Parenting & Family Quote by Daniel Greenberg

A quiet act of indictment hides inside Greenberg's plainspoken “worked for us.” He’s not mounting a grand theory of education; he’s reporting a failure in lived experience, then treating that failure as sufficient justification to build an alternative. The rhetoric is domestic and pragmatic: two scenarios didn’t fit, so a family makes a different choice. That smallness is the point. By framing dissatisfaction as a parental, everyday decision rather than an ideological crusade, he normalizes rebellion against the default system.

The subtext is sharper than the tone. “Neither” signals he’s seen more than one model up close and found both wanting; the line quietly dismisses the idea that the problem is a bad teacher or an unlucky year. It’s structural. “Worked” also dodges the culture-war vocabulary that turns education into tribes. Instead of “failed” or “harmful,” he uses the language of usability, as if schooling were a tool that should fit a child rather than a child that must fit the tool.

Then comes the political move: “the other founders felt the same way.” This shifts the story from private grievance to collective mandate. He’s building legitimacy through consensus among peers, not credentials or research citations. In the context of alternative-school movements (Greenberg is associated with student-directed models like Sudbury), this is a familiar founding myth: parents and educators confronting the limits of conventional and even “reformed” schooling, then converting dissatisfaction into institution-building. The intent isn’t to persuade you with abstractions; it’s to invite you into a community of people who tried the system, found it incompatible, and decided that opting out can be a responsible, even loving, act.