Flint School

Flint School

The Flint School was a preparatory school founded by educators George and Betty Stoll. Based in Sarasota, Florida, United States, it operated aboard first one, then two, school ships from 1969 to 1981. Girls as well as boys aged 12 to 18 sailed the world aboard the steel-hulled auxiliary schooners Te Vega (ex-Etak, ex-Vega, ex–USS Juniata, now Deva), and teQuest (ex–Black Douglas, ex-Aquarius, ex–Aquarius W, now El Boughaz I) while studying an academic curriculum. The school was one of very few educational institutions of any kind during the period to stress free-market or libertarian thought, making it in some ways akin to Hillsdale College. In its pedagogy, the Flint School combined elements from Alan Villiers' earlier seaborne program with Maria Montessori's Casa dei Bambini. Although the school was not based on Objectivist philosophy, the Stolls made Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged the centerpiece of their program. The Stolls also included the work of Nathaniel Branden even though he had been expelled from Rand's movement some years earlier. Similarly, the Stolls emphasized the importance of the Austrian School of economics, despite Rand's having characterized Friedrich Hayek as "an example of our most pernicious enemy." The Stolls' academic program attempted to reconcile libertarianism and Objectivism. George Stoll was regarded as an able teacher with good insights into human nature, especially relating to adolescence. He described his school as a benign dictatorship, a management style wholly appropriate to life at sea. Many students and staff members were drawn to him by dint of his personality, and he was thus able to sustain his legitimacy on the basis of charismatic authority. Others thought that, as the years progressed, Capt. Stoll had allowed a small-scale

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