Mountain Laurel Sudbury School
147 West Main Street New Britain CT 06052 (860) 828-4077
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Back to School

8/25/2015

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Imagine a job in which your work every day is micromanaged by your boss. You are told exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. You are required to stay in your seat until your boss says you can move. Each piece of your work is evaluated and compared, every day, with the work done by your fellow employees. You are rarely trusted to make your own decisions. Research on employment shows that this is not only the most tedious employment situation, but also the most stressful. Micromanagement drives people crazy.

Kids are people, and they respond just as adults do to micromanagement, to severe restrictions on their freedom, and to constant, unsolicited evaluation. Traditional school, too often, is exactly like the kind of nightmare job that I just described; and, worse, it is a job that kids are not allowed to quit. No matter how much they might be suffering, they are forced to continue, unless they have enlightened parents who have the means, know-how, and will to get them out of it. Including homework, the hours are often more than those that their parents put into their full-time jobs, and freedom of movement for children at school is far less than that for their parents at work.



Please, listen to your kids if they are unhappy. Try alternative education, Sudbury schooling, homeschooling, or unschooling.


From Peter Gray's blog on the Psychology Today website.
Read the entire article here. 

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Love, Responsibility and Freedom

8/13/2015

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Real responsibility is an absolutely necessary component to learning. The difference between real responsibility and fake responsibility is the difference between walking a tightrope without a net or with one. You don’t typically get much real responsibility in High School, except in sports and extracurricular activities where it is expected you prepare on your own. Choice is implicit in real responsibility. Homework is your responsibility the same way it was the slaves’ responsibility to pick cotton. I know, nobody can argue for very long about anything without bringing up slavery or the holocaust, but what do you call it when a stranger makes you do work you didn’t agree to in order to benefit a system you’re compelled by law to belong to? You behave differently when you are engaged in an activity you love and where there are actual consequences to everything you do or fail to do. In this way, caring for a pet hamster for a month offers more opportunity for personal growth than an entire year of “required classes” that a combination of state and school district strangers decided was your responsibility.


From The Outlaw Academy by Allan Watts
Read the entire blog post HERE
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    Author

    Sean Vivier is a former staff member at Mountain Laurel Sudbury School, a former public school and Montessori school teacher, and an aspiring novelist. He is currently working as a web developer.

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