Category: Education

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Visiting Sudbury Valley School (Part 3)

“Don’t do it,” said Mimsy.

Mimsy Sadofsky is one of the pioneers of Sudbury Valley School (SVS). Apart from Dan and Hanna Greenberg, she is one of the school’s longest-serving staff since it opened in 1968. All her three children graduated from the school.

She said those three words as her advice on our desire to open a Sudbury school here in Davao.

“Don’t do it,” she repeated, when I chuckled the first time. “I’m serious,” she said. “Move here, send your kids here.”

Then we talked about the never-ending challenges of starting and running this type of school. You literally get bombarded from everywhere — government, other schools, even parents. She knew the pain, and wanted to spare us or prepare us for it.

Society has a hard time wrapping its head around the idea that there can be any other type of “education” than the “standard” model. Many people have become successful despite not going through the school system or dropping out of it. In fact, some of the most recognizable names in the world were once dropouts – Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres, Tom Hanks, Coco Chanel, Al Pacino, Jim Carrey, Ralph Lauren, and so on.

I’m sure you know someone who didn’t do well in school but are at the top of their game in their business or profession. The person who has the reputation as the best doctor in your community may not have topped the board or graduated with honors. I know several successful businessmen who admit to just copying from their classmates or who were troublemakers.

Even my own father did not finish high school. His schooling was interrupted by World War 2, but his education went on as he learned how to fight and struggle for survival — building a pharmacy business that started from a box of medicines he and his brothers carted to the public market every day.

When he was still alive and active in the business, he was often mistaken for a doctor because he could tell you, from memory, what this or that medicine is for, what the dosage was and what are the side effects. He told me that he and his brothers had to learn all those the hard way, by painstakingly reading the literature found in each box.

Education does happen in the absence of, and in spite of schools. The goal of SVS to provide an environment where students have the time and freedom to explore what it is they really want out of life, how to relate with other people, and discover who they really are — but not to dictate to them what it is they should be learning. Without the desire to learn, teaching is useless.

It is a difficult journey we face, but when my wife asked Mimsy if it was worth it — the heartaches and trials — she answered, “Oh every minute, every second.”

That’s all I need to know that this is a cause worth fighting for, because Davao deserves a Sudbury school.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Killing Joy

When my daughter was in kindergarten, she was often praised for being sociable. Her classroom was a Montessori-type setup where kids were free to roam around and choose different corners where they would play with whatever materials were there. Her teachers would commend her for being helpful towards her classmates, and she would often be found surrounded by friends. She enjoyed going to school.

When she stepped into Grade 1, the environment changed into a more traditional setup with rows of chairs facing the whiteboard. We noticed a gradual shift in her attitude towards school, and one of her teachers complained that she was too talkative.

It was at that moment when I had a first real encounter of what was wrong with school. It takes what is natural and attempts to cage it, all in the name of “molding” and “shaping” the child into what he ought to be.

Little Johnny loved to draw. He would get “oohs” and “aahs” from his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties, and pre-school teachers who encouraged and commended him for his creativity and imagination. How bewildering it must have been for him, when he stepped into the “big school,” that he was now being reprimanded for what had previously garnered praise.  “Johnny, stop drawing and listen to teacher explain the different kinds of rocks!” Then he gets his notebook back after the teacher has inspected it and finds that he has been deducted points for neatness because he doodled on it.

Little Ella enjoyed dancing. She could dance the whole day. She would copy moves from videos she watched. She would make costumes with colored paper. She would gather her friends and choreograph moves. She was a hit at family gatherings and parties. Her kindergarten teachers loved her, especially during special events, because she would readily volunteer to dance. But now that she was a bit older, she doesn’t understand why her teachers keep insisting that she sit still for hours, listening, copying, writing. She would often just fidget and daydream in her seat, and would often get scolded for not paying attention.

“Perhaps, you should have a doctor check on Ella,” said the teacher to her parents. “She might have ADHD.”

How many stories like these have we heard? How many more go untold because we as adults don’t listen, or just shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, that’s how it is,” or “Hey, I survived that. Grow a spine!”

