In my previous blog, I celebrated the news that many adults are working to make self-directed learning an option in their communities.  From democratic schools to Agile Learning Centers to our network of Liberated Learners, I am enthused for the dramatic increase in the amount of people offering their support to students and families to consider a fresh and exciting path for learning.

Here, I would like to start a conversation with the question, “Well, where is everybody?” For all that we analyze the problems with modern schooling and offer welcoming invitations to families to join us in our joyful alternatives, the truth is that the vast majority of school-kids are staying put.  If we tried to count the number of kids in all of our self-directed learning projects combined across the U.S., our census might rival the one or two largest public schools in the country.  North Star has been providing an option in our community since 1996, and while our organization has grown in stability and professionalism, we have maintained a fairly steady size of 50-70 students for many years.

This essay is spurred by a recent conversation I had^, with a prospective new member at North Star, age 12.  Despite his mother’s urging him to join North Star, he desperately wants to stay in school with his friends.  He is constantly in trouble at school for minor behavioral infractions, and his mother is fed up with the multiple daily emails and phone calls she receives from the school team informing her of his transgressions.  So are the school personnel. In a rather rare turn of events, his teachers and counselors are telling the boy and his mother, “You guys should really consider North Star. That might be perfect for him!”

She and I presented the option of his opting out of school for the remainder of 7th grade, and perhaps starting fresh in the fall with a bit more maturity gained from a semester of North Star and his natural growth over the next six months.  (Or, even better, using North Star for the rest of middle school and starting fresh at the high school as a ninth grader in eighteen months.)

His resistance was informative.  He truly fears that if he leaves school for a semester, his friends will forget about him, and it will be impossible to make up this lost ground next fall.  He wants to grow up to be a lawyer, and he is already quite savvy and articulate. He told me, “School is the place I feel the happiest.  It’s my best place.  You can’t take that away from me.”  I pointed out the inconsistency that his days sound full of wandering the hallways and engaging in trivial conflicts with adults, to no avail.  “I’m really going to do better this time!” he pledged.

We concluded the conversation with a stalemate. His mother is ready to withdraw him from school and enroll him at North Star against his will, from an understandable view that “this is for his own good.”  I am not eager to have anyone enroll against their will, and I proposed that he can continue being a nuisance at his school while his mom just ignores the daily reports. With any luck, he will tire of this routine on his own.  (He acknowledged my argument that North Star might help him get a head start on being a lawyer more effectively than middle school, but that was dismissed as not being the real issue at this time.)

In the meantime, this anecdote shows some of what we all face in our efforts to build small alternative programs.  Many kids feel a strong desire to be where “everyone else is”, at the main scene of the social action in their community: the public school.  I know that I certainly felt that way as a child, and that my many of my family members felt the same way, too.  Many of us feel a strong urge to be “normal,” or at least a need to prove to ourselves that we can do the “normal” thing, especially during childhood and adolescence.  Opting out of the mainstream may feel like a failure.  I have encountered many teens who will “go down with the ship” to remain in school rather than embrace an offer for something different, even when that alternative includes getting out of a system that isn’t working well for them.

I normally start my explanation for the resistance that many families have to leaving conventional school with three other topics:

1. Money. Most families don’t have $5,000 to $10,000 per year per child to spend on private education, and many of these people feel uncomfortable asking for financial aid. Even though our tuitions tend to be less than a third of the fees of elite private schools, we are competing against the price of public schools, which is $0.

2. Transportation. I have learned that some states require towns to provide yellow-school-bus transportation for children attending private schools within a limited distance of their home district.  We have no such luck in Massachusetts, so families who choose charter schools, school choice to other districts, or private schools are on their own for rides. Homeschoolers are not welcome to use the school bus as a form of public transportation.  This logistical problem is difficult for many families to solve.

3. Fear: Many parents and teens feel certain that the young person will do nothing, learn nothing, and become nothing if they are given the freedom to pursue their own lives without school.  There are misunderstandings of how our programs work, of how our staff support families, and of how our alumni succeed.  For this point, I am speaking of the fear of bad academic outcomes, not the social stigma I have described above.

I usually add in the desire of teens to be in school for social reasons as at most a fourth point, an after-thought.  This week’s case, though, was so clearly stated by this boy that I wanted to share it and consider whether it might rank as a first-place issue. Even when parents are sold on our approach as better for their child and family, sometimes the teen firmly prefers to stay in school for the sake of their social life in spite of the obvious disaster it has become for them.

In my next blog, I will offer the update on this dramatic tale.

For the moment, though, I ask, especially regarding teens:

Is the desire by many teens to attend public school for social reasons the primary obstacle to the growth of our various programs promoting self-directed learning, and if so, how might we address this situation?