The Spokane Learning Co-op

We are Washington State's only outdoor Self-Directed Education Center

The Vision

Many youth enter adulthood needing to go "find themselves."

What if they were never lost in the first place?

Imagine...

Imagine a world where children wake up excited to be alive, their eyes bright with curiosity, and voices strong from being truly heard.

Imagine a school that children actually want to attend. A place where there are no required classes, no grades, no homework, no tests, no detention, no coercion, no manipulation, no micromanagement, and no shaming. A place where children learn through action instead of sitting all day in a classroom trying to memorize facts.

A place where children learn to communicate effectively, have healthy relationships, and live in tune with their inner genius.

Imagine them growing up in a supportive community where they feel important and cared for. Imagine them entering adulthood with real-world skills, full of life, curiosity and creativity still intact.

They wouldn't have to go "find themselves" because they were never lost.

A school like this would save lives.

This is what we are building.

School Has Nothing to Do with Learning

If school were actually about learning, it would look completely different.

There would be no lectures, since that is the least effective method for learning. There would be later start times, since children, especially teenagers, need that sleep. There would be longer, richer time for play, since playing is how children learn. Children would have a real say in how they spend their time, since practicing self-determination is precisely what prepares them to participate in a free society.

The research is there. It is not new. School's willful ignorance about how learning works is the clearest sign that school was never really about learning.

School is about standardized obedience.

A closing down of the self.

A cauterizing of curiosity.

A death of genius.

School diminishes one's capacity to learn.

Natural learning, real learning, is expansive and spine-tingling and personally meaningful. Most importantly, it is yours.

Are you frustrated with conventional schooling? We keep hearing people say, "Things need to change." Things change when we change them. That's why we started the Spokane Learning Co-op.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

Children are not treated well by the school system. School does not recognize children as complete human beings. The only value it consistently upholds is compliance. It compels children to abandon themselves, out of fear of retaliation and loss, before they ever have the chance to discover who they are.

School forces children to do the wrong things at the wrong time, developmentally. It occupies most of a child's waking hours and prioritizes academics at the expense of natural genius, life skills, social skills, and practical skills. As a result, children graduate knowing the Pythagorean theorem and that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but not how to maintain healthy relationships, grow their own food, build a house, or start a business.

The mental health consequences are not a mystery. We have a crisis among young people, and it is not unconnected to how they are treated, all day, every day, for the first eighteen years of their lives. Children in school are not allowed to talk except in an adult-controlled context. They are not allowed to move their bodies except during a few minutes of recess. Prisoners have more outside time than kids. It is profoundly demoralizing to be micromanaged all day long, to have no say in how your childhood is spent.

Children are alienated from their innate genius at a young age. They grow up anxious and depressed. As they grow into adulthood, many feel a deep-seated need to go "find themselves," which is a clear indicator that they lost themselves. As they get even older, many eventually find themselves needing to do Inner Child work in order to feel whole again, the way they felt before they started school.

Children are real people. They are not being treated like it.

What We Believe Instead

We believe that children are born curious, capable, and socially intelligent. They are born knowing how to learn. What they need from us is not a curriculum. They need the freedom to be who they already are.

We believe that children learn best when they are free to follow their own interests, at their own pace, in a community of people who take them seriously.

Most people believe in consent. We believe that consent should also extend to education. A child who is forced to learn something they don't care about, before it is relevant, in a way that doesn't suit how their brain works, is not learning. They are enduring. Enduring is not the same thing as learning.

We believe that the most valuable thing we can give a child is time: time to be, to think, to play, to discover what they love, and to figure out who they are. This is where the real beauty of Self-Directed Education lies. They get to discover who they are now, instead of spending their twenties trying to find themselves while also racking up student loan debt and trying to figure out how to adult.

We believe that all children are motivated. All children have a passion for learning and discovery. If a child doesn't exhibit motivation for learning, it is worth asking: what has their experience in learning environments been like? Have they become accustomed to being led, directed, and bossed around by adults? Boredom, in the absence of coercion, is the best way to cultivate self-reflection, followed by self-motivation.

Self-Directed Education: What It Actually Means

Self-Directed Education means that children are free to follow their interests. They have a real voice, and a real choice, in what they learn, what that looks like, and what pace works for how their brain works.

They get to develop their inner genius. They get to grow up as themselves, without the trauma of standardization.

Nothing is more personalized than this, except for unschooling at home. We are unschooling, plus community.

Community is how the magic happens.

Kids at the Co-op develop authentic peer relationships with children of different ages, different temperaments, and different backgrounds. They work together to create the rules they live by. They discuss, deliberate, and negotiate. They practice the lived experience of what it means to build something that works for everyone, which is exactly what a healthy democracy requires of its citizens.

