I haven’t looked really, seems worth someone doing. I think there’s been a fair amount of experimentation, though maybe a lot of it is predictably worthless (e.g. by continuing to inflict central harms of normal schooling), I don’t know. (This post is mainly aimed at adding detail to what some of the harms are, so that experiments can try to pull the rope sideways on supposed tradeoffs like permissiveness vs. strictness or autonomy vs. guidance.) I looked a little. Aside from Montessori (which would take work to distinguish things branded as Montessori vs. actually implementing her spirit), there’s the Summerhill School: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School which seems to have ended up with creepy stuff going on, and Sudbury schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sudbury_schools which I don’t know about.
Have you looked for previous experiments along the lines of what you’re proposing? If so, did you find any and what were their results?
I haven’t looked really, seems worth someone doing. I think there’s been a fair amount of experimentation, though maybe a lot of it is predictably worthless (e.g. by continuing to inflict central harms of normal schooling), I don’t know. (This post is mainly aimed at adding detail to what some of the harms are, so that experiments can try to pull the rope sideways on supposed tradeoffs like permissiveness vs. strictness or autonomy vs. guidance.) I looked a little. Aside from Montessori (which would take work to distinguish things branded as Montessori vs. actually implementing her spirit), there’s the Summerhill School: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School which seems to have ended up with creepy stuff going on, and Sudbury schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sudbury_schools which I don’t know about.