That’s a great interview. I sometimes wish my children had an opportunity like Sudbury. I would have to work full-time in order to afford the tuition, however, and I like being available for my children and spending time with them. That’s one of the things that bothers me about full-time schooling is that parents and children are separated for the majority of the children’s growing up years, so the two generations come to have separate lives and they risk not learning to relate to each other. Spending a lot of time together helps to build a strong and meaningful relationship (although it doesn’t always, in every family situation). Of course, you can spend too much time together, and I sometimes feel this way about my children, too, that they spend too much time with me, and too much time with each other. I would like a happy medium, where they could go to a democratic school two or three days a week, and stay home two or three days a week. But if I have to choose all or nothing, I’ll choose having too much time together over not having enough.

We have the Albany Free School here (where daily attendance is not mandatory, so the kids who are there want to be there, and they are free to stay home when they want to, too), which operates on much the same philosophy as Sudbury, and it’s probably more affordable, too, and I considered sending the girls there, but the Free School has one major difference that I can’t stomach for my kids, and that’s related to the part in the interview about hitting. Whereas the Sudbury school would not allow students who hit, the Albany Free School specializes in taking those kinds of students in. So not only is the atmosphere “chaotic,” but it also can be violent, especially language-wise. There’s a lot of swearing, name-calling, and behavior that I cannot live with, and much of which the adults just let happen because they operate under the philosophy that the children need to learn to work out their problems on their own, and so “learn confidence and independence.”

I think what the Free School does is very admirable. They locate themselves in an inner city and give poorer children the freedom to be who and what they are — chances that they would not get elsewhere. I would like my girls to know what it’s like to be poor, but I don’t necessarily want them around a lot of children who have lived difficult lives and therefore are angry and resentful of the world (at least at first, until they’ve been at the school for a while and come to learn what it’s like to be respected, so the theory goes). That’s too much to lay on the shoulders of children who haven’t been there. It’s a huge social shock (for me, as the adult) to see firsthand how the poor and abused live, let alone to try to live with them and their anger.

I think that’s a huge social problem in this country, that the middle-class is so isolated and insulated from the truth about poverty. We are so comfortable in our middle-class lives that we have blinders to anything different. But I’m veering off-topic….