For a lot of kids, the joy of learning, of being curious, is killed at school. What’s worse is that some even develop apathy or downright aversion towards it. Many teens are now suffering from stress or burnout, and perhaps one of the greatest reasons was articulated by Dr. Peter Gray:

“Over the past several decades we’ve continuously increased the amount of time that children spend at school, and at schoolwork at home, and at school-like activities outside of school. We’ve turned childhood into a time of résumé building.”

My daughter is almost going to college now. She has spent the past two years of her life out of school. She took a homeschool program, but she’s also had a lot of time to explore what she wants. She can edit videos like a pro. In fact, she already has several paid projects under her belt. She can create digital designs and illustrations. She likes to bake too. She creates amazing cookies and revel bars and has already sold a lot of those. Her former classmates (aside from her grandparents and aunts) are her most loyal customers. She just shows up in school with her products and she’s almost guaranteed to sell out all of them by the end of the day.

I don’t regret taking her out of school. I think she has learned much more than had she stayed there.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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A Final Word on Finland

Having spent the past few weeks dissecting Finland’s educational system and comparing it to my preferred model, the Sudbury Valley School, has been enlightening for me. I’m not sure if you, my readers, have been similarly enlightened. But they do say that the person who learns most from any lesson is the teacher.

I guess the task of trying to understand the strengths of each model, and then trying to simplify and explain those models in small 500-word chunks (which is my weekly limit for this column) forced me to think of them in ways I had not thought of before.

So what’s my final verdict on the Finland system?

In a previous article, I mentioned seeing it as a halfway point between the strict confines of traditional schooling and the almost total freedom in a Sudbury school. I also mentioned the reason it is so successful in their country is because it moves towards liberation from the rigidity of the old systems.

In fact, an article recently caught my attention that Finland was already considering removing subjects from the curriculum in favor of a more holistic approach:

“Subject-specific lessons – an hour of history in the morning, an hour of geography in the afternoon – are already being phased out for 16-year-olds in the city’s upper schools. They are being replaced by what the Finns call “phenomenon” teaching – or teaching by topic. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take “cafeteria services” lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages (to help serve foreign customers), writing skills and communication skills…More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union – which would merge elements of economics, history (of the countries involved), languages and geography.”

Instead of teaching various trivia per “subject,” they now want students to understand “topics” perhaps like global warming or pollution or recycling. And if it needs a little math or science or history along the way, then that gets taught as well, but it is now relevant because it helps the students understand the topic. It’s not just taught because “hey, you need this in college” or “it’s part of the curriculum” or something like that.

If I were to start a school, I would still go with the Sudbury model. I think it’s the best educational model there is. But for those already running traditional schools, shifting to a Sudbury model might be too radical and would bring a host of other issues that might overwhelm them. The best bet for them is to shift to the Finland model which I think can be done quite easily.

The problem lies not in the “how” as Tim Walker already lays down so many ways schools can start implementing the Finland system. The question is, are the school’s stakeholders — administrators, teachers, parents, students — willing to shift their mindset to accept this more liberal and collaborative approach to education?

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Finland vs Sudbury (Part 1)

For the past two weeks, I had been writing about the Finnish educational system. I would now like to compare it with the democratic school system like Sudbury Valley School, of which I had also previously written.

(If you’re just getting on board my column now, you can read up on my past articles to learn more about these two systems — just click on the following articles to get a more extensive background:

This list is slightly altered from the newspaper version to link directly to the articles)

As a short recap, the Finland model is not that far from the traditional schooling that we know, except that it has a lot of breaks in between subjects (15 minutes after every 45-minute lecture), minimal homework, and offers students more autonomy and collaborative opportunities for both teachers and students.

The Sudbury model or the democratic school model, however, is probably something 99% of you haven’t heard of. The shortest possible way to describe it a school where students are free to do whatever they want, provided that it is legal and within the school rules; and the school rules are decided by votation by both teachers (called staff) and students.

