What's a school?
some clarification.
At the last Open House many of the questions parents and youth asked, got me thinking: how are we like a school and how are we not? We do have some offerings on the schedule and some structure to our days. We haven’t even opened yet, but the word “school” in our name (a choice we made consciously, knowing the weight it carries on multiple sides) it’s already affecting our reputation. Conventional school has such a huge impact on kids that those of us who choose to leave school and pursue something different call that period of time after you leave school “deschooling.” Deschooling is a hard swing against all the expectation, judgements, and control of conventional school settings, including progressive schools. At Meraki, all of those expectations, judgements, and controls are thrown out.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of things you won’t find at our school.
*Required attendance
*Tardiness
*Testing
*Punishment
*Patronizing adults
*Conventional lectures
Here is a non-exhaustive list of things you will find at Meraki that you won’t find at a conventional school.
*Free time to hang with your friends
*options to participate or not.
*Access to tools to make what YOU want with them
*Youth-run conflict resolution
*Youth-run community
*Mixed-age community
At any conventional or progressive school, the adults have made a plan for what kids will learn and how things will be handled. At Meraki the youth that are a part of the community decide those things through the general assembly. Youth are free to spend their time at the school as they wish. The youth are truly in charge of the school.
So it may be a “school,” but it’s really like no other school you have seen before.
If you or your child wants to learn and understand more about how our school and schools that have inspired our work, and you like video mediums, I made a short playlist of my favorite promo videos from other schools and my favorite dramatized mini series from the BBC on Summerhill and their fight to stay free.