Informal schooling

Take ten minutes to watch this marvelous film of students describing their democratic school, Fairhaven. This is the sort of schooling John Taylor Gatto dreams about.

Filmmaker Danny Mydlack (who was not coincidentally in John Holt’s nextdoor neighbor) lets the students tell their story themselves:

• “Learning is what happens when you’re doing something else.”People generalize too much. The world is more complex than left wing or right wing….

  JC, Judicial Committee, is the jointly-run disciplinary

  Age isn’t so much a factor as who you are. I don’t want to hang out just with 11 year-olds. “It doesn’t matter how old you are, it just depends on when you’re ready to take in information.”

  Something gets violated when you’re forced to learn something you don’t want to learn. [Otherwise] you’re kind of giving permission to yourself to do something you don’t really like.

  For graduation, “You basically write a defense that you’re ready for adulthood.”

  “Education is in the heart of the listener, not in the voice of the teacher.”

  “A wild animal, as opposed to a caged animal, knows chaos and can adapt to it.”

No fixed schedule, no required curriculum, and no transcript: this is school as run by informal learning principles.