Lessons of a Sudbury Education

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As we sit in our school’s main lounge, trying to write about the underlying lessons of a Sudbury education, we often find ourselves “off task.” We are watching the bustling activity around us…Jeff, a staff member, and Sonya, a 14-year-old student, are working on math problems in order to move her closer to her goal of becoming a vet. (She’s contacted Cornell University to find the best method of getting into their program.) Cody, age 11, and Madison, 15, are reading medicine cards for all who walk by. Eli, 5, and Kiran, 6, are comparing new Magic Cards and talking about the mysterious gum switcher—the spearmint and cinnamon gum from the School Store have seemingly switched bottles. The Judicial Committee members file into the JC room to start the daily session but Natasha, 15, one of our JC clerks, has to find a replacement for the 5- to 9-year old representative to the JC who is out sick. Success—Sophie, age 8, is filling in. Lisa, a staff member, and David, age 16, are discussing whether or not putting “spring water” on a bottled water label ensures you aren’t getting someone’s random tap water. A man drives up attempting to deliver food to the Zena Elementary School, a public school down the road. While only a few miles away, the Zena Elementary School couldn’t be more different then The Hudson Valley Sudbury School on Zena Road.

It struck us that we weren’t off task as our minds wandered. It makes perfect sense to explain our philosophy from the perspective of the students. Only through our students’ experiences are we truly able to give justice to a discription of the Sudbury education. To understand the Sudbury education you must first erase any preconceptions and conditioning you have about education. A Sudbury education is very different from any other type of education provided by either public schools or private schools. You have to be open to challenging your beliefs and trusting the fundamental principles of life.

Sudbury schools operate with no mandated or pre-determined curriculum. Students are responsible for every aspect of their education. This means that all day, every day students are free to decide how to spend their time and, in turn, the directions that their education and lives take. One of our parents termed this “Student Motivated Learning.” The Sudbury philosophy acknowledges that people learn best when the motivation comes from within instead of from an external source, be it a parent, teacher or national curriculum.

Sudbury schools are run by a participatory democracy. Each student and each staff has equal representation and an equal vote in the weekly School Meeting. This meeting makes all of the day-to-day decisions necessary to run the school; it is chaired by a student and is run similar to a town hall meeting. There is no principal, no higher authority, and no veto power.

Given that there is no mandated curriculum, it is hard to pinpoint what each student learns. They learn whatever they consider important enough to learn—reading, writing and basic math, but equally important, they might learn painting, physics, skateboarding, sewing, cooking, carpentry, Chinese—the list is infinite. Students learn important lessons just by being a member of the culture of a Sudbury school. John Taylor Gatto, who was twice named NYS teacher of the year, wrote a scathing rebuke of the public school system’s form of compulsory education in his essay “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher.” Mr. Gatto describes the underlying or hidden lessons taught by the culture of compulsory education—lessons such as “stay in the class where you belong,” “you can only learn through an outside agent,” “you are subject to a chain of command,” “your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth,” and “you are always under surveillance.” The “hidden” lessons are those that aren’t explicitly taught—no one stands up in front of the students and says, “you are subject to a chain of command.” The lessons are simply part of the culture, and to be successful in the culture the students have to conform to the cultural rules. Those students who don’t conform are labeled “trouble makers,” or even given a medical diagnosis of ADHD and prescribed medicine to numb them enough that they won’t disrupt the culture.

A Sudbury school also has lessons that are taught by its culture, however these are very different lessons than those taught by a compulsory educational culture. As we struggled to write this, we asked some of our students “what is it like to be a student in a Sudbury school?” Here are their responses:

Monty, age 8, who was in the kitchen in an intense version of his block men game said: “When my mom sent me to school in California, I didn’t like it so much. I was a prisoner. They wouldn’t let me free. I always had to do math, which wasn’t fun for me. There wasn’t any space to do things I wanted to do. Until I got to this school and it is great. Yes, good times.” Katya, age 7, who was restricted to the art room all day for being annoying, said “You don’t have people telling you how to live your life, you get to LIVE YOUR LIFE.”

