Even if Sudbury Model is not for everyone, at least it is for the majority. If it is not compulsory, no one will choose the school.
When discussing the role of school in future education, Chris Anderson said that (it is not clear here what he referred to. Probably self-learning ) doesn’t suit everyone. Different people have different ways of learning.
Well, this is a very common mis-understanding. I will do an analysis below:
Even if it is not suited for everyone, at least it is for the majority. In Sudbury Valley School, all students of various personalities are able to learn by themselves. So self-learning is not just for certain types of children. In our society, we probably see a lot of people who cannot learn by themselves and expect to be fed by the teachers. That is only because they have been screwed up by the school. If you look at children, all of them are able to learn and explore by themselves.
Actually it is the school that is compulsory in nature. If it is not compulsory and everyone has a choice to go or not to go to school, then we are able to see how many people will choose schools and think that school fits the way they learn.
So why Sudbury Valley School cannot spread to the whole society? Even in the states, there are only about 20-40 of SVSs. The reason? It is not that Sudbury model has some problem. It is the social environment that has problems. It is the adults who have deeply rooted misunderstanding of learning/education.
So we need to solve the problems with the adults, make the adults understand what is real learning/education first. The adults need a revolution in their own learning. They have to try and feel what is the real learning. They have to learn what is the best way to learn. Otherwise, when the adults come together to talk about education, they are all talking about other people’s (the kids) learning, and they only know to pass down all the wrong conceptions of learning which are formed from long time of schooling. Generation after generation, this is a bad cycle.
So how the adults learn, how to learn in real life, is what we should focus when we are working on education. Without first have a clear understanding of what learning is, there is no way to untangle the myth of education. Learning is relatively simple. Education is far more complex, involving various institutions.
So let’s figure out learning first.