A Room for Learning

"A few years ago, an idealistic teacher named Tal Birdsey started such a school for young adolescents in Ripton, Vermont, called North Branch School. He tells its story, with delightful wit and penetrating insight, in his inspiring new book . . . We see how an authentic teacher builds a caring, loving community of learners. Every page, every incident and observation Birdsey relates, is a gentle but firm repudiation of technocratic schooling . . . A Room for Learning shows exactly what 'something closer to the heart' looks like in education. Birdsey sees each of his students as whole persons, with their own challenges, inclinations, learning styles, quirks and insecurities. Most of them . . . are afraid of ridicule and rejection, suspicious of adults who judge them and peers who band together in cliques to exercise power. They are reluctant to open themselves to others, to test their own limits or pursue their deepest dreams. Birdsey tells how he created a safe, nurturing space in which these young teens could find and test their best, authentic selves . . . Ultimately, what really matters to Birdsey and his students is a community where everyone feels cared for, a community rooted in love. This . . . is what people are for."—Ron Miller, author of What Are Schools For?, Vermont Commons

"A telling and  inspiring account of a dedicated and knowing teacher and a community that assembled on behalf of the future of its young citizens, all determined to further the cultural, intellectual, moral, psychological growth that takes place in a classroom . . . A witness to education as it hands one generation along to form, ably and knowingly, its place in a nation's destiny."—Robert Coles, Pulitzer Prize award-winning author of Children in Crisis

"If education interests you—if kids interest you—this is a magical story. It's about what happens if you take them seriously, and if you have the grace and agility to hang with them in the tough spots and the glorious ones. Nothing you've read for a long time will make you much more optimistic about the possibilities for the future. And if you're an educator, or thinking of becoming one, nothing will remind you more powerfully of the nobility of your calling."—Bill McKibben, New York Times bestselling author of Deep Economy

“A glorious memoir of teaching and learning, of building a school from the bottom up, of keeping it small, intimate, personal and informal, Tal Birdsey's A Room for Learning is an implicit rebuke of of the rancid illness that plagues American education: bureaucracy, formality, standardized testing, uniformity, conformity, and an unholy reliance on numbers and statistics.  In Birdsey's little piece of heaven, there is simply the student, the teacher, the materials, and the place. Nothing extraneous, only art, intelligence, creativity and a close stable healthy environment. A hymn to pedagogy, the sacredness of nature and the child, the music of language, the rigors of inquiry, and the natural high of creativity. As he opens his students eyes, he opened mine.”—Pat Conroy, New York Times bestselling author of The Prince of Tides, My Losing Season, The Water is Wide, and many others