The Proof

Living the Dream

Published on May 15, 2006 By Phil Osborn In Life

Recently posted to the KPFKchat.org newsgroup:

We are about to be bombarded with pros and cons in this debate over the big union money grab. I mean, of course, the (California) state-funded pre-school initiative. See my previous posts on this issue at KPFKchat.org for details. Bottom line is that it represents the culmination of decades of sinister plotting by the truly evil Public Teachers Union to add 15% to their membership by destroying private day care via utterly useless regulations that more than double its price.

So, isn't it true that education costs so much that only the state can fund it? Or that Wir Mussen Discipline Gehaben!! Can't just let the little blighters do whatever they bloody well please, now can we? Spare the rod...

(Note that I actually do not subsribe to the opinions stated above, but only introduce them for shock and humor value.)

So, I think that Sharon Presley, one of the other non-collectivist anarchists speaking at Pitzer College at the Anarchy conference last month, may have mentioned this to me and I forgot it completely, as usual, but anyhow, I stumbled accross the article in the June 2006, "Psychology Today," entitled "Anarchy Academy." (Sharon is a noted psychologist and author with a specialty in education.)

Turns out that there is this "school" (with several clones scattered about the globe now), started in '68, in Framingham, MA, not exactly a low-rent district, which charges $6,000 per year tuition and for the money provides every kid's dream education. As in, they get to play all day long!

And so naturally they turn out to be illiterate goofballs living on welfare. NOT! Actually, the students tend to do very well for themselves. Why? Well, the article and the school tend to back the explanation that it's simply that the kids get an education in the ONE thing that really matters in life success - figuring out what is of real value.

Instead of having some authority figure at the head of the class, of whom you have to ask permission to even use the bathroom (and just consider how dehumanizing and demeaning that really is), dictating a rote learning exercise, enforced by force as necessary, these kids have to figure out what is important in life and how to get it. So, instead of learning how to be a good slave, they learn how to be a human being.

It gets worse. Not only do the kids do exactly what they please - within the bounds of not destroying property or hurting other people - but the kids RUN THE SCHOOL. EVERY issue that needs a social decision is voted on, and the five-year-olds have the same vote as the teenagers or the "teachers." There is also a school judicial council, on the same basis, for resolving daily disputes.

The reader may note that I recently called for the high-school students locally to rise up and take over the schools. What a crazy idea! Something an ANARCHIST might dream up. What was I smoking? (We won't go there...)

Here's a link to a Sudbury Valley School review by one of my fave writers:
Here's the school website, with a link to the Psychology Today article, it appears.
http://www.sudval.org/

More later...

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