I will not describe the Sudbury model in detail here as I have done that before, and it will take a lot of space. But I believe there is a question on the minds of those reading about it for the first time here: “How can kids learn anything if you just let them do what they want? They’ll just play video games all day!”

The short answer to that is that Sudbury has been turning out productive citizens for the past 50 years (it started in 1968), and according to their studies, around 80% of their graduates go on to the college of their choice. Many schools in other countries have also studied and adopted the Sudbury model. So yes, even if Sudbury had students who played, or fished, or chatted with their friends all day, that doesn’t mean they didn’t learn anything and they grew up to be businessmen, artists, and professionals in various fields just like most everybody else who went through a traditional education.

So given these two systems, which one do I think is better?

I am biased towards the Sudbury model. I happen to think that it is the most liberating concept in education. Sudbury founder, Daniel Greenberg, likes to compare traditional school with prison (and many kids, and even you, may  feel the same way). And the reason it’s prison is because the student has very little freedom — someone else tells him what to study, and for how long, and how he’s supposed to behave, and what he’s supposed to wear, and so on. He is subject to the authority of the teachers and the principal, like prisoners have to listen to their guards or the warden, or risk getting punished.

Now, that is traditional schooling in a nutshell, and if you look at Finland, it still follows the basic framework of traditional education. Everyone has to study their reading, writing and arithmetic, and history, science, geography, algebra, trigonometry, and all these other subjects that other people have deemed “essential” to basic education.

What Finland has done, however,  is to make prison more palatable.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles atwww.freethinking.me.

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Learning Democracy (Part 2)

Part 1 | Part 2

What if we began practicing democracy in school?

Not the pretend democracy we give when we let students choose, for example, whether they want the quiz on Friday or on Monday; or the playhouse democracy we give to student councils and school papers, where they can decide whatever project they want or whatever article they want to print, but all it takes is a word from the principal or the school board and that project can be instantly vetoed, that article immediately censored.

But what if students’ decisions actually mattered? What if they voted on having no uniforms or having no haircut rules and that decision was actually respected? What if students could decide how the school spent its money? What if students voted on which teachers (including administrators) to hire and which ones to fire? What if students could actually choose what they wanted to do — whether it’s to read a pocketbook or to chat with their friends or even to play all day?

You may think that is a recipe for disaster for any school and it wouldn’t last a year, or even a week, but that is what Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts has been doing since day one for the past 50 years. Not only has it survived but it has thrived and become a model for similar types of schools in different cities and countries. Its graduates go on to colleges or trade schools of their choice and are in diverse fields and professions.

Hal Sadofsky, one of the school’s earliest graduates, went on to get a Ph.D. in Mathematics at M.I.T. and is currently an Associate Professor in the University of Oregon. He has this to say: “The most fundamental educational lesson we hope our students will learn is that they are responsible for their own education, and in fact for their own lives. Actually internalizing this, and all that goes with it is the best lesson they can have for the rest of their lives. I believe that it is important for people to acquire knowledge and skills, but I don’t believe I can or should force them to do so. Much more important is for our children to learn that if they value something, it is worth working for, and that if they have a goal they care about, they need to take responsibility for realizing it.”

And the way this lesson is imparted is not through dry lectures but through actual experience, where the student feels and knows that his decisions do matter, and no adult is going to come along and say, “Well that’s interesting, but now it’s time to come in and learn your grammar,” or something along those lines.

Sudbury founder, Daniel Greenberg, says that even he has no special authority or tenure in the school. He has one vote like everybody else, and he always has to perform well in the eyes of the community, or risk being voted out.

In an essay entitled The Significance of the Democratic Model, Greenberg writes, “To educate successfully for democracy, the real life surroundings of the children we seek to educate must be democratic in every respect, through and through, to the core and down to the last detail. The world of the children we want to reach must be a democratic reality, so the children wishing to master it will have no choice but to master the whole intricacy of its democratic structure. Education for democracy demands democratic schools. There is no other way to make it effective.”

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles atwww.freethinking.me.