Citizen Schools

I found Courtney's blog on citizen schools very intriguing. I had never heard of such a thing before. What really excites me about them is the hands on experience and the role of the community as the teachers.
To me, there is no better way to learn, than to do, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and do again. I think that there is a lot of pressure in traditional schools to get it right the first time. This can be detrimental to the learning process because many students are afraid to explore and question for fear of being wrong.
With community members involved in the learning process, students get to see the working world as a real place, rather than some mysterious place that you are only told about, by people who only work in schools anyway. The community also has the opportunity to benefit from these schools because they will get to see how this new generation works and learns, and what they are capable of. It also has the potential to strengthen the community and their sense of responsibility for the youth, and the future workforce.
Courtney mentions some topics that citizen schools cover that were never covered in all my day's in public school, such as buying a car and other finance issues. If kids don't learn about this from school or their parents, where are they going to learn it? I've met college kids who don't know how to balance a checkbook! These citizen schools provide the opportunity to teach kids what they don't learn (but probably should) in school.