As a teacher at a traditional high school, Cassi Clausen was frustrated. She felt as if her students didn’t retain anything, that they worked for a grade rather than learning the material.
When Clausen decided to earn a masters in education, she took an education-philosophy course that introduced her to alternative approaches to learning. One model that piqued her interest was the Summerhill boarding school in Suffolk, England. Summerhill, founded in 1921, was the first democratic, free school. The students and staff have equal votes in how the school runs. Students are free to do as they please as long as they don’t harm others, and pupils are allowed to choose which lessons – if any – they attend.
“I would be living in internal conflict if I went back to a traditional classroom now. I want something that gives kids the real gift of independence and self-actualization,” says Clausen. As a parent, she decided she wanted that kind of education for her own kids, but she couldn’t find anything like it in Orange County. She considered home schooling, but she wanted them to learn as part of a bigger community.
So Clausen founded The Open School, Orange County’s only democratic, free school. At the Open School, students design their own curricula based on their personal interests, have an equal vote in school rules and how the budget is spent, and spend much of their time “world schooling” on field trips to parks, zoos, local businesses and more.
In their first year of operation last year, Clausen and her co-founder, Ben Page, served 10 children ages 5-11 at the Open School. This fall, they are moving to a new location in Orange, where they expect to enroll 20, with an ultimate goal of growing to about 50. The school can serve children up to age 18, and tuition costs $10,500 annually.
Elvana Gaucin enrolled her daughter, Amariah Palacios, 8, in the Open School after Amariah became unhappy and bored as a first-grader in a traditional public school. Amariah herself had learned about Open School at a community event, and had insisted to her parents that she wanted to go there, her mother says.
“Even though her teachers never complained, every day after school she was moody and fussy, saying school was boring and all they did all day was worksheets,” Gaucin says. “I absolutely fell in love with the mission of the Open School, what they talk about, what they want for the children. I felt like it was a place where she could blossom.”
Amariah’s father, who teaches in a public school district, also supported enrolling her in the Open School, telling Gaucin, “We teachers are so limited in what we can teach.”
During the year that Amariah has attended the Open School, she has taught herself to ride a bike, served as chairperson of its party committee, learned some French and done a lot of cooking. She enjoys the many field trips, and asked her parents to enroll her in a writing class this summer.
“It’s really fun. I get to go lots of places and do lots of things,” Amariah says. “At my old school, I would have to do whatever the teacher told me. She would always tell me if you didn’t do homework you wouldn’t go to recess.”
Amariah’s grandparents are skeptical, Gaucin says, asking, “ ‘What does she learn? What does she do all day? Will this count for college?’ And then Amariah will come home and say, ‘I jumped on a trampoline all day today.’ But our answer is very simple. Amariah is happier than she’s ever been, and that’s all that matters to us.”
Page says it can take a “leap of faith” for parents to embrace a free-schooling philosophy that lets children choose their own path, and that families who value filial obedience above all else are not a good fit. But he says that longitudinal studies of graduates of Sudbury Valley School (a Massachusetts school founded in 1968 as the first of its kind in America) showed that 88 percent of its graduates opted to go to college, while 100 percent answered affirmatively to the question “Are you happy with your life?”
“Instead of asking children ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ why aren’t we asking ‘What do you want to be right now?’ ” Page says. For example, one of the Open School’s students wanted to be an actor, so the staff arranged to have him work in a promotional video, Page explains. Afterward, the boy decided that acting was different than he expected and decided to try other interests.
But what about basics like math and reading? Is a child going to choose to learn algebra? Page says the math question comes up often, but that life-led learning provides the opportunities to learn both. At the Open School, children who bake teach themselves fractions, and deciding how to spend the schools’ budget offers meaningful math experience. Meanwhile, says Page, one student taught himself to read by playing “Minecraft.” “He’s never done a worksheet, but he’s learning it because it’s useful. The brain values knowledge it considers utilitarian,” Page says.
“Parents may wonder, ‘Will my kid learn this? How will they get into college?’ By the time a child is 14-15, they’re going to be a fully self-directed learner. If they decide they want to go to college, they will learn four years of math in one year because there is utility to that learning,” Page says.
Other parents might not be able to wrap their heads around the idea that the school’s staff can be outvoted by its students. Page says children deserve more credit than that, explaining that at one budget meeting, a student proposed not spending money on insurance because they weren’t “getting anything” for it. Once the group discussed the purpose of insurance, the group voted unanimously to keep paying for it.
That said, staff members have been outvoted. Once, the children voted to be allowed to drink juice in the school’s van – a rule they changed back after seeing the consequences of a sticky spill, Page says.
The Open School is just one example of child-led learning, an approach to education gaining traction among parents who are turned off by traditional teaching at public schools.
In the 1970s, educator John Holt coined the term “unschooling” to describe a method that advocates child-chosen activities as the main means for learning. Unschooling students learn through life experiences such as play, household chores, travel, books, experience and family interaction. The idea is that the more personal learning is for a child, the more meaningful and useful it is. Unschooling children may choose to take certain courses, but the philosophy questions the usefulness of a standard curriculum and conventional grading and testing.
Karen Morrison, a home school coach and blogger, works with many families who turn to homeschooling and says she’s seen a dramatic upswing in the number of parents considering pulling their children out of public schools, in part as a reaction to Common Core, standardized testing and excessive homework as well as new laws requiring all public-school children to be vaccinated.
Morrison never intended to home school her children, but when her oldest daughter was miserable and almost suicidal despite attending different schools, her family decided to pull her out altogether. At first, Morrison structured her day at home much like a traditional school day.
“I tried that, but it didn’t work. My kids rebelled. It wasn’t fun. I have evolved drastically since the beginning,” says Morrison, who now home schools her four children and considers herself to fall under the “unschooling” philosophy. “For us, learning is always happening. It’s not separate from life,” says Morrison.
Morrison says she thinks the biggest misconception about unschooling is that it means unparenting. Are parents just abdicating their responsibility to parent and leaving children in a structureless environment that spoils them or leaves them unprepared for the real world?
“That’s such a misconception, that unschooling means playing video games and eating cookies all day,” Morrison says. “I was a rule follower, and I believed in schools, but we really felt like we had no other options. Now our family relationships have grown so much. There is peace and joy on the other side.”
