What I Want to Do When I Grow Up
Some of my recent writing has been looking at the problems of conventional education. (Using the word “dystopia” in my title may not have been an appealing lead for some.) Today, I’d like to present a positive vision and introduce you to some folks I’ve gotten to know who are tackling these challenges in a fresh way.
Twenty-five years ago, Ken Danford was very much in the place I find myself today. He was teaching in a regular school, but began to feel that for many kids, this environment did not lead to their flourishing. Like me, he worked hard to make his class a place where kids might enjoy a creative approach to the content. In the end, though, he believed that the overall context was not a place where most kids were excited to be. He wanted to offer something else.
He and a like-minded partner launched a place that today is called Northstar Self-Directed Learning for Teens in Massachusetts. Some years later, another teacher, Joel Hammon, in New Jersey felt the same restlessness. He discovered Ken’s book and knew this was it, forming Princeton Learning Cooperative. Together, they now also run a small network of similar learning centers under the name Liberated Learners. Fast forward to the present, and I found BOTH of their books, plus websites, plus TED Talks. I’ve included their links so that you can learn more about them if you like, but for today, I’m just going to paint a picture of what they do…and what I am considering bringing to Chicago.
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Liberated Learners centers have their distinctives, but in general, this is how they work:
A teenager is unhappy with school. They are not challenged enough academically, or they are bullied, or they have a physical or social-emotional challenge that makes school really difficult, or they have a passion for something (dance, sports, theater, etc.) that requires a lot of time. There are many reasons, but the common thread is that school is an unhappy and unproductive place for them. Maybe they’ve tried a few schools. There is often conflict with their parents. They learn about a Liberated Learners center nearby and call.
What Ken or Joel will tell them on that call or in that initial meeting is that they don’t have to go back to that school again. Ever. This is usually a shocking message. But it’s true. The center will help them enroll as homeschoolers and they will begin coming to that center instead. (Some LL kids were already homeschooling, but most come from conventional schooling and it is just not working anymore.) They are invited to come visit for a day. When they arrive, they see kids hanging around a common room. If they’re in Princeton, they notice Joel playing his guitar near the entrance. During the day, there is a schedule of classes on offer. Most of these are there because kids have requested them. Some have many learners (say, current events) and some are very small or one-on-one tutoring sessions (calculus), either led by one of the staff or by a volunteer. All classes are optional. Many of the kids take community college classes, even when they are 15 or 16. In addition to classes, the center helps arrange internships and part-time jobs. Each week, every teen has a one-on-one meeting with their mentor. At these meetings, teens share what matters to them, what they want to learn, skills that they want to acquire, dreams for their life. When have teenagers’ own dreams for themselves ever been taken seriously in school? The mentoring sessions are what shape the whole rhythm of what is going on at the center.
There is a lengthy list of pragmatic reasons that this model makes a lot of sense at this moment we find ourselves. I’ll address that in detail another time. One common fear when people hear this description is “But can they get into college?” Yes, their rates of college acceptance are as high or higher than regular school. And since many have already taken community college courses, they’ve already shown that they are capable of that level of coursework – a critical question all college admissions folks are asking with every application. A more important question to me is “What kind of people do places like Liberated Learners centers help shape?” Whether they are applying for college or a job, one huge distinctive among these kids is that they have been actively practicing self-direction. With nobody forcing them to do schoolwork, the work that they’ve done has been because they wanted to do it. As a longtime teacher, I can tell you that students with self-motivation are operating at completely different level. Colleges and employers want people with passion, that are independent and can figure things out. For so many kids, conventional school has taught them, instead, how to play the game, how to give the bare minimum to achieve the desired grade, how to give the boss the answer they want.
Which kind of person will do better moving into the high-velocity, ever-shifting future coming at us? The reason I am interested in launching a Liberated Learners center is that I believe that, for many kids, it will make them – and their parents – happier in the short term and help them become more capable and self-assured adults in the future. Ken and Joel have 40 years of combined experience and scores of stories bearing that out. I’ve talked with some of these kids and you can listen to those interviews on my blog (stevenslaughter.com).
If you know a family in Chicago whose teen is struggling with school, I’d really like to meet them.