Monty and Katya have flourished in the freedom that is fundamental to the Sudbury culture. Students are not told where they have to be, what they have to do, who they have to listen to or what they have to learn. Each student pursues his or her own independent path. Because no two people are exactly alike, no two students take the same path of learning. Some students spend their entire energy on music, some on art, some on math or physics. More important than anything they choose to do with their freedom is that they have the freedom. The most obvious lessons underlying freedom are independence and trust. By allowing our students the freedom to decide what to do, we communicate to them that they are independent beings with independent needs, goals, desires. We are also saying to them that we trust them to exercise this freedom. The underlying lessons will always be more important than how or whether they learned the quadratic equation. This freedom, therefore, is guarded with the utmost respect.

The brilliance of Sudbury schools is that responsibility is on an equal footing with freedom. Eli, age 5, who was playing Magic Cards with an older student said “The best thing about this school is you learn not to do bad things, like not to litter.” Responsibility and freedom intersect in the Judicial Committee (JC). This body consists of 5 students and a staff member, with each age group represented. The JC has the responsibility of ensuring that the School Meeting’s laws and policies are followed. This body resolves issues through investigation, charges, and sentences. There are thorough reports, motions, and pleas. Students have responsibility to this body through membership, testimony, and honesty.

The underlying message of holding people responsible is that the culture believes they are capable— capable of taking care of themselves, of deciding their path, capable of being an integral and active part of a larger community and helping to shape that community. Sudbury schools have very high expectations of their students. It is not an easy place to be. There is room to make mistakes but everyone must take responsibility for their choices. Students are held responsible for every aspect of their education, behavior, interactions, and the community. They have freedom to do as they choose but also the responsibility to not impinge on the freedom of others.

With this responsibility comes respect that is unmeasured. With this freedom comes a natural sense of joy, friendship, conversation, and life.

Alexei, age 16, said “When you tell a kid they can do anything, but we’re trusting you to do the right thing, they — especially the younger kids — take it to heart. They like to push the boundaries. If there’s nothing to push against, they’ll settle down and do work.” But the work that Alexei is referring to doesn’t look like work. Eli, age 5, said “In other schools you have to work all day, here you get to play all day.” By play, he doesn’t mean “recess.” Recess is defined as “a suspension of business.” Sudbury schools do not consider play to be a suspension of business— they consider it part of the “business” of the school. The underlying lesson in dividing a student’s time between “learning” and “recess” is that learning is not fun and recess is fun, that play is not important but learning is important. Students at Sudbury schools don’t differentiate between work and play, learning and fun. They play anything and everything with passion and intensity. They work at play like musicians work at music, like doctors work at medicine, and they play at work like writers play with language and carpenters play with wood.

Students and staff play constantly and they play together. Just as the lines blur between work and play, the lines of age become non-existent. Age mixing is the Sudbury secret weapon. There is no separation or grouping by age, but instead there is a community of people with different skills and different interests. Fifteen-year-olds read to six-year-olds and seven-year-olds give skateboarding tips to sixteen-year-olds. The competition created by putting all kids of the same age together, only to compare themselves against one other, is transformed to friends helping each other move through life in a natural and supportive way. The staff’s role at a Sudbury school is multi-faceted: they complete the age continuum, they model responsible behavior, and they handle the administrative work of running the school. Staff members are friends and playmates, sounding boards, counselors, parental figures, and most importantly, they hold the space that allows for freedom, trust and responsibility to flourish in each and every student.

Students who come through a Sudbury education are independent. They are responsible for themselves and responsible for their community. They are passionate and articulate. Through their independence they know what they want to do with their lives and are focused on accomplishing their goals. Through the responsibility and trust given to them they are self confident and able to accomplish those goals. When a student applies to college, for a job, or even a relationship and shows this level of independence, responsibility and self-confidence, they have an outstanding chance of acceptance, a chance above those who are just taking the next step deemed important by society.

