Two months ago, C., a twelve-year-old student, obtained permission from School Meeting to volunteer every Thursday at the nearby Clearwater Nature Center in pursuit of his Junior Naturalist certification. Two weeks ago, as a component of his training, he co-hosted a live animal demonstration in the Chesapeake Room with his supervisor. He and the school [...]

Understanding Fairhaven School often involves what we do. To name but a few things I’ve seen this week, students here have been spending their days creating, playing, thinking, debating, reading, writing, running, dancing, swinging, acting, voting, drumming, climbing, and drawing. (See the earlier post linking to Sudbury Valley School’s new video or the many previous [...]

The best book I read in 2010 (and one I’ve used in my Creative Writing class here at school) might just be expatriate poet Gustaf Sobin’s essay collection Luminous Debris: Reflecting On Vestige In Provence And Languedoc. In it the late author writes brief meditative essays about prehistoric artifacts in southern France, his home for [...]

In the latest installment in its forty-three effort to explain and promote the Sudbury model of education, our colleagues at Sudbury Valley School have produced a new video. It is lovely, and features a student named Ben whose thesis defense I had the pleasure of approving last spring (along with Stephanie Sarantos from Clearwater School [...]

This post by Shoshona London Sappir appeared on the blog of Michael Sappir, a graduate of the Jerusalem Sudbury School. (Michael writes often on issues of education at http://sappir.net.) A few years ago my husband and I attended a lecture by linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann, presenting a provocative theory: the Hebrew we speak today is closer [...]

Some things don’t change. In an era of increasing homework, we are buoyed by this this quotation from 1860 reprinted as part of The Scientific American’s 50/100/150 feature: Against Homework “A child who has been boxed up six hours in school might spend the next four hours in study, but it is impossible to develop [...]

Here are a whole batch of pictures from our Halloween party. Current students, alumni, and staff are represented. Enjoy!

We learned last Monday about the tragic accidental death of David Hepner, one of our 2009 graduates. He was riding in a truck with two other graduates, passing the home of yet another graduate. The news and suddenness has shocked and rocked our community, but the unique fabric of a Sudbury school has already begun [...]

From the top of the outdoor steps, behind the swing set, you can look down into the forest and see Mt. Nebo Creek passing through the school’s property on its way to the Patuxent River, the Chesapeake Bay, and, ultimately, the Atlantic Ocean. Housing its fossils, naming our first book, the stream (as we call [...]

Whereas traditional school environments rely on stability, predictability and routine, a Sudbury school environment like Fairhaven is characterized by change and variability. To be sure, we do have our routines and structures here: just today we convened our first School Meeting of the year, where we elected students to run the meeting and record the [...]