The school that puts kids in charge of their own education
On a recent Friday afternoon in a sleepy suburb just west of Chicago, 5-year-old Zeke Banks faces several teenagers seated at a table.
Attentive but unperturbed, with big eyes and curly blonde hair, he peers up at them, answering questions about how and why his older brother, Ollie, 7, had knocked him off a ball he was sitting on several days ago.
The older students form the school’s Judicial Committee, or the “JC” as they call it here at the Tallgrass Sudbury School in Riverside, Illinois. There is one adult in the room, but she doesn’t speak at all. The JC’s job is to enforce the school rules and to keep peace in the community.
The ball incident had left Zeke sobbing, feeling small and violated, but he perked right up when someone reminded him he could “call Ollie up” before the JC later that week.
After listening to both sides, the committee issues a simple warning to Ollie. If it becomes a pattern, the committee will take a harder look. Zeke is satisfied. The JC committee has done its job.
Welcome to Tallgrass Sudbury, part of a radical experiment in American education unlike just about any other. Here, kids of all ages don’t just enforce the rules. They also make them. They vote on budgets and hire and fire staff. Each child and each of the two full-time and three part-time staff members gets one vote — regardless of age.
The 20 students here have a startling degree of autonomy. They choose what they do all day, including what and even if they study. The school doesn’t have teachers: it has “staff members” tasked with helping children develop their own interests, but not to pressure them.
Sudbury schools have been quietly doing their thing since 1968, but now they suddenly find themselves part of a broad push-back against what proponents see as one-size-fits-all factory education.
With the advent of Common Core and the ratcheting up of standardized exams aligned to it, American students are facing increased pressure to get into good colleges, which will hopefully lead to stable careers. But reaction has set in, and 2015 may go down as the year of testing backlash.
Anti-testing “opt out” movements are making headlines in Colorado, Florida and New York. Over 100,000 kids reportedly opted out of tests in New York this year. Meanwhile, homeschooling continues to grow. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that by 2013 1.8 million students were homeschooled, up from 850,000 in 1999.
In the midst of the furor for tighter standards, schools like Sudbury are part of the "democratic" or "free schools" movement. Along with their "unschooled" cousins, estimated at about 10 percent of homeschoolers, these alternative approaches to education are responding not with less testing or structure, but with none.
They propose that kids learn best when left to pursue their own interests, surrounded by stimulating peers of all ages and supportive adults. Sudbury is not a retreat to a quieter past: it’s a plunge into an improbable parallel universe.
They are few, but they are not alone. The Alternative Education Resource Organization lists 102 democratic schools in the United States. And at least two prominent psychologists, based at Boston College and New York University, are optimistic about the results. Could this extreme “opt out” option offer insights on how to cultivate, rather than manufacture, emerging adults?
A low hum
At Tallgrass, there is a pleasant, low hum through much of the day as kids wander around, mingling in groups, talking, playing computer games, or reading. A staff member plays tic tac toe with a younger student.
In the Sudbury model, staff members have valuable talents to share if kids want to avail themselves, but the staff demand nothing of them. No one is forced to do math or read, and many don’t read until they are eight years old or later.
The school occupies several rooms on the upper story of a graceful Methodist church built of grey stone. It’s situated five blocks from the picturesque Des Plaines River, across the bridge from acres of fields and forests surrounding the renowned Brookfield Zoo.
It's a cloudy, cold day and a 16-year-old girl wears bedroom slippers and carries a comforter around with her. At 11 a.m., she chairs the school meeting, where students discuss updating the cleaning assignments, whether to promote the school in a social media contest, and whether to invite a volunteer adult to come work at the school.
After lunch, a mixed-age group gets ready to go play at the park down the street while a
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