How do students learn the “basics” that other schools teach formally?
We trust that students will come across a need for and therefore an intrinsic reason to learn those skills that are truly basic to success in our society. Everyone needs reading and writing skills to email a friend or read the directions to a new gadget, and math skills to buy a soda or build a deck. Beyond these traditional “basics” there is a great deal of information that is useful in life. Why allergies make people sick, how insurance companies work, what a “defendant” is – these are examples of things we all probably need to know. But every alert human being will pick up such basic information through conversation, TV watching, reading, or first hand experience over the course of her/his life. On the other hand, many of the things taught in traditional schools — John Quincy Adams, the air currents over the Sahara Desert, and the Pythagorean theorem, for example — may or may not be “picked up” by students living their lives at a Sudbury-model school. If a student is interested in