Compare this to the standard sit-down-and-be-quiet model that most of us grew up with, which prepared us for very little except sitting down and being quiet.

Every young person will need to learn how to make decisions for themselves. The only question is when they get to start practicing.

Access to knowledge has been democratized. What is scarce now is permission: cultural permission, educational permission, parental permission. Many young people are ready. They are hungry. They are bored of worksheets and desperate for meaningful problems to solve. When given the chance, they rise.

Autonomy: Why Freedom Changes Everything

Young people understand, with extraordinary clarity, how little say they typically have in their own lives. When children come to the Co-op and experience what real freedom feels like, many of them light up in ways their parents have never seen before.

Autonomy means having the freedom to make real decisions, with real consequences, in a community where those decisions matter. At the Co-op, children are not left to figure out their newfound freedom alone. They are supported by adults who help them understand what it means to use freedom wisely. The freedom is real. That is what makes it work.

Sociocracy: We Make Our Own Rules

The Co-op runs on sociocracy, a form of collective decision-making that is neither a top-down hierarchy nor a majority-rules vote, but something more nuanced: a process of finding a decision that everyone can genuinely live with.

Unlike a representative democracy, where decisions are made by people you elected to make them for you, and unlike a direct democracy, where the majority wins and the minority loses, sociocracy seeks a third way: not "our way" or "their way," but something that works for everyone in the room. Children participate in this process alongside adults. Their voices carry equal weight.

At our Rules Meetings, we sit in a circle and, one by one, say how we want to be treated here. We engage in a collaborative discussion to turn these requests into rules that make sense. A rule is approved only if no one has a reason to object to it. Children as young as four have actively participated in this process. We have noticed that the longer a child has been a member of the Co-op, the more thoughtful and nuanced their ability to make rules becomes.

The result, over time, is children who are extraordinarily articulate. Who know how to advocate for themselves and listen to others. Who understand that conflict is not a crisis but a conversation. Who have practiced the skills that most adults are still struggling to learn.

“So many of the things that we care about are completely learned through the creative process,” Ginsberg said. “When kids are allowed free time to play, they learn how to work in groups, negotiate, share, self-advocate, and make decisions.”

Click here to read the full post on Mind/Shift about the importance of play.

Our Story

The Spokane Learning Co-op opened on September 18th, 2024. Nineteen children from all over the city came on that first day, from as far away as Cheney and Liberty Lake, and gathered on ten wild acres in north Spokane where children's laughter now echoes through towering trees. The road to that day began long before.

Hi, my name is Katy Purviance. The vision for the Spokane Learning Co-op first came to me back in 2005, when I imagined how incredible it would be to have a school in a forest. I imagined welcoming all the kids who didn't fit in conventional school, and how happy and healthy they would be running around in the woods and being in nature.

That simple dream ignited in January 2009, when I was an architecture student at Harvard. I was struggling. It was 20 required credits, most of which had nothing to do with my interests in architecture. It was multiple all-nighters a week. It was as if the whole curriculum was designed to make you hate architecture. I started asking questions about why school was the way it was, and that's when I found John Taylor Gatto's blog.

A winner of the NYC Teacher of the Year Award and the New York State Teacher of the Year Award, with 30 years of teaching behind him, Gatto reached the place in his career where he realized that what he was doing in school was hurting kids. So he dove into historical records and produced his magnum opus, The Underground History of American Education. I read a chapter every morning. It didn't take long for all of my teacher friends to unfriend me on Facebook.

I was so shaken by what I learned that I dropped out of Harvard and took time to reevaluate my life. Over the next few years, I read every book on alternative education I could find: Gatto, John Holt, William Ayers, and A.S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill, the world's oldest still-running democratic school. I started dreaming about my own school, something like Summerhill, something like Sudbury.

My main problem was that I had no idea how to start a school. So my first step was to become a teacher. I taught in Burkina Faso, Poland, Oman, China, and here in Washington.

What I discovered is that school is school all over the world. Be quiet. Sit down. Listen. Do as you're told. Do it now. Who you are as a human being doesn't matter. It is all about obedience.

Some days it made me angry. Some days it made me sad. For a while I thought that maybe I could change schools one classroom at a time, one teacher at a time. When you see things the way I do, though, that children are full human beings worthy of profound respect, that play is learning, that school does not work for most kids, it becomes harder and harder to believe that you can reform school from the inside out.

There is a quote in my favorite education documentary, La Educación Prohibida: "If you want to reform education, you'll become a footnote in somebody else's book. If you want to revolutionize education, you can start tomorrow."

After everything I had witnessed in schools around the world, I realized I wanted nothing less than to revolutionize education.

