If you could design your own school and study whatever you wanted, what would you choose to learn?

This isn’t an unlikely question for students at Monument Mountain Regional High School, who are taking part in an activity called the Independent Project. The program is a special school within the Massachusetts public high school that’s completely run by students - no teachers, parents, or adults are allowed - and they’re in charge of deciding their whole curriculum (课程).

These teens’ homework and what they study in the classroom are all totally up to them. Charles Tsai, a journalist, made a 15-minute film about the project that shows the wide variety of activities different students join.

Students aren’t taking this lightly - instead of reacting irresponsibly (不负责任地) to the freedom to design their own studies, they’re dealing with their own interests by writing poetry (诗歌) collections, learning instruments and taking flight lessons.

The program is this: On Mondays students come up with questions in relation to one of their school subjects, then they spend the rest of the week researching and coming up with possible conclusions to these questions. On Fridays, they present this information to their classmates.

“I think the more choices we have in our school, the more students we will help develop into the kind of citizens that we need,”Principal (校长) Marianne Young explains in the film.

In the video, teens express their satisfaction with the program because it holds different kinds of learners, even those who don’t always succeed in a traditional study situation.

“I have difficulty in reading and writing. School has always been a big problem for me,” one student named Sergio explains in the video. “If it were not for this program, I don’t know if I’d be graduating - I don’t know where I’d be right now. I think this has really been my savior (救星) and got me through the last two years of high school.”