42. The Sudbury Valley School: The Underground HIstory of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Sudbury Valley School
I know a school for kids ages three to
eighteen that doesn't teach anybody to read, yet everyone who goes there learns to do it, most very well.
It's the
beautiful Sudbury Valley
School, twenty miles west of Boston in the old Nathaniel Bowditch
"cottage" (which looks
suspiciously like a mansion), a place ringed by handsome outbuildings, a
private lake, woods, and acres of
magnificent grounds. Sudbury is a private school, but with a tuition under $4,000 a year it's
considerably cheaper than a seat in a New York City
public school. At Sudbury kids teach
themselves to read; they learn at many different ages, even into the teen years (though that's rare). When
each kid is ready he or she self-
instructs, if such a formal label isn't inappropriate for such a natural
undertaking. During this time they
are free to request as much adult assistance as needed. That usually isn't much.
In thirty years of operation, Sudbury has never had a single
kid who didn’t learn to read. All this is aided by a magnificent
school library on open shelves where books are borrowed and returned on the honor system. About 65 percent
of Sudbury kids go on to good
colleges. The place has never seen a case of dyslexia. (That's not to say some
kids don't reverse letters and
such from time to time, but such conditions are temporary and self-correcting
unless institutionalized into a disease.) So Sudbury doesn't even teach reading yet all its kids learn to read
and even like reading. What could be going on there that we don't understand?
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