School is good if it is democratic.

I read somewhere that Michael Brooks went to one of those Deweyite schools and so did Noam Chomsky. I never got around to reading John Dewey but I figured that was a good place to start learning about philosophy of education. I think he might have been a lib? or one of those Georgists? In any case, I think he had good ideas about education needing to involve more student participation rather than treating them as vessels to be filled with prescriptive knowledge or future wage slaves and/or middle managers.

I was excited when I learned about a school near where I live that has existed for several decades with a similar model of self-directed learning. Then a very prominent fascist was revealed to have come from that city and been educated at that very school. I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from that. It’s definitely painted the place in a new light for me but I have no direct experience with them nor anyone who has attended it.

As an aside, I read a short paper on the concept of “Everybody gets an A” that I can no longer find that basically argued for repeating lessons until everyone in the class has mastered the material to a sufficient degree. It called for more frequent, earlier testing followed by review whereby students are broken into groups with a representative subsection according to performance - so that the students who are doing well can tutor/teach the students who aren’t. Repeat until everyone gets an A and move on to the next lesson. The students who are doing well get the opportunity of experiencing what it’s like to teach material - this is a valuable skill and requires introspection and examination of their own comprehension. The students who are not doing well “slow the class down” but there are no longer gaps in their knowledge which will compound over long periods of time and requires less review in future lessons. I think everyone has had the experience (especially in mathematics) of not quite understanding a lesson but scraping by with a C or B only to really need that prerequisite knowledge in the future. Everyone I’ve explained this to has said it was a bad idea so I’m firmly on the author’s side even if I’m misrepresenting their idea.