Start your own school

I read Starting A Sudbury School and the first thing I came away with is just how hard it is to start a school of any kind but its really hard to start a sudbury school because the whole concept is so out there that you have to spend a bunch of time just explaining it to people. I have so much respect for the founders of HVSS because not only did they get a school started but then went on to purchase land and build their own facility. These days I can barely put together a birthday party so I don't know how they did it but I am grateful.

Now for the criticism. Not of our school but the book. There was a chapter about where to find students and a founder of a school said something like "The homeschool community is not the best place to recruit from because homeschooling parents are often unwilling to give up being custodians of their children's development." To which I respond "Hey genius, that's our job!" This is the major failing of all schools, even Sudbury schools,they think they will do a better job of raising kids than anyone else. It is simply unnatural to remove children from their natural place in the community so that they can learn how to be useful participants in that community. At least Sudbury schools actually model the real world and give kids some practical ethical and decision making experiences but they still spend most of their day almost entirely with other kids. I've been agitating to have more adults coming into the school, not necessarily to teach but to just provide a richer experience for the kids.

I've been kicking around ideas of what my ideal situation would be. Basically variations of a learning community where adults could come in and study with children. Sort of like letting adults come in and be students at sudbury. The problem with that would be that adults are more sophisticated and would probably take over the school meeting or just be more skilled at pushing their agenda through and I think it would be easy for the kids to just cede the decision making to the grown ups. So that wouldn't work. Then I thought about how if the school was open for fewer hours rather than more, it would force the kids and the parents to have them out in the world more. The problem here is that state regs insist on a minimum amount of time in school and during the winter months my kids would probably just spend a lot of time watching tv.

Homeschooling is the ideal for me but with regular schools from kindergarten up operating like little tiny universities where kids could go part time if they wanted or just do sports. The schools should be resource centers for parents instead of parents being a resource for schools by providing the raw material of kids who the schools then manufacture into students.