At a gathering last week, the parent of a potential student asked us “how do you know that students flourish at a Sudbury School?” We know it without assessments, or grades; without evaluations or testing. We know it because we see it every day. We see it in the 7-year-old girl who used to call her parents every hour on the hour and now only calls them once a day. We see it in the 6-year-old boy who never wanted to be separated from his mother and who now runs out of the car to come into the school and doesn’t want to leave at the end of the day. We see it in the teenagers who are taking responsibility in the community by running for clerkships and are eager to be role models for the younger students. We see it in comments like “I look forward to the weeks and not the weekends” or “I can sing out loudly, badly and not feel embarrassed,” and “so, if it snows and only one staff member can get to school, do we still have to have a snow day?” We see it in the 11-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy who volunteered to be on the suspension committee of a 12 year old, because they, too, have had anger management issues.

We see it in the writing of two of our teenagers the first being Sonya, age 14, who has waited two years to experience our solid environment in which to pick her bouquet:

“School is a field of flowers. In public school you are in that field being told which flowers are best to pick. There are the red math flowers and the blue science flowers. Sometimes you will be told to pick the green English’s or the purple Social Studies. Your teacher will walk with you and hold your hand showing you how to pick the flowers—what to do once you have it in your hand. They show you how to place it carefully in your bouquet of knowledge so it doesn’t fall out.

At Sudbury you are put in a field with the flowers everywhere. You aren’t told what to pick and when to pick it. You are given the open field to crawl around in. When you look and find the prettiest flower you might stop and look at it carefully. Noticing the veins that trickle down the sides. The petals open up for you. While you look at it you see the inside of it colored yellow, red, and orange. Carefully so that you don’t break the stalk, you pull it lightly from the ground and let it roll on your fingertips, slowly one way then the other. Then just as soon as you have looked at it, you know everything there is to know, you add it to your pile of flowers that you have in your hand. Some of the kids in the field have a lot of the red math flowers. Other kids have a lot of green English’s. But in the end every one has a beautiful bouquet to call theirs.”

And, we see it in Natasha, a 15-year-old who commutes weekly from New Jersey to be in our school.

“Whenever someone asks me how I like my new school I always respond: “I love it! It’s absolutely awesome!” because it’s the only way I could come close to expressing my overwhelming happiness at HVSS. Hudson Valley Sudbury School has essentially been the key to the door that has opened up into a whole new way of living. I can say, without hesitation, that this has been one of the most important and positive decisions I have ever made in my life, and there is no way I would regret it. I really can’t say enough about the difference a Sudbury education has made in my life. This past weekend I was at a party of my father’s where there were many members of my family and family friends that I haven’t seen for months. When they saw the 360-degree turnaround in my attitude they were astounded. I was the cheeriest and happiest they had every seen me, since I was a child. My attitude this weekend is no exception—I’m always in a positive mood. I’m no longer pessimistic, but rather optimistic and greet the world with interest, curiosity, happiness and peace.

Every day I grow more and more as an independent person and less and less of a programmed machine. Within the last two months I have more of a sense of what I would like to do in my adult life than I have had in the last 15 years. For the first time that I can remember, I have goals and motivation, too. My motivation comes from my desire to learn what I have interest in—namely politics, activism, law, foreign languages, history, philosophy, art and literature. Organizational, communication, and leadership skills are all skills that I am learning and refining in the environment that Sudbury School has provided me. HVSS is like a loving, democratic community of amazing and diverse people. It’s a place where anyone can and usually is your friend—both staff and other children half (or twice) your age. This is a place where there is truly liberty and justice for all!

Sudbury schools are completely democratic—demonstrated in the workings of the Judicial Committee and School Meeting. Everyone is an equal—no exceptions. I know this school isn’t for everyone, but I think it could be for most people if they were really willing to give it a try and were open to this completely different way of learning, they would be amazed and flourish in this environment. Never be afraid of change—you could travel down some amazing paths if you allow yourself.”

Kingdom of Childhood Growing Up at Sudbury Valley School

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From interivews by Hanna Greenberg; Edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg

Chapter 11

I came to Sudbury Valley the first summer we were open. I was seven. I was really surprised when I saw the school. The picture I had before I came was nothing like what it turned out to be! I had imagined it to be a place with rooms that had labels according to what you did inside the rooms a room that said “Science,” and a room that said “Reading,” and I don’t know what else. My picture didn’t look like the public school I went to, but it also didn’t look like a house; it looked institutional.

