Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

This type of school sounds like it would be disastrous for anyone except naturally motivated and intrinsically pragmatic renaissance boys and girls.

There is no curriculum or set of required courses. Instead learner interest guides things, with students studying what they want to study.[1] There are generally no classrooms, just rooms where people choose to congregate.

I don't see the average 10-year-old (let alone younger) dutifully self-balancing their schedule to make sure they learn arithmetic, language, and everything else that young children learn. I just don't see that.

There was a school somewhat similar to that where I grew up. It scored so highly on the Provincial Achievement Tests that they started investigating whether teachers were helping kids cheat. It turned out they weren't, but the principal was embezzling money, so they shut it down anyways. And that's how I ended up in a public school and learned how to slack off and cheat the system instead.

I actually think that children are more likely to learn what they need to learn when they want to learn it. I hate math, because the way it is taught doesn't give it any use. Why on earth do I care about when two trains in an imaginary world will meet? However give me a problem that doesn't seem to have a solution, I will often use mathematical concepts to solve it because when I hated math so much, my mom gave me more practical/parlor trick ways to learn it.
Kids are naturally curious, and will absorb way more knowledge when they explore on their own than when forced to sit in a classroom for hours on end.

I love the idea. I don't think I could homeschool my children for their whole school years, but one year of unschooling sounds fantastic to me.

I was home schooled. We had more structure than do whatever you want, but it was very much focused on what each of my siblings and I needed/wanted to focus on. I think the lowest any of my siblings has scored on a standardized test was 80th percentile. One sister was convinced she failed the ACT. She got a 29.

Our education system is flawed, and I don't think that there many wrong options when it comes to schooling.

My daughter starts first grade this coming Tuesday. I can appreciate the difficulty in teaching a group of little humans. The same performance by a teacher could be pushing one kid too hard while pushing another not enough.

One thing I wonder about that Sudbury school after having read that article, if the kids are in charge of their own education, deciding for themselves what they want to learn, what if there is one kid who just doesn't like something pretty important, like, say, spelling. "u no wat i meen, and i luv math an jus wanna do that. jus that." I wonder if they truly would not pressure such a kid to learn the basics of spelling if he absolutely would not give any of his self-directed learning to it.

I think that most kids want to be well learned. Maybe that's just me though. Peer pressure would likely be enough to get the lagging children to invest time in something, and mixing ages could help too, since I don't know of many children that don't want to do the things their older peers are doing.

Spelling is one of those things that is already an issue, and I don't really see how letting children guide themselves will worsen the spelling problem.

Many children are not mentally developed enough to process concepts that we give them when we present them in our current education system, particularly mathematical concepts.