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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