The school is such a great looking building to a little kid, big and old and kind of mysterious. It was exciting to go there and find out that it looked like some old mansion, where you can get lost or hide from people if you want to and not be found, and things like that. I remember just feeling joy at being at this place where I could do what I wanted where I wanted. The school was physically beautiful, and to be around this beautiful place and not be constrained was wonderful. The grounds were also incredible, and walking around on the rocks were really frightening! They were big. They were several times higher than I was, and people were jumping around on them. It amazed me that people were just going up there to this far away, scary place and nobody was attempting to make them not do that.

I had gone to public school the year before. I had ambivalent feelings about it. I liked learning how to read. That was fun, and the teacher I had was a nice woman. When fall came and I was at Sudbury Valley instead of in public school, I started to get worried about whether I was going to be learning enough, and whether I was going to be missing things; so I went back to public school at the beginning of second grade, for maybe a week. That was long enough for me to realize that I had made a mistake. Second grade in public school was horrible, boring, and incredibly tedious. So I came back and re- enrolled at Sudbury Valley.

The whole time I was enrolled, I wasn’t concerned about my education. I never felt I needed to create a “program of studies” for myself; I didn’t ever again feel that was an important thing to do. I knew enough people outside of school to feel like I wasn’t any worse educated than they were! I never asked myself, “Am I satisfied with the way I’m being educated?” I usually just came to school and tried to figure out what was going on, and if there was something going on that I was interested in, then I would do it. If there wasn’t, I would go read. In general, I don’t remember thinking, “Is what this person is doing ok?” I had the idea that it wasn’t really my business what someone was doing. He was doing what he was doing and that was sort of the beginning and the end of it.

The first thing I remember clearly spending lots of time doing was the Plasticene Village, a table in the art room taken over for full-time use for plasticene. On some days, I would do it from the moment I got there to the moment I left. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it seems like it went on forever! We made houses and people; those were pretty basic. The more complicated things were machinery and stuff like that. You had to convince people your machinery worked, so you needed some superficial knowledge of how it ought to work, and you had to be able to point to where the different parts were. It was wonderful fun.

All of us graduated many years ago, and it turns out that it wasn’t a bad thing at all to be doing plasticene all day for a year or so! But I don’t know how I would have dealt with that if I was a staff member then, and a parent said to me, “I can’t believe it. My kid is playing with plasticene for a whole year. This is terrible.” It’s hard. I’d have to tell the parent, “Look, what’s wrong with your kid doing this? He’s having fun, he’s probably learning stuff, although who knows what.” I don’t know how the staff dealt with it.

Until I was thirteen or fourteen, I read a lot of science fiction and not much of anything else. At thirteen or so, I started reading other things, like Russian literature; that was because everybody was interested in Solzhenitsin. His books had just been coming out in the West and people were reading them and talking about them. That was the first Russian literature that I read. I read The Gulag Archipelago, Part I and I think I may have read Part II sometime, but I was much more interested in his novels: The Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life. Then I started reading a lot of other Russian literature too, because in his novels there are references to other things and that always made me curious to know what the other things were. I was always reading at school, sometimes a lot. Just like there were days when I would play with plasticene all day, there were days when I would come in and read all day.

Outside, I played a lot of soccer. The soccer games were really great, mostly because of Mitch. Everybody would play, people of all different sizes. Mitch always made sure that all the little kids got treated fairly and that nobody got left out. He was gentle, and I think he held the other big kids who may not have been so gentle in check. I thought of him as sort of a role model; he was the only older kid who I looked up to.

The other thing I did outside a lot was play war. We used to go off either to the area around the barn and stables or behind Dennis’ house [no longer there ed.]. It was always an all day thing. You would go out mid-morning and you wouldn’t come back until it was time to go home. This was a problem because people weren’t ever sure when they were going home and parents would come looking for them and they just wouldn’t be there; and their mothers would have no way of finding them.

