(Fairhaven School graduated seven students last June. As a way to celebrate the class of 2011, over the next month, we will be posting the theses that they successfully defended. In italics below is a brief description outlining how somebody earns a Fairhaven diploma, followed by the first thesis. Enjoy! Students who have spent at…
Below is a link to an article on CNN that features Sudbury Valley school staff and alumni. http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/03/unschooling.sudbury.education/index.html Be advised, like most articles about Sudbury schooling, an expert is quoted expressing concerns with the model, specifically the concern with “chaos” and how “the world is going to need things” from our students. Rest assured, our…
It began as a casual, inscrutable suggestion from Sudbury Valley School founder Mimsy Sadofsky at the end of the last Sudbury conference in Framingham, Massachusetts: “You guys should host the next conference.” Us? Was she kidding? No, she wasn’t, and last month Fairhaven School hosted our first international Sudbury conference. After a year and a…
Fairhaven School’s Theatre Corporation is staging Kesserling’s comedy “Arsenic And Old Lace” for a second weekend this Saturday and Sunday. Doors open at 7:00. Approximately one-third of the school has been involved, from acting to directing, from set-building to stage crew. It’s a barrel of laughs, and a lovely testament to what a Sudbury education…
(Reprinted here with permission, a blog post from Frome School founder Guy Wilson. http://fromefreeschool.co.uk/ Best wishes to Guy and his start-up group as they open a Sudbury school in the United Kingdom!) After seven hours of traffic jams and motorways, my family and I are bored rigid. Our aging golden Labrador snores sonorously in the…
For the month of January, Fairhaven School hosted Monika Wernz, a visitor from a startup Sudbury school group in Munich. From the beginning, we have welcomed visitors from all over the world to our campus. On the one hand, we want to support growth and awareness of the Sudbury approach to education. On the other…
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…
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!
