Fairhaven School: Playing Video Games on Their Own Terms

Children are wonderfully creative beings with boundless energy. They draw and sing and create and smile and, yes, play video games. These are all healthy activities for a child… up to a point. When a child spends all day playing video games — for three years — or is creative all day without guidance from adults about how to use that creativity to learn new things, that’s unhealthy. It’s not school; it’s just a bunch of kids hanging out all day. It’s also what the Fairhaven School in Maryland encourages, and for which students are charged over $6,000 per annum in tuition.

Last I heard, “tuition” meant money paid for instruction. Yet, from reading today’s article in the Washington Post, I am hard-pressed to see how the word tuition applies. Maybe it’s more accurately described as an “activity fee.” Maybe “membership dues.” But tuition? That implies education, which the children at Fairhaven are simply not getting.

Purely alternative schools, where “teaching” is frowned upon and “students” (I use all these words very loosely) are left to frolic as they see fit, have no place in our educational system. They create oxymoronic students who don’t study, teachers who don’t teach, and schools where learning is left up to the whims of the children. Don’t want to learn about fractions today, Timmy? That’s okay — go climb trees instead. Write a skit. Bake a cake. It’s all learning here!

The very idea is almost too ludicrous to be real, but indeed it is, and some parents actually pay money for this tripe, and I want to know how effective Fairhaven really is. Unfortunately, the Washington Post article didn’t tell me. It made some lame-o excuse about there being “little way to evaluate Fairhaven except on its own terms,” and then noted anecdotally that a few of its “graduates” have actually gone off to college. That’s great, but the article stopped there. Were the three graduates actually prepared for college? Did they learn anything useful in elementary through high school? How many students don’t graduate, anyway? What happens to them? Do you have any tables or charts we could look at? We’ll never know because intrepid WaPo staff reporter Nick Anderson didn’t dig. “That wasn’t my angle,” he may say, cocking his Scoop hat snippily. Fine. Angle. I get it. The fact remains — you don’t know how many Fairhaven students are truly well-equipped to handle life outside the Fantasy Forest.

It’s understandable that Fairhaven couldn’t provide any data on its students — after all, the very idea of “data” implies some kind of standardized collection method, and possibly the use of a spreadsheet. It probably is just a bit inconsiderate of us to expect the Fairhaven folks to acquiesce to society’s request for meaningful numbers demonstrating any sort of progress. Besides, the Fairhaven people may not know how to work a spreadsheet.

But if I were the Post, I would have gone past the Fairhaven folks. I would have talked to state officials, school boards around the area, university admissions counselors, to discover exactly why, as the article notes, “[s]tudents at Fairhaven earn no course credits toward a state-recognized high school diploma.” Why not having a diploma might put a damper on one’s professional aspirations. Why it is important to expect from our children something more than constant playtime on their own terms. Why teachers have a responsibility to take the video games and skateboards away and force Timmy to buckle down and learn how to write properly, how to critically analyze a text, how to become a productive member of society, and how to try to muffle the sounds of laughter echoing toward us from across the Pacific.

Fairhaven is a candy store and our children’s brains are rotting away. We owe our children more than that.