Sudbury Schools where the men of the mind learn in freedom.
Educating yourself
Graduate Says:
I didn’t really think about getting an education. I didn’t understand the idea
of having to artificially “get” an education. I thought that you lived in the
world and you got smarter because every day you were learning. I thought that
there was no way you could get dumber unless you were erasing stuff out of
your brain. It seemed to me that one day you were talking to someone about
one subject and another day you were talking to someone about another, and
eventually you’d get around to all of them.
Outsiders would ask, “What classes do you do?” And you’d think, "Classes? We
don’t do classes, you know. Look around. There are no classrooms here."
They’d say, “What did you learn today?” and we’d think, "What did we learn
today? What are you talking about?" Because it wasn’t as if you went into the
library and learned your facts for the day. You had a dozen conversations
with people. We weren’t learning subject by subject. We were learning in a
much more organic manner. You would be doing a lot of different things and
you would learn them in little bits and pieces that would start adding up to
much bigger pictures. You wouldn’t really know where it came from a lot of
the time. By the time you were done learning about something, information was
coming from so many different sources, from books and from people you were
talking to, and from a long drawn out experience, that you had no idea how
you learned it.