Learning
Sudbury schools are based on the belief that no kind of curriculum is necessary to prepare a young person for adult life. Instead, these schools place emphasis on learning as a natural by-product of all human activity. Learning is self-initiated and self-motivated. They rely on the free exchange of ideas and free conversation and interplay between people, to provide sufficient exposure to any area that may prove relevant and interesting to the individual. Students of all ages mix; older students learn from younger students as well as vice versa. Students of different ages often mentor each other in social skills. The pervasiveness of play has led to a recurring observation by first-time visitors to a Sudbury school that the students appear to be in perpetual "recess".
Implicitly and explicitly, students are given responsibility for their own education, meaning the only person designing what a student will learn is the student him- or herself or by the way of apprenticeship. As such, Sudbury schools do not compare or rank students — the system has no tests, evaluations, or transcripts.
Read more about this topic: Sudbury School
Famous quotes containing the word learning:
“Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, “so hot? my little Sir.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
““Miss C_____’s father,” says Betty, “had much better have bred his daughter a housewife, and then, mayhap, she might have got her a husband, which with all her fine learning she has not yet been able to do. And no wonder, for what man would be plagued with a slattern?””
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)