Where's Walden?

For almost a century a small cohort of private “alternative” schools have offered progressive (and occasionally kooky) curricula to families who want their kids to learn how to think for themselves. But do barefoot hikes and chopping wood still have a place in an age of cutthroat college admissions?

- BY NICOLE LAPORTE

On the face of it, “the puddle” as it’s known, is an elongated scar of muddy water closer in size to a small pond than to something a child might skip over in rain boots. But at the Peninsula School the puddle is something more significant: It’s a mode of learning. Kids stomp through it in their bare feet. They swing over it like monkeys on an old-school climbing rope. And every year the sixth graders stage a reenactment on its murky waters of the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada. There are sword fights and a beheading, and for the grand finale dozens of paper boats crafted by the kids are set ablaze, their ashes slowly dis-integrating into the murk as the entire school cheers, Wild Rumpus-style, from the sidelines.

Mud, grandiose student-led projects, and potentially hazardous elements are par for the course at Peninsula, an independent PK-8 school founded 100 years ago in Menlo Park, California, on the idea that children learn best by being self-directed, highly creative creatures. Peninsula takes the basics of Quaker educational ideals (open-ended questions; an emphasis on social justice; no grades) and pushes them a tad further. Students don’t have to wear shoes. On school camping trips they can wander freely on timed hikes in the woods without adults so long as they travel in groups of three. And in lieu of the rubber turf and plastic playground equipment that has taken hold of America’s risk-free playgrounds, Peninsula has a metal swirly slide that has been around since the 1960s and a wooden fort nestled in a tree 20 feet above the ground.