tina (tls@ziplink.net)
Mon, 07 Feb 2000 11:44:38 -0500
Incredibly well said, Ben. This says alot for the SVS model.
T.
At 11:42 PM 2/4/00 -0500, you wrote:
>As far as I know, SVS has only one criteria for admitting students:
>that they actually /want/ to go to the school. In other words, free
>schooling has to be chosen, and chosen by the student. The notion that
>Sudbury isn't for everyone is true to the extent that not everyone wants
>to go to a Sudbury model school. To what I extent of students this
>applies, I could only speculate. We might choose to say that those who
>prefer traditional schooling are simply unable to think around the
>institution that they have always known and grown to accept as a
>necessity, and that they would certainly see the light if only they
>could see such a school in action for long enough, or spoke to enough
>graduates, or simply ceased clinging to certain pedagogical-didactic
>predispositions. This approach to other people is incredibly problematic,
>though, and I can think of a number of disasters in the course of
>history that have arisen from one group that was certain their fellow
>citizens were deluded on a mass scale, but all of whom would certainly
>recognize the error of their ways if only the minority's vision of the
>world could be forcibly implanted.
>Let us not be proselytizers or evangelists of unstructured education.
>In a democracy, it is ultimately the people who will chose their own
>education and that of their children, and so it is not public education
>that needs to be altered, but rather it is our fellow citizens who we
>need to /talk/ to. Discourse is an exceedingly slow method of bringing
>about change, but the change it does bring about is willed by those
>whom it affects. Every year that the old SVS mansion continues to
>stand probably speaks volumes more than any one of us could produce,
>and every graduate who can honestly tell anyone who cares to ask them
>that they couldn't have asked for a better education (as I can certainly
>say) is a living testament to a "legacy of trust."
>Let us engage others in respectful conversation and respect their freedom
>to choose, whether it is what we would choose or not. But no one needs to
>be "converted."
>
>----Ben
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Tue Sep 26 2000 - 14:58:27 EDT