Blindboy and the Love of Learning
- West Cork Sudbury School
- Sep 11
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 15
by Kate Smith
If you haven’t yet listened to a Blindboy podcast, you need to. This Limerick-based author delivers a gentle, piano-backed, 'auditory hug' every Wednesday. There is no normal episode: maybe it will be a conversation with The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr on creativity, with Manchán Magan on rewilding and Irish mythology, an expert on mental health, a professor of evolutionary genetics or a historian on the British working class. And when there is no one to talk to, he will offer up one of his hot takes on topics as random as simulation theory in Greek mythology or the colonial history of fish fingers. It’s always a gentle ramble, meticulously researched, full of digressions and loops, told by a true storyteller. He is deeply curious, and creative, and it is evident that he loves learning.
In this Guardian interview, Blindboy described his schooling as “miserable for me because I was told: ‘Sit down, shut the f*** up, stop moving around and asking so many questions”.
Blindboy was late-diagnosed as autistic and like many others has had to reappraise the false negative narratives told by others about him, an undiagnosed autistic child in a system that was not set up to embrace neurodiversity. In this Podcast he reads a fictionalised short story based on his childhood experiences from his 2023 book Topographica Hibernica.
In the Guardian interview, he goes on to say: “I would have done well at school If I’d been able to teach myself from books, didn’t have to sit down, and was able to walk up and down in circles while listening to Slipknot. That sounds like a Guantánamo Bay punishment, but if I can do that, I will not only learn but I will excel. I will excel massively.” Blindboy could have excelled at a school like West Cork Sudbury School.
Recently I read the autobiography of the economist Amartya Sen (Home in the World: A Memoir) which reminded me in style of Blindboy’s storytelling and his love of learning. Sen is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose thinking on famine, democracy and gender equality changed the field of international development. Born in West Bengal in India (now on the border with Bangladesh), Sen describes his childhood with similar digressions into local history and culture. When his family moved to then Burma where his father held a post as a chemistry professor we learn about Burmese-Indian cultural relations and his thoughts on Aung San Suu Ky and the Rohingya (later when teaching at Oxford he would be friends with Aung San Suu Ky’s husband, the historian Michael Aris). When he returns to school in Bengal we learn about the cultural importance of rivers in Bengalese folklore. When he heads to university in Kolkotta we learn that the East India Company established the city as an important trading post and he recalls his memories as a child of the ports being bombed by the Japanese during the Second World War.
What interested me most, however, was Sen’s description of his school. As parents and educators curious about progressive education, we have probably heard about Summerhill, the democratic school founded in Suffolk in 1921 by AS Neil. We may have heard of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a liberal arts university where so many influential 20th-century American artists studied or taught (including John Cage, the de Koonings and Rauschenberg). We might have read Peter Gray and his research on outcomes for the students from the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts (USA) founded in the 1960s - the school on which West Cork Sudbury School is most closely modelled.
These were all creative, stimulating communities of intellectuals, educators, artists and craftspeople. They were all heavily influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey and his idea that education should be about the cultivation of thoughtful, critically reflective, socially engaged individuals rather than passive recipients of established knowledge (Dewey, 1916, Democracy and Education). All three communities were trying to move away from memorising and tests towards learning fuelled by intrinsic curiosity.
But in all of this reading, I had never before heard about a school in India founded over 120 years ago in 1901.
From 1941, Amartya Sen attended Santiniketan, a hugely progressive co-educational school in West Bengal which was established by the poet, musician and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore who was heavily influenced by his horror with his own school days. He was fortunate enough to have the safety net to drop out and be tutored at home.
A visiting educator from Harvard, Joe Marshall, came to Santiniketan School in 1914 and described Tagore’s educational approach this way:
The individual must be absolutely free and happy in an environment where all is at peace and where the forces of nature are all in evidence; then there must be art, music, poetry, and learning in all its branches in the persons of the teachers; lessons are regular but not compulsory, the classes are held under the trees with the [students] sitting at the feet of the teacher, and each student with his different talents and temperament is naturally drawn to the subjects for which he has aptitude and ability.
