Democratic school documentary

EUDEC posted a cool link to a report about the Sudbury Valley school online, which explains the daily life in a democratic school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOpOxcsNlK0 Very intriguing, can't wait to get in touch with people from Sands and hopefully attend the IDEC in Isreal next April! I am now also in contact with Michael who is the EUDEC chair and it will be very exciting to learn and travel more!

I also continued reading 'Turning points' in the metro today and realised that 'Home schooling' is actually a wrong name. It neither has to take place at home (a lot of the home schoolers I read about spend a lot of their time travelling), nor does it resemble what we associate with a school- adults teaching children. It's funny to think that not all parents would actually want to have the responsibility of being with their children all day and providing 'education' of some sort. I can imagine school is a great place for them to send their children to to go to work/ have time for themselves. But why have children if you don't want to spend time with them?

I came across Susan Ohanian today and she wrote a couple of things that made a lot of sense to me. Firstly, she says that it is not important which facts children learn in primary school, but that the only important thing for them to remember is that learning is fun and that 'books can offer information and pleasure'. She also laments that testing and grades do not take into consideration social responsibility, compassion, caring, creativity, curiosity, initiative, self reliance and a lot of other good qualities. I absolutely agree with both of the points. When I teach Englishh in summer schools, it's never really about making kids better at the language but rather about inspiring them that English can be fun so that they might persue it at home- because they WANT to rather than have to.

Three more links for me to explore in the next weeks/months:

Education Otherwise: http://www.education-otherwise.org/

School of Living: http://www.schoolofliving.org/

'Natural Life' magazine: http://www.naturallifemagazine.com/

It's funny to think that by the end of my time here in Paris, my French will have improved only very little, but my knowledge of alternative education (and my ballet skilss :-) will have grown quite a lot! I think I would like to return to France to work in a Primary School where the language is a bit easier and then try to swap teaching the kids German for the kids teaching me some more French! I like to speak it, but the lessons are just so dull!