Activity > Youth Project

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basic idea

We are creating Spectrum, a community for all ages that also serves as an alternative-to-school for young people. Additionally, it will serve as a supplement for kids and youth who may also be doing homeschooling, alternative schooling, or even mainstream schooling, who want another avenue of socializing and getting involved in fun and meaningful activities and projects. Our “Youth Project” is our effort to involve young people in our community, and to support them in living well, as they see it, now and in the future.

We are looking for interested people, for participants, and for co-founders and co-organizers, and would like to make this a reality in a matter of months. We invite you to join us in conversation and in the process of building a community.

summary

Regarding education and learning, there is no single solution that will work for everyone. We recognize that many different solutions will be necessary to meet the needs of each individual, family, and community. And we’d like to see a world where many options are available to people at reasonable cost. However, we have a particular vision and preference that we’d like to create and share. And here we present our vision and invitation.

Great learning is a natural part of great living, as has been demonstrated by decades of positive experience and results from Sudbury schools across the world, unschoolers(1)”Unschoolers” are self-directed learners who don’t go to a school to learn. across the country, the North Star teen learning center, and others. There is a trend toward self-directed education and living, as found for example in Agile Learning Centers and the Liberated Learners network. This trend is positive not only for young people’s education and future success, but for their quality of life, now and in the future, and for the quality of life of everyone involved.

Very many schools, due to their structure and assumptions about young people, are unfortunately not good learning or living environments, even with all of their good intentions and effort. We can do better, and we now know how to do better. We can even do it less expensively than government schools.

We are following the examples of Sudbury schools and the North Star teen learning center; we are taking from the research of psychologist Peter Gray; and we are following our own inspiration to create an environment that is well-suited for living and learning and building a vibrant community for all ages. We invite you to join us.

We’d like to establish social centers that help to empower and liberate people (including children), where we encourage and support each other to emotionally and rationally self-integrate and self-actualize, finding ways to create value, health, and wealth for ourselves and others. For children and youth, that mostly translates to giving them freedom, respect, responsibility, and a rich environment to play, explore, create, socialize, learn, and live well. We’d like to help parents and their children build healthier, less strained and coercive relationships.

There are two books we highly recommend to get a deep understanding of what we have in mind: Free to Learn by Peter Gray, and Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. You can find these books listed on our book club page. If you find that what we are suggesting seems impossible, Peter Gray shows that it is indeed possible and explains why it makes sense. All you need is one example to show possibility, but there are many examples. (Also, see the videos below and do more investigation to confirm for yourself.) And if you find that what we are suggesting seems impractical, Marshall Rosenberg shows that it is most practical to live in a respectful, self-directed manner that enables deep mutual compassion and real problem-solving. He gives practical and effective advice on how to live in this way.

quick overview of our principles

One thing that all schools *do* get right is that there is a role that adults can play in children’s education. Besides providing for the physical needs of children and providing safety, love, and support, the most important part of that role is to ensure that children’s natural and strong drives to learn are not impeded but allowed to function, as is witnessed most naturally in hunter-gatherer cultures and most modernly in Sudbury schools. Just as children naturally learn how to speak and walk, they naturally learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic when they live in an environment where the value and relevance of these skills is apparent and they are free to follow their own interests.

When children learn in this manner and in a diverse participatory community, they don’t just learn the information that is important for them to learn, they learn the skills of confident, responsible self-directed decision-making and mutually beneficial social interaction. This kind of character development is actively opposed (even if unwittingly) in the controlled and contrived environment of most schools. Even beyond impeding learning and character development, there is good reason to believe that most schools are actively harmful to the mental health and behavior of children, in some cases leading to rebellion, bullying, depression, and even suicide. This is not inevitable, at least not at the ever increasing rates that we are seeing. And we do not need to drug and manipulate children to better fit into school structures; we need to change our approach.

Children are driven to learn and continually, progressively achieve by their curiosity, playfulness, sociability, their growing abilities to predict and plan, their need for competence and achievement, and their boundless energy. As explained by the research of Peter Gray and summarized by the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, the six optimizing conditions that enable young people to maximize the value of their education are the following:

  • Responsibility — The social expectation (and reality) that education is children’s responsibility.
  • Unlimited Time to Play — Unlimited time to play, explore, and pursue one’s own interests.
  • Tools of the Culture — Opportunity to play with the tools of the culture.
  • Helpers not Judges — Access to a variety of caring adults, who are helpers, not judges.
  • Free Age Mixing — Free age mixing among children and adolescents.
  • Community — Immersion in a stable, supportive, respectful community.

We will apply these principles, combining the best features of the Sudbury model and the North Star model, and expand the mission and reach to create a community that is built for people of all ages, providing even more benefit to the young people in the community by also being relevant and useful for older people. We found that Peter Gray presents a very similar vision at the end of his book, Free to Learn. This further confirms to us that this vision is one of the fullest embodiments of the best principles of education and living that exist today.

enlightening videos

Before reading more, it may be best to watch some videos to see and hear some interesting perspectives. Here are several videos to explain and illustrate what we’re talking about:

See our Youth Project Media page for more videos and some audio.

further explanation

Read our Youth Project Explanation page to get more of the general idea.

Read our Youth Project Brainstorm page to get more specific ideas of what we can create.

more resources and links

See our Youth Project Links page for more resources.

join us

If you’d like to join the conversation or join our community, please feel free to connect via

There are multiple ways you can contact us. Please let us know if you’d like to get involved and we can figure out how each of us can contribute to grow this community and make our vision a reality.

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 ”Unschoolers” are self-directed learners who don’t go to a school to learn.