Lars Og Pål

In this episode Lars talks to Kenneth Danford, co-founder and executive director of North Star, an alternative to middle school and high school in Sunderland, Massachusetts. Since 1996 he’s been “helping kids leave school” (sic), and can talk from personal experience about what has happened to over 500 adolescents as they have done just that. Spoiler: It works better than you might think. In 2019 he published the book Learning is natural. School is optional. The North Star approach to offering teens a head start in life. In it he tells the story of North Star, how he went from teaching in middle school to starting this alternative, his own uncertainties about what giving kids this amount of freedom might lead to, and some lessons learned, more than twenty years down the road. It’s honestly one of the most inspiring reads we’ve come over in the last couple years, so get yourself a copy. Some of the main questions that Kenneth asks in the book are:   What if kids are naturally curious? What if we counted th