Translator: Ramin Farhangi Reviewer: Denise RQ
Tonight, I'd like to start by sending a big "thank you"
to our ancestors, the Enlightenment philosophers.
Men are born free and equal in rights.
I'm a big fan of that.
I love being free.
Free to think, say, and do whatever I want.
And by the way, tonight,
I will not refrain from speaking my mind
whether you like it or not.
To be honest, there's something I don't appreciate
with this Declaration of Human Rights,
namely, we all took it for granted and that it only applies to white men.
Fortunately, people of all colors, as well as women
demanded and were granted the same fundamental rights,
and I imagine everyone here agrees it was a great idea.
Well, tonight, I came here with a proposal:
to grant these same fundamental liberties to children.
And I will tell you why I founded a school
where children can do whatever they want with their day.
The adventure starts in a town with 70,000 inhabitants
called Framingham, in Massachusetts.
For almost 50 years, there's been a school there
where children could do whatever they want, without any time limit.
It is called Sudbury Valley School
and it was founded by Daniel and Hannah Greenberg,
ex-university physics and biochemistry professors at Columbia.
Daniel and Hannah worried about the education of their children.
For them, going to school, even at Columbia, was not an option
because their parents found it to be anti-intellectual.
So they explored other alternatives that were flourishing in the 60s,
but they didn't find what they were looking for.
So they simply invented their own school,
based on a super simple rule with revolutionary implications,
which stated children are people, too;
they're not the property of their parents, they're not the students of a teacher.
They are just like you and me,
independent members of a democratic society.
Thus, their three children grew up in a world
where nothing was expected of them,
and where they were truly free to make their own choices
on how they want to live their life and what they want to learn.
As a result, their eldest became a professional photographer and musician,
and made a good living.
Five years later though, he decided to make a little challenge
and opened a restaurant in New York City.
Their second child became a psychotherapist.
And the third one, after living and surviving in the forest for one year,
became a farmer.
To get a better idea on how far they went with granting children full freedom
in this school,
I'd like to share the story of a boy who attended this institution in the 80s.
His name is Dan.
Dan fell in love with fishing at the age of 10.
He would take his fishing rod to this pond everyday.
I took a picture of this pond when I visited the school a few weeks ago.
He'd go fishing everyday even in winter, regardless of the weather.
And yet, there were so many other things he could do,
sports, arts, music, research, play games.
There were endless possibilities, but he wasn't interested.
He was obsessed with fishing.
And he did this for five years until he was 15 years old.
One could therefore legitimately worry about the future of a person
who lived such an unconventional childhood.
You may find the end of this story rather surprising.
With 16, he falls in love with computers.
And that's a period when all his obsession about fishing
shifted to the IT world with the same intensity.
At age 17, with a few of his friends,
he opens a store to sell computer hardware,
and he becomes rather successful, so he's already earning a living.
He then uses this money to go to the university,
as a way for him to explore his passions all the way through.
And while studying in college, he's hired as an expert by Honeywell,
one of the major computer companies.
At that point, there wasn't much room left for anxiety.
He was on track for a beautiful career in his domain.
I heard about Dan's story three years ago
when I started working in a high school as a Math and Physics teacher.
During that time, pretty much like everyone else, I developed my doubts
about the effectiveness of our education system,
but let's be honest, Dan's story was way beyond anything I could imagine.
This boy didn't study a single subject in his life,
and he still became a thriving contributor to our society.
This case necessarily raises some questions.
And in my case, it did more than posing questions,
it completely turned my world upside down.
I don't know about you, but when I hear something so crazy,
I absolutely need to know more about it.
So I set myself on a quest to better understand this alternative to the system.
And quite rapidly, I discovered that there are in fact
more than 40 schools everywhere in the world
that adopted this approach.
So I went to visit some of these schools,
in Holland, Belgium, Germany,
and more recently, Sudbury Valley School itself in the US,
where I met with very smart and mature children,
and school founders who were realistic, pragmatic, sensible,
who clearly knew what they were doing.
I even thought some of them to be quite stern.
For these people, of course,
experiments on their kids or other people's kids are out of the question.
It is a serious educational approach, with a proven concept,
which aims for human excellence.
At some point, it became obvious for me I wanted to create such a school as well,
and the good news is that it's done.
It's the first big one of them in France.
It's called Ecole Dynamique, opened about two months ago in Paris,
with around 20 members of all ages, from three to 16
who do whatever they want with their lives,
and spend their days together in this place.
Here is a picture of my colleagues, the co-founders of this school.
They're also free to use their time however they want
to help this school thrive.
So on top of being a liberated school,
our organization is also liberated
from traditional structures and hierarchies.
Now, besides Dan's story, I'd like to tell you another one.
It's about Laura Poitras. I love this story!
Laura also went to Sudbury Valley School from age 4 to 18.
She didn't open a single school textbook in her life.
She mostly practiced photography.
And she learned how to read at age 13.
After graduation, she did a career as director of documentary films.
And not just any director. Laura is a true international superhero.
She created Citizen Four, where she films Edward Snowden
in the midst of revealing the NSA's controversial schemes to the whole world.
And for this piece of work, she received the Oscar for best documentary in 2014.
I'd like to insist on the fact that she learned how to read at age 13.
This means that the age
at which one starts reading and taking interest in intellectual endeavors
doesn't necessarily have much to do with the future success of this person.
In fact, and I may surprise some of you, it's the opposite trend
that has been observed at Sudbury Valley School.
