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REAL EDUCATION Non-Authoritarian Initiatives in Education

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REAL EDUCATION Non-Authoritarian Initiatives in Education Libertarian Education is a small independent publ~shingcollective, which for the past quarter of a century has bcen campaigning for the development of REAL EDUCATION non-authoritarian initiatives in education. As well as books, they publish the termly magazine, Lib EL). varieties of freedom Also in this series: Free School, The White Lion Experience, by Nigel Wright, ISBN 0-9513997-1-3. Frpcdorn in Education: A do-it-yourself guide ro the lib~rutionof Learning, ISBN 0-9513997-2-1. David Gribble No Master High or Low: Libertarian Education and Schooling, 1890-1990, by John Shotton, ISBN 0-9513997-3-X Libertarian Education - - LC 7 U6,: (< ' ' , ,,,> ii Published by: '1'0 the many people or all ages who have helped me to write about their Lihenarirm Education sc+~ools,this book is dedicated with gratitude and dection. Phoenix House, 157 Wells Road, Brislol, HM 2RU. ISBN 09513997-5-6 I Copyright: David Gribble and Libertarirm Edurauon, 1998 Front covcr by Clifford Harper. 0< 1 1 Printed and bovnd by: BPC-AUP Aberdeen Ltd., Hareness Road, Altens Industrial Estate, Abcrdco,, ABl2 3LE. Vel: 01224-24%39, Far: 01224-24%99) CONTENTS I~~troduction............................................................................... 1 I . Summerhill (England. 1924).............................................. 5 2. Dartington Hall School (England. 1926) .......................... 23 5 . Tamariki School (New Zealand. 1967)............................ 41 I.. Sudbury Valley School (USA. 1968) ............................... 61 5 . Bramblewood School (USA. 1969) .................................. 79 0 . Countesthorpe Community College (England. 1970)....... 95 7 . Nee1 Bagh and Sumavanarn (India. 1972)...................... 115 I<. The Pestalozzi School (Ecuador. 1977) ......................... 131 0 . Kleingruppe Lufingen (Switzerland. 1977) .................... 147 I0. Mirarnbika (India. 1981) ........................................ 163 I I. The Barbara Taylor School (USA. 1985) ........................ 181 I2. Japan: Tokyo Shure. Nonami Children's Village. the Global School. Kinokuni (Japan. 1985).................... 197 I . The Democratic School of Hadera (Israel. 1987) ........... 217 I . Sands School (England. 1987) ...................................... 237 (:o~~clusion........................................................................... 251 I5it)liography .......................................................................... 255 list of Schools ....................................................................... 257 I i.ot~ldnever succeed in making a complete list of the people who have I~<,ll~cdme to write this book. May I simply pay tribute to all the different x<.llools!hat gave me generous hospitality, to all the writers I have quoted, and I,, 1111 the individuals, named and unnamed, who talked informally, agreed to IN. it~trwiewed,wrote helpful letters or corrected and commented on my draft vllill~tersabout their schools. This book is theirs rather than mine. My thanks are also due to Eriko Fulford, for translalion from the Japanese, nt1~1Maria Knowlton, for help with Spanish. I)nvid Gribble I'l~o~ographs: S~anttnrrhill,page 4: Piers Cavendish S~~tnmcrhill,page 7: Libby Hall I)t~rlingtonHall School, page 22: Steve Hoare 1)urtington Hall School, page 25: Steve Hoare 'l't~tnttrikiSchool, page 43: David Gribble SIIIIINI~Valley School, page 63: Michael Greenberg I :oun~csthorpzCommunity College, page 97: Lib ED N,v.l Ilagh, page 114: Lib ED S~~~t~nvanam,page 125: David Gribble '1'111. I'estalozzi School, page 133: David Gribble I'~.~~xlx~tusforder Martplatz, page 146 Mil.~l~nbika,page 165: David Gribble 'I'III. Harbara Taylor School, page 183: David Gribble 'I'IIv (;loha1 Free School, page 199: David Gribble 'I'III. I),:mocratic School of Hadera, page 219: Noa Ben-Shalom 5t~1111sSchool, page 236: Nicky Scott I)tlvi,l (kibble with students at Darlington Hall School, page 253 Introduction I first encountered an alternative to conventional education when I was twenty-six, having already found much to object to in the school where I was teaching. One day when I was browsing in a bookshop I came across a description of Dartington Hall School, which seemed to answer all my objections. Within a year I was teaching there. Almost thirty years later, when Dartington Hall School closed, a group of the children and staff, of whom I was one, started Sands School, which had even more radical principles. I worked there for five years until I reached the age of sixty. For all those years, I had been searching for an ideal system of education. Teaching is such a demanding occupation that I had to concentrate my attention on the school I was working in, usually trying to solve problems rather than to develop new ideas. It was not until after I had retired that I began to realise how much there was to learn from other schools, all round the world, that shared the same principles and ideals but had found different ways of putting them into practice. In