Dana Matthew Bennis (dbennis@umich.edu)
Thu, 05 Apr 2001 11:24:16 -0400
Laura and others,
As Kristin mentioned, Peter Gray, along with David Chanoff, has put out
articles and studies on democratic schooling. I believe they have
specifically studied Sudbury and its graduates, is that correct?
Dana
At 09:57 AM 4/5/01 -0500, you wrote:
>I can certainly appreciate your perspective on this, as well as John,
>Christopher, and Alan's. I guess I dislike the idea of getting information
>on the graduates only from the school itself. That is not to say that I
>would not want the school's own version of the facts as well - I DO want to
>know what the school considers about its success. It would just be nice to
>have more than this one source for this information - forget about having
>raw, razor-sharp data to throw around (which is usually impossible to
>achieve when talking about education anyway.) Even just having the same
>accounts that are contained in Kingdom of Childhood coming from an outside
>source would add more impact. On the other hand, I think the point about
>not wasting time trying to convince someone who really doesn't want to
>believe in this alternative is really true as well. Maybe my question
>should have been more along the lines of - why hasn't anyone else already
>done this? Why haven't there already been outsiders who have studied the
>graduates and published their findings? Any thoughts?
>
>Laura
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-discuss-sudbury-model@aramis.sudval.org
>[mailto:owner-discuss-sudbury-model@aramis.sudval.org]On Behalf Of Marko
>Koskinen
>Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 6:08 PM
>To: discuss-sudbury-model@aramis.sudval.org
>Subject: Re: DSM: objective source of evidence
>
>The problem with numbers is that they really don't tell anything
>important about Sudbury Model schools. People who have hard time
>believing in the model have equally hard time with it even if they saw
>the data. This is because it totally wrecks all that they are made to
>believe in. Such an enormous change in thinking cannot happen without
>effort and the effort needed is for them to think and usually people who
>don't believe in Sudbury Model are also taught not to think for
>themselves. They believe in authorities, but if the authority tells them
>to think themselves, they are in deep trouble and usually rather try to
>avoid such trouble...
>
>So, the the point of the data is mostly to be able to say that it is
>available and anyone is free to examine it. But even then many people
>say that "it's not from an objective source". And even if it was they
>could say "but they are all some special kids, it couldn't work with our
>kids", or "yeah, but it's a middle-class school, but how about the poor
>kids".
>
>So, the lesson I'm slowly starting to learn is not to waste my time with
>people who clearly DON'T WANT TO believe, but rather find people who are
>genuinely interested and give them SOME information and let them do the
>learning themselves. We cannot make people believe something they don't
>want to, so why bother.
>
>Marko
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri Apr 06 2001 - 14:18:19 EDT