I recently met some of the co-founders, who still work there as staff members,
and they have the very rare experience
of observing for 47 years young people who live without any constraints.
Some of them learn how to read rather late,
at age 10, 11, 12, or even 13, like Laura,
and they realized that these people have a tendency to progress more
towards intellectual and academic careers,
which obviously questions
some well-established beliefs about education.
Of course, all the people
who attended this kind of school learned how to read and write.
Otherwise, they would have closed down a while ago already.
Who in his right mind would enroll his children in a school
where they wouldn't be sure they would learn how to read and write?
People often ask me the question: how do these schools teach reading?
And my answer is, I insist, we abstain from teaching how to read.
And it works just as well as abstaining from teaching your mother tongue.
Did you ever see a parent trying to teach his mother tongue to his children,
who would make them repeat sentences over and over,
and who would explain all the rules of grammar and conjugation?
Of course not, it would seem absurd.
Little children feel the obvious need to learn their language
and to always get better at it,
and this is why they keep practicing with their relatives,
such that they make visible progress day by day.
Well, just like the natural learning of their mother tongue,
the natural learning process of reading and writing
happens through and infinite amount of interactions with their environment.
Each person has his own method. No one knows how they do it exactly.
No one could ever be able to dissect such a rapid and complex process.
The result is the same anyway: they all learn how to read and write.
And now, I'm also going to tell you why we abstain from teaching math.
Yes, math! Everyone is obsessed with math.
There are quite a few observations that lead to similar conclusions,
and I'd like to focus on one of them I found to be particularly compelling.
It's the story of a study that was done in the 30s
by an American superintendent and researcher called Louis-Paul Bénézet.
Bénézet felt that it was too early for primary school children to study Math.
and he thought that if we didn't teach them math,
they could still attend secondary school without any problem.
So, in order to test this crazy hypothesis,
he asked a few primary schools from poorer neighborhoods
to simply abandon math as a school subject.
Six long years later, he measures the results
hoping to prove his hypothesis.
And ... surprise!
The results were far beyond his expectations.
Children from poorer neighborhoods, with only a single year of training,
significantly outperformed their peers from richer neighborhoods
who had six years of training.
So when I'm asked how children will learn math at Ecole Dynamique,
I tell them that we leave them alone, and that it is proven by science.
In fact, they encounter quite a few math problems in their daily ordinary lives,
and we trust that they will solve them by themselves or ask for help when in need.
Graduates from this type of schools therefore master fundamental skills
to be effective in society,
and beyond this,
well, they learn how to know themselves better
and explore their own interests,
apply themselves intensely,
and persevere in their efforts
to eventually reach excellence in their domain.
In fact, we aren't dealing here
with the experiments of some mad scientist,
or a tireless hippie aiming at freeing kids for the sake of freedom, no.
It is a serious educational approach which aims for excellence.
In fact, in the end, to give you the key to what is going on here,
I'll tell you now, it is that we give them the power.
All the power, to overcome the greatest challenge of a human life,
that of becoming fully independent and responsible for your own life,
and not only starting at age 18, but at any age.
In the end, by abstaining from educating them,
we allow them to develop the confidence they need
to overcome all challenges in their lives,
which include getting a high school degree some day, if they need it,
and which takes, let's say, come on,
at most a year of preparation if you take it seriously,
as shown by the experience of these thousands of young French people
who never went to school and still succeeded on exams.
And for those of you who remain skeptical,
I will offer some stats which may end up convincing you.
80% of Sudbury Valley graduates went to college,
and they usually got their first choice
even when applying to a highly selective university,
like Harvard, Berkeley, or Columbia.
And for the remaining 20%, well, they chose a track
which doesn't necessarily involve a college experience,
like some careers in arts, craftsmanship, or entrepreneurship.
So there are the facts. There is proof.
And there is simply common sense.
Treating children as independent persons is a Copernican revolution indeed.
We can't continue considering children blank slates adults should develop
so that they can live their own lives someday,
except if we want to live in a Dark Age and stop human progress,
then it's exactly what we should do.
But if, like myself, you dream of a day when humanity will become
infinitely more genius than it is today,
well, we don't have a choice!
Our world views need to evolve.
And tonight, I will make a political proposal
which would honor this Copernican revolution.
Yup, I'm going to make a move as a citizen of this country.
I move a proposal to change
the law on compulsory education which goes back to 1882.
At that time, the 3rd Republic voted this law
within a context of building the Republican French Nation,
which implied getting rid of local languages and alternative ideologies,
to prepare children for the industrial world and for war.
Today, the context has totally changed,
and we should adapt to an era of globalization, digitization, and peace.
The problem today is not to submit all children
to a standardized educational program
for all of them to learn the same thing, but quite the contrary.
We should diversify approaches as much as possible
to free the potential of a wide variety of individuals.
We should have a law which allows
for a diversity of philosophies, methods, and educational content.
We should even allow those who'd rather go back to uniforms
and a more strict obedience to a master to go on with that.
And I say this without any irony. Why not?
Any point of view, from the most traditionalists
to the most progressive like Ecole Dynamique,
depends on each person's world view.
If we have the courage to make such a change,
we would honor the spirit of the Enlightenment
and all these pioneers, who for the past 300 years
have fought so hard to push for an evolution of our culture
and to free the individual, so that he may think, say,
and do whatever he wants with his life.
Tonight, with my love for life, my passion for education, and for culture,
I suggest to replace the law
of compulsory schooling by a law for freedom of education.
And I will finish with this quote from Victor Hugo,
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
(Applause)