conventional schools children are literally prisoners: the law keeps them in. Learning according to inclination is not an option; children's inclinations are not considered relevant; adults tell them what they must learn. They make the best of it and enjoy themselves as much as they can, but they are always under someone else's authority, unable to conduct themselves as they would wish, unable to follow up their own interests. School seems to be designed to destroy their individuality, to turn them all, as the Swiss teacher Jiirg Jegge says, into cogwheels that will fit smoothly into the machinery of society. Governments cannot make schools ideal merely by altering the amount of topic work or testing children more often or buying more computers or improving the staff-student ratio. The ideal school must have an entirely different atmosphere. It must not even try to manufacture cogs. Dan Greenberg, of Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, has commented that when compulsory education was introduced in the nineteenth century, parents objected because it prevented their children from learning anything useful. They wanted their children at home, observing and helping adults at work, learning the things that they would need in the future. Time directed by a teacher was time wasted. Nowadays people seem to believe the opposite - for children, time not directed by a teacher is time wasted. The pendulum has swung too far. Reol Educotion Introduction Educationists have become so fascinated by the concept of teaching that they The schools are arranged in historical order, by the date of foundation. For have forgotten to consider what children actually need to learn. chapters seven and twelve the dates of the first schools to be founded have Ideal school-leavers would be literate and numerate, of course, but they been used. I have visited all the schools except for Nee1 Bagh and the would also be happy, considerate, honest, enthusiastic, tolerant, Kleingruppe Lufingen. In most I spent at least a week. self-confident, well-informed, articulate, practical, co-operative, flexible, I chose the schools because I knew them, was impressed by them and felt creative, individual, determined people who knew what their talents and them to be sufficiently distinctive to warrant separate description, or because interests were, had enjoyed developing them, and intended to make good use what I had heard or read of them promised interest and surprises. I was not of them. They would be people who cared for others because they had been disappointed. The first entry in my diary for one of my last visits begins cared for themselves. "Astonished all over again." Conventional school organisation seems designed to produce superficially competent people who, underneath, are evasive, self-interested, ruthless, frustrated, cautious, obedient, timid conformists; they will be complacent about approved achievements and easily humiliated by public failure; they will have spent so much time at school struggling to acquire knowledge that does not interest them and skills that are irrelevant to them that they will probably have lost all confidence in the value of their own true interests and talents. They will be people who don't care much about others, because most other people have never seemed to care much about them. The school curriculum is supposed to equip young people for life. If you think back to yourself as a school-leaver, do you see yourself as having been equipped for life? Do you see yourself as having been a knowledgeable person even within the narrow limits of the subjects that you studied in classes? Since you embarked on your adult career, have you not in fact forgotten most of what you were taught? How are you now on the periodic table, long division, Chaucerian English? I would suggest that the lesson that you remember most clearly from all those years in school is simply the importance of doing what is expected of you, the importance of fulfilling a proper function as a cog. All over the world there are conventional schools that ignore children's curiosity, suppress their energy and over-rule their generous moral impulses. And all over the world, as I have at last discovered, there are people who have seen the damage that this does, and have set up schools that are different. Eighteen of these schools are the subject-matter of this book. They are schools which decline to train children to become cogs, and indeed help children who have been so trained to lose their coggishness. In all of these schools the adults have a fundamental respect for the children and believe it is right to allow them to develop naturally as themselves. Children are not seen as clay to be moulded or pots to be filled; they are not regarded as trainee adults, but as people, just like anybody else. It follows that it would have been inappropriate to rely principally on the teachers for my information. The views of current or former students (or sometimes both), are included in the description of almost every school. 1 Summerhill Summerhill is the oldest and the most famous of the schools in this book. It is also the most notorious.
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