Sen explains that “the emphasis at the Santiniketan School was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence; indeed, interest in grades and examination performance was severely discouraged.” Sen describes how much he enjoyed “exploring Santiniketan’s open-shelved and welcoming library with stacks of books about places all around the world, and I absolutely loved not having to perform well (…) Santiniketan was fun in a way I had never imagined a school could be. There was so much freedom in deciding what to do, so many intellectually curious classmates to chat with, so many friendly teachers to approach and ask questions unrelated to the curriculum, and – most importantly – so little enforced discipline and a complete absence of harsh punishment.”
The founder Tagore placed great emphasis on freedom and reasoning as a means to cultivate intrinsic motivation. He believed strongly that students must learn to embrace the freedom to choose what they study rather than fearing that freedom, “as rote learners are taught to do”.
Santiniketan School celebrated diversity and was co-educational, giving “proper attention to the brilliance of girls”. International speakers were frequently brought in to open students' minds to different cultures and offer an understanding of the interdependency of the world. Sen explains that “Rabindranath [Tagore] did not like our thoughts being incarcerated within our own communities – religious or otherwise – or being moulded by our nationality (he was fiercely critical of nationalism).”
Sen chose to attend Santiniketan School with a wish for greater freedom, having started at a much more academically-driven and exam-focused school. Many of our families choose West Cork Sudbury School for the same reason. Others come to WCSS when it is clear that their schooling up to that point was having a deleterious effect on their mental health. Often these later arrivals are, like Blindboy, neurodivergent. We embrace this diversity at our school and know that we all benefit in a community where we have different thinking styles. We want to embrace all neurotypes now, so that no one has to go through the painful process of reappraising false negative narratives told by others about them.
We embrace and accommodate children of all neurotypes now. To read more about why schools that embrace neurodiversity benefit everyone click here.
As with so many progressive schools, Santiniketan was always short of money and much of Tagore’s time was spent fundraising. Sen describes a nice story about when Tagore himself won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913: Apparently, he received a telegram informing him of the prize during a meeting of a school committee he was attending, to discuss how to finance a new set of drains that the school needed. The story goes that he shared the news from Stockholm by simply announcing, ‘Money for the drains has just been found.’
West Cork Sudbury School faces similar challenges to funding. Just like at Santiniketan School, our students are learning to embrace freedom. As such, we do not follow the national curriculum and therefore do not receive public funding from the Department of Education or elsewhere - even while we are re-engaging in education some of the very same students who have fallen through the cracks of the government-funded mainstream schools. We provide an opportunity for young learners who, like Blindboy, were not previously allowed to flourish while at school.
We are however determined to embody and model to our students the principles of social justice so important to Sen which are: Equity, Access, Participation, Human Rights, and Diversity*.
As such our Membership Dues are based on a family's income to be as accessible as possible to as many students as possible. However, some families cannot afford even our minimum Membership Dues. We therefore fundraise to offer subsidies. The real cost per student is approximately €5,000 per year, so raising enough funds to support our families in need is no small task. This is why we are reaching out to you: If, like Tagore and Sen, you have recently won a Nobel Prize or the lottery, or by any other means could pledge an annual contribution towards our bursary, please Become a Sponsor or get in contact with Kathrin, our fundraising manager at office@westcorksudburyschool.ie.
Thank you!
Everyone talks about peace, but no one educates for peace. People educate for competition and this is the beginning of any war. When we educate to cooperate and be in solidarity with one another, that will be the day we will be educating for peace! - Maria Montessori
If you wish to show solidarity with WCSS in different ways or make a one-off donation, you could get involved in our Plant a Tree, Grow a School local reforestation initiative (with all proceeds going to the school) or Support Us on our website.
Or simply share this blog!
References:
Blindboy (2023). Topographia Hibernica. Coronet.
Dewey, J. (1980). Democracy and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle works 1899-1924: Vol 15, 1923-1924 (pp. 180-189). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sen, A. (2022). At home in the world: A memoir. Penguin.
* The principles of Social Justice are interlinking - here are some blogs and other resources that highlight them in practice at WCSS:
Participation and Accessibility:
West Cork Sudbury School - Our Processes as a Democratic School
Compassion, Compromise & Cohesion - Our innovative approach to decision-making
Diversity:
Children's Rights:
Being 'for' something… - How self-directed learning considers the child’s view in all matters affecting them as required by Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Equitable Membership Dues:
For further reading on our approach to education see our research page on the WCSS website:
Kate is a parent at the West Cork Sudbury School. She works as a freelance academic psychology researcher and editor and is always trying to learn a bit more on the side about parenting a neurodiverse family.
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