<p>I’m a big believer in following kids’ leads in the early years. I think that most kids naturally know what they need to know and stretch themselves, and that if we trust them, while also surrounding them with resources, both in the form of knowledgeable adults, and things like books, and art supplies, and musical instruments, they’ll find their way.</p>
<p>Having said that, I think that if you follow this approach you need to take a long term view, and not expect kids to be marching along in lock step with the public school, or in this case elite private school kids. Kids who are directing their own learning are likely to jump from subject to subject, showing dramatic growth in one area while neglecting another. I think of my own child, who wasn’t educated in this manner, he went to public school because I needed to work, who spent about 4 weeks the summer he was 7 obsessed with the game monopoly. By the end of those 4 weeks he had gone from sort of understanding single digit addition and subtraction, to mastering 4 digit place value, adding and subtracting 3 digit numbers with regrouping in his head, being able to divide numbers in half (so he could figure out how much a property mortgaged for), etc . . . Of course during those same 4 weeks the only reading he learned was things like “Community Chest”. If I’d let him learn like that all the time, I’d imagine that there would have been similar months when he was all about Harry Potter, and jumped 3 years in reading levels while working his way through the books, or decided that all he cared about was bugs and learned a huge amount about life cycles. But would that bug month have happened during the same grade when “life cycles” appear in the standards? Would he have been “on grade level” before the Harry Potter jump? Probably not. </p>
<p>I’d need to see the Blue School before I’d decide whether I’d send my own kid, but in general, I think that you can’t judge schools that give a lot of freedom with a yardstick designed for kids in adult directed curricula.</p>
<p>I would also say that Montessori schools don’t really belong in the same category as the Blue School. Montessori schools, in my experience, do direct kids learning a great deal. They do so by limiting what kids are allowed to use or do, and how they are supposed to use or do those things, with the result being that kids do end up choosing the academic tasks that the Montessori people value. I think that’s fine, but it’s really no less pushy than a teacher saying “Now it’s time to take out your reading book”.</p>