Joerg Langhorst

I was recently taking my kids out of school – I de-schooled them and took them out of school – and I'm currently creating a new school with a new school system which is a democratic school system, in France. The goal is by September/October this year I want to open that school and have my kids go there plus a lot of other kids as well, and a new way of learning. There was a moment in time when I saw that my kids – the way that they were going to school and everything – they had some issues, let's say it this way. It was a question whether the problem was with my kids or whether it was the school system – and it became pretty clear to me that it's more a problem with the school system rather than the kids. And then if you look a little bit further in the story, you find a lot of interesting articles and books around this topic where it comes down to that the existing school systems that we have – the classic school systems actually kill creativity very quickly and very efficiently. That's why we decided first of all to take our kids out of school. So they are 13 and 11. My daughter was the best in her class, but we still decided to take her out. And certainly for my son, it was better because of his profile and everything, he's more self-learning person. Very interested in certain things but not necessarily the stuff they learn in school. I was thinking about myself 'What was really important in school that was really important when you decide what you want to do in your life?' So when you go to university and everything – I was thinking that out of the 100% that you learn in school, it's maybe 1% that you really use at the end of the day. So I said, you can use that time learning something more important and at the same time get the feeling that in the school system that you are in that you are really taking control of yourself. You are self aware of what you want to do, what you want to become, etc. Which is probably more a problem for the parents than for the kids. So we'll see how it goes but it's definitely an interesting concept. C: What is the model? We are modeling after the Sudbury model which is the model for democratic schools. C: How do you visualize it when it's running? Hopefully the most beautiful thing is that you will see a lot of kids across different ages – age mixing and everything will be there – in an environment which is hopefully a very nice and supporting environment. We are living in the south of France near the Cote d'Azur. It's an area where the kids spend most of the year outside and we are also in an area which is called more or less the Silicon Valley of Europe. So it's an area where people are more open to these kinds of new concepts. So we hope that we will be successful there. […] We hope to demonstrate to other people that there are other ways of educating kids. [...] [My kids] are happy that they don't have to go to classic school any more and they are pretty excited to experience the new system as well. So they are actively working with us on this. She's 13 and she's always there to respond from her perspective which is pretty powerful. [explaining more of how the system works]