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   Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 02:25:27 JST Adam Greenfield

   Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another #Lifehouse thread. I’m super-mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.

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     Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 02:25:22 JST Adam Greenfield

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     It was a failing, hippie-era experiment in egalitarian education called the Miquon Upper School, which makes it sound a lot grander than it was. It was in a ramshackle house in Chestnut Hill, an hour away across town – I had to take two commuter trains to get there in the morning, and two to get back, which was its own kind of education. And it didn’t have grades in either sense, i.e. neither year-based distinctions of curriculum, or letter-based evaluations of performance. You called teachers

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     Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 02:25:23 JST Adam Greenfield

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     The school district insisted I see a psychiatrist, who wasn’t great, but to his credit told my parents, “You should trust him, he really isn’t going back there. You need to find an alternative.” Well, conventional private schools were out of the question. There were Friends schools around – two of them, excellent – but even putting expense aside I just bounced off their social universe. My parents were getting fairly desperate, when somehow they heard of a place that seemed to offer some hope.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 02:25:25 JST Adam Greenfield

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     (I promise you, this is going somewhere.)

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     Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 02:25:26 JST Adam Greenfield

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     Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that I was kind of a fuckup at the age of 13, dealing with life issues that included not having a stable place to stay and also what I’d pretty clearly now characterize as ADHD. I was getting bullied in school – not awfully, but enough to make it an unpleasant place to be – and had started to cut classes. Up to then an ostensibly “gifted” student, I landed a failing report card in my first semester of eighth grade, and one day just refused to go back.

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     Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 01-Apr-2024 02:25:32 JST Adam Greenfield

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     by their first name. You took whatever classes you felt ready for, with whoever else was there, from 12 to 18. There was lots of hands-on craft. It was the kind of place where students had a smoking room (!), and put on their own production of “Ubu Roi.” It literally saved my life.