LA
SCUOLA AL CAPOLINEA
Dal
New York Times - February
20, 2002 By
CLAUDIA ROWE
WOODSTOCK, N.Y.,
Feb. 18 — Emma Berklin, not quite 5, had clear visions of what school
would be like when she finally got there. There would be desks filled
with textbooks and teachers lecturing at blackboards, and she imagined
it all joyfully, the way other children might dream of Christmas. It
won't be quite that way, though. Emma's mother, Eugenia Berklin, is
helping organize a school with no classrooms, no grades and no lecturing
teachers, and Emma will be there in September when the Hudson Valley
Sudbury School opens. "But
how will I learn to read? How will I learn to write?" she wailed. As
Ms. Berklin has explained to dozens of intrigued people in this town
famed for its offbeat and free- thinking soul, children at Sudbury
schools across the country are never seated at desks and lectured. They
pursue whatever they feel like all day long, be it video games, woodwork
or, in Emma's case, Barbie dolls and ballet, and that is how they learn.
If
a student wants to cook, the theory goes, he must be able to read words
and numbers to follow a recipe, and that interest will spur him to ask
for instruction from an older student or a "staff member," as
even the teachers are called. He is led entirely by his own interests. Sudbury
educators believe there is no right way to learn, no time by which a
student should have mastered a given skill. If a 16-year-old does not
know algebra or geometry, that is fine; she will learn it when the need
arises. It is possible to graduate from a Sudbury school without ever
taking notes or writing a paper. Nonetheless, in a 1991 study of 188
students who attended the Sudbury school in Massachusetts, 87 percent
went on to higher education, including degree programs at schools like
Wesleyan, Yale and Columbia Universities, Bard College, and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We
have really been brainwashed into thinking that if kids are left to
their own devices they will fail miserably, when it's exactly the
opposite," said Ms. Berklin, a drama coach and personal healer who
recently visited the Massachusetts school and was deeply impressed. The
approach puts tremendous confidence in the natural curiosity of children,
and it appears to be catching on. The first one, the Sudbury Valley
School in Framingham, Mass., opened in 1968, and in the last 10 years 17
more have started, bringing enrollment in Sudbury schools to about 600.
Not all carry the Sudbury name but all use the Sudbury approach, and
more are on the way. In
Woodstock, nearly 100 parents, many of them artists and practitioners of
holistic health, gathered recently to hear more about Sudbury schools
from Jeff Collins, who first suggested opening one here in Ulster County.
Mr. Collins, who is financing the Hudson Valley Sudbury School by
lending it $700,000 and has already purchased a large plot of land,
hopes to have 50 students from 4 to 19 years old and 8 staff members,
none of whom will necessarily be a trained educator, when he opens in
September. He said he had commitments from a dozen families willing to
pay $4,500 a year in tuition. Mr.
Collins is a software engineer, but his presentation was decidedly low
tech, without overhead projectors, microphones or fancy printed
material. Two
little girls, one wearing gauzy butterfly wings, the other in a purple
wizard's cape, ran through the meeting giggling. Their play was clearly
distracting, but no one tried to quiet them. The parents were learning
that play is an essential component of the Sudbury experience. Mr.
Collins described one boy at the Massachusetts school who did little
more than fish for four years and in the process learned focus,
concentration and, of course, a great deal about fish. "That's
awesome," a parent in the audience said. Mainstream
educators, however, tend to discount the Sudbury approach as a bizarre
experiment undertaken by hippies, something akin to the Summerhill
school in England, which "became a metaphor for total
permissiveness," said Frederick Calder, executive director of the
New York State Association of Independent Schools. Nonetheless, Mr.
Calder agreed that New York State's push for increased standardized
testing and a general move toward conservatism in education had made
alternative schools more attractive to many parents. Much
of the interest in Sudbury has come from middle-school children's
parents who are concerned about what may be ahead: public high schools
where the halls are patrolled by guards, students' privacy is invaded
and "there seems to be a basic distrust of kids," said one of
the organizers, Lisa Montanus-Collins. Judy
Reimer, who has seen public education through the eyes of her 16-
year-old son, said he was so "miserable and bored" in public
school that she was planning to enroll her 4- year-old daughter at the
Sudbury school this fall and has joined the Collinses as a founder. Still,
even forward-thinking Woodstock residents have concerns about an
education initiated entirely by children. "I
worry, will my son learn grammar? Will he learn chemistry?" said
Janet Villani-Garratt, another founding parent. "But then I think,
I learned chemistry in public school, and it's not in my head now. So
what does that mean? If there's something Wyatt wants to learn at
Sudbury, he's going to really get it and it's going to make a lasting
impression." The
Woodstock school has several hurdles to clear. Not the least is getting
a charter from the New York State Board of Regents, which will secure
the school's nonprofit status. This entails answering questions about
the curriculum, a process that, naturally, will require some delicacy
since at a Sudbury school there is no curriculum in the standard sense. The
Woodstock-area parents accepted the free-form approach, but they were
not ready to abandon their children to "chaos." "Parents
need to feel there is a structure of some sort," said Sarah
Chianese, whose son, 6, and daughter, 8, were doing gymnastics on the
meeting-room floor behind her. "If they felt and saw that there was
some kind of structure to work within, I think people would say, `Amen,
let's go.' " Indeed,
there is structure, Mr. Collins insisted, and the students create every
bit of it. Democracies
in the purest sense, the schools have no principal, just a student who
runs the weekly meeting at which the children and adults debate school
matters — from starting a photography club to deciding whether
pocketknives will be allowed — and a 5-year-old's vote counts as much
as an adult's. Parents
join the voting at an annual assembly where budgets, salary scales and
tuition are decided. Daily questions of discipline are handled by a
student-run committee, and a staff member may be cited as readily as
anyone else for rudeness or other unacceptable behavior. Students do get
expelled from Sudbury schools. It is not, the founders insist, a
free-for-all. Upon
hearing of the Woodstock parents' plan, Mr. Calder from the independent
schools association had scoffed a bit, but he softened as he considered
what Mr. Collins and the others were trying to do. "A
little part of me admires them, people who want to go way out there and
try these new things," he said. "It's wonderful. But the
problem is, is it good for the kids? We really don't know. Are they
going to be grateful as adults when they look back?" |