So here I am. I have taught everywhere from PreK to university, in five different countries. I have never been part of an education environment as beautiful, in every way, as this one.

I am so thankful for the people I've met along the way who understand how important this is, and who have joined me in creating a true alternative educational experience.

I hope you'll join us.

We The School We're Building

We are most similar to Summerhill, the pioneering democratic school founded in England in 1921 by A.S. Neill, and to the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, which has been running since 1968. Like those schools, we believe that children learn best when they are trusted, when they have genuine freedom, and when they are treated as full human beings. Unlike those schools, we practice sociocracy rather than democracy, which we believe is a more sophisticated and more equitable model for group decision-making.

Our goal is to become a Washington State-approved school, which will allow us to offer a full-time, Monday through Friday program. The Co-op as it exists now, three weekly gatherings on ten beautiful acres, is the first chapter of that story.

What We Stand For

We trust the genius inside every child. We surround children with connection, freedom, and belonging, cultivating truly happy, confident, and capable human beings who know their worth from the inside out.

Here, young people are free to follow their burning curiosity, ask questions that matter, solve problems that captivate them, and make choices that shape their world. They have all the time, space, materials, and support they need to pursue their own irresistible goals.

We recognize that most of us did not grow up learning in-depth relational skills centered around peace and collaboration. To that end, we intentionally offer three classes to all members of our community, including parents: Non-Violent Communication, Alternatives to Violence, and Sociocratic Decision Making.

We are a screen-free community. This is a deliberate choice rooted in our commitment to children's mental health. When screens are removed, children discover what they actually want to do. It is always more interesting than anything we could have planned for them.

Young people are real people, deserving of our utmost respect.

We uphold the rights and autonomy of young people, including the right to choose what, when, and with whom they learn. No matter what their age, everyone here is treated with the same respect. We do not seek to dominate or control one another. We see each other as fully human.

Young people have the right to keep their innate creative genius.

It will take genius-level creative thinking to solve the world's big problems. We reject the institutional systems of schooling that dumb down young people. By holding space for young people to grow up retaining and developing their innate creative genius, we hope to help foster a more peaceful and satisfying future for all.

Young people need community.

We believe in the importance of having a strong, supportive community where everyone feels valued, respected, and safe. Compassion, empathy, belonging, and collaboration are essential to healthy individual and collective development. Learning how to build and be part of a peaceful, functional community is necessary to thrive.

Young people need the right to full development.

Full human development extends far beyond consuming content in a small selection of academic subjects. It includes mental, emotional, physical, and social health. By doing real things that they care about, children develop the capacity to self-actualize.

Our Beliefs

We believe in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention holds that childhood is a special, protected time in which children must be allowed to grow, learn, play, develop, and flourish with dignity. It has been ratified by 195 countries. Only two have not: the United States and Somalia.

We believe that children are full human beings who should be treated with respect and dignity. By growing up with respect and dignity, they will be able to recognize when they are in a toxic relationship or environment, and be equipped to make healthier choices for themselves, their community, and the world.

We believe children should have the freedom to nurture their interests at a pace that works for them, free from the stress of manipulation, evaluation, points, and scores. No required classes. No homework. No exams. No grades. No shame.

We believe that learning through living is superior to learning through worksheets, "educational" software, or other conventional methods. Children learn best when they can learn with their whole selves: bodies, minds, and voices, free from the dictates of corporate curricula.

We believe that when children have authority over their own learning, they learn how to learn. Children who are trusted grow in confidence, self-esteem, self-respect, and responsibility.

We believe in keeping children's imagination, natural curiosity, and love of learning intact. We provide the time, space, and community to support the natural development of each child's unique potential.

We believe that learning is play and play is learning. Play is our natural, built-in means of learning what we need to know to have a satisfying life. Children must play in order to truly learn.

We believe that it is foundational to children's immediate and long-term mental health to grow up learning how to be a good friend, how to work together with other people, and how to solve real problems. We believe in collaboration over competition. We believe children can learn to talk things out respectfully and come to fair conclusions.

We believe children should have the freedom and power to affect change in order to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. When children learn how to access and use power in a positive way, they will see themselves as changemakers rather than victims.

We believe children should have autonomy over their own bodies: going to the bathroom when they need to, eating when they need to, moving when they need to, and resting when they need to, as long as they are respecting the needs of others around them.

We believe families have a right to flexible schedules, including flexible drop-off and pick-up times. Families should be able to schedule trips without needing to ask permission.

We believe that Self-Directed Education is the best way to honor each child's unique genius, and that in holding space for self-directed learning, we are radically improving children's mental health. We believe that this respect and freedom cultivates truly happy, caring, confident, and capable young adults. We believe that this will result in a more compassionate and more satisfying future for all.