Summerhill protects your right to be how you want to be. You choose; the Meeting does not. The purpose of the Meeting is to sort out the inevitable boundary disputes in a community of nearly one hundred people who are all trying to live vibrantly individual lives.
We discuss optional lessons, an essential part of the Democratic Free School engine. Also Reduced Curriculum and Freak Out subjects.
The Age Range Train. How many coaches? The most important coach?
The open classroom is back. I have my doubts about the phenomenon and want to see some evidence for the effectiveness of the trend.
Talking about the Curriculum in democratic free schools.
Family and kinship are a part of our mammal nature. How do they relate to our choices in education? Is it right for the state to work against our primal instincts.
Here I talk about my own experiences as the English teacher at Summerhill School and what those experiences meant for my evolving awareness of what a reduced curriculum might be.
The second of three posts on the reduced curriculum. Here we look at the phenomenon of bloating in the curriculum: how to avoid it. Create a better curriculum in a free school.
Introduction to the reduced curriculum in Summerhill-style schools.
The first in a series of posts about the Reduced Curriculum to help subscribers to Summerhill Democratics think about this important issue in setting up a free school.
