I am usually so busy at conferences that I don’t usually get to go to many workshops. But there were two that I had to participate it, and aspects of both of them amazed and stunned me.
The first was the workshop that nutritionist Dr. Joel Fuhrman did on the first day. He was speaking about the best foods to eat and what not to eat for optimum health. Sometimes he got into fairly detailed analysis.
Two students from a Sudbury school were in the workshop. One of them raised his hand and asked a very high level bio-chemical question. Dr. Furman began to answer it and realized that he had lost almost everyone in the audience. He stopped and asked the student, “How do you know about all these things?”
I responded, “He’s a democratic school student!”
“How old are you? The student was asked. He replied that he was 15 and was studying this on his own because he had great interest in nutrition.
Later Dr. Fuhrman told me he thought the students must be a very young- looking college student. “He should go to medical school!” he said.
In another remarkable workshop, Michael Landers spoke about how he homeschooled in 11th and 12th grade to pursue his dream of making it on the USA Olympic table tennis team. He was already the youngest person to win the national men’s championship. While homeschooling he was able to train in such places as California, Europe, and China. He was even on a cereal box! Eventually, he won the Olympic tryouts.
But the most dramatic part of this workshop came later. At one point Michael said he was also relieved to be homeschooling because he had been verbally bullied in school. Students there made fun of him, calling him “ping pong boy” and even made fun of his classical bassoon playing. His orchestra had even played at Carnegie Hall.
But then a student at a democratic school, also a competitive athlete, said, “If you were in a democratic school you could have called a meeting.”
When Michael asked what that was, the democratic school student said that when you call a meeting in a democratic school the bully had to come to the meeting and would be confronted about it. The person who was bullied could explain what happened and the meeting had to listen. If the meeting agreed there had been bullying, the bully would often have to write an apology and that usually ended the bullying right then and there.
Michael was floored! But that was not all. Then a homeschooled brother and sister pointed out that usually homeschool was with a non-authoritarian approach, “and we also learn a lot of compassion. So we don’t often see bullying in homeschooling.”
It was an amazing sequence., What is also interesting is that Michael was on track to work on Wall street and has already successfully interned there. But then he decided he didn’t want to do that and wanted to become a social worker. “Homeschooling taught me I could get off the track if I wanted to!”
