On Tuesday, April 14, it was announced that Hampshire College, my alma mater, a pathbreaking experiment in radical pedagogy, would be permanently closing in the fall of this year. With its first class of 250 students in 1970, Hampshire’s founders took the bold approach of believing that young people could design their own educations. The college never had tests or grades, and students created their own majors. This self-directed curriculum has been imitated elsewhere but retained its purest form at Hampshire. So long as you could find a mentor, you could cobble together a concentration in almost anything: game design, ancient Irish, cheesemaking—the world was your oyster. That was the idea, anyway. As you can imagine, at an underfunded school full of overworked faculty and weird teenagers, things often went pear-shaped. But failure and the self-discovery that went with it were all supposed to be part of the Hampshire experience.

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