LA SCUOLA AL CAPOLINEA

 A Woodstock, Stato di New York, si realizza una scuola particolare: č non scuola e non ci sono insegnanti. Ottimo esempio su come liquidare la figura del docente. Peccato che costi  10 milioni l’anno!

Dal New York Times - February 20, 2002

In Woodstock, a Nonschool With Nonteachers

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?"