with the child, they are doing freedom. We are
assured of this when we look at the Plasticine work. Go to Sudbury and look
directly at the social and cultural production of free children. It is not
education. I have visited 80 of the other types of schools and taught in
three of them. None of them, in a thousand years, would show Plasticine. They
don't allow the freedom. It is freedom that defines the second paradigm.
(By the way, it is not only the child that is free; when we (the children,
the parents, the staff, the founders and the assembly) fail to evaluate
progress, well then, that's our freedom.)
And this second paradigm happens the first moment the four year old arrives
at the "school" house door. It happens when, as Sudbury has done for 33
years, they are offered real and true freedom. It happens exactly in that
first moment, when we fail to anticipate.
Deep Regards,
Bill Richardson
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