The game involved dividing the group into two teams, and then everybody would have a stick and you would kind of tramp around hiding in the jungle and in the forest and trying to shoot people on the other team with your stick. If you got shot you had to walk, usually to the parking lot, and then come back, and then you could be alive again. This was a big incentive to stay alive, because that’s a long walk!

People always argued about whether they got shot. Somebody would be running from one tree to another and say, “You couldn’t have hit me,” or “What kind of a gun do you have?” and things like that. We played that mostly in the spring or fall, because in the winter it’s just too cold to sit still behind a tree for hours and hours.

During the winter sledding was the thing. We used to sled down to the millhouse, which was kind of bad because the millhouse was at the bottom! If the ice was frozen, we used to sled down the hill toward the pond instead, which was much more fun because we’d go sliding across the pond. You could go from one end of the pond to the other on the speed you picked up on the hill.

At one time, there was a fort that some kids built, that I used to go to. It was a secret for a while. Frank hit me once when I tried to follow him there, but somehow I ended up going anyway. It was kind of neat because it was made out of tree limbs, draped over a frame, with pine branches on top of the tree limbs. If you were inside of this thing, I doubt that you would stay dry in the rain, but you felt pretty sheltered. There was also a “well” there. It was this big hole that they had dug, and it wasn’t really a well. It was just a deep hole that would fill up with rain water all the time.

My favorite room in the school was the sewing room, and the place that I particularly liked sitting was near the solarium. I can read in a noisy room, but conversations sometimes bothered me, and then I’d go to a quieter place; or if I was in a quiet room, I would try to get people to be quiet, which was sometimes not so easy.

When I first got to the school we all had the idea that the school was going to be a raving success and that pretty soon we were going to have 1,000 students and lots of buildings and things. This sounded great, and it was something I thought would happen. Later on, when the school wasn’t that big I was conscious of there not being many people around, and I would really have liked to have a lot more people to talk to. There wasn’t anybody else interested in things like algebra and I felt it would have been fun to talk to somebody else who was interested, not to get help, but just to talk about it.

While I was there, I desperately wanted the school to be bigger. I think for me as a student there, it would have been much better if it was bigger. Most of the time I was there, the only friends I had my age were Gabriel, Judy, and Rudy, and that wasn’t because I wasn’t friendly. That was because there wasn’t anybody else my age. The people who were my friends were really intelligent and interesting, but it would have been great to have more. I have to add that I don’t remember feeling that individual friendships were that important. What was important was being able to join a group of people that I liked.

I did math sometimes during those years not generally at school, but usually at home with a mathematics book written for adults to learn elementary mathematics. Everything that I learned before I started to learn algebra I learned out of that book, or by asking one of my parents to show me.

After I had sort of figured out all the elementary things to do, I wasn’t very interested in it. Then, at some point, I became interested in understanding why and how nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors work. So I would go and pick up books that I couldn’t understand. The first thing that was identifiable as being incomprehensible was the mathematics in the books. It was easy to see that one of the reasons I couldn’t understand anything was because the mathematics made no sense to me whatsoever, because it was algebra and I had never thought about algebra at all. There were other things too, but that was the first problem. So I decided to learn algebra so I’d be able to figure out things more easily. I looked at the algebra textbooks in the library until I found one that seemed OK and I just read it and did all the problems. It was something I did on my own. I didn’t need any help with it. When something puzzled me I just worked at it until I figured it out. There were people I could have turned to, but there was nobody that I did turn to.

The algebra took me something less than a year. There were two books, Algebra I and Algebra II. The thing that was really stupid was that I did all the problems in the book. I didn’t realize until a long time later that this was not the way anybody ever learns anything out of a textbook! It just takes too long. Then I found that I still couldn’t understand the things I wanted to read. I figured, well, the thing I should do now is try to understand more elementary physics, and so I asked Danny to help me with that. I had a physics textbook, and I just started at the beginning and read it and tried to work out problems. When I would get confused, I would go find Danny and make an appointment to talk to him sometime and ask him questions. I enjoyed it until I got to studying something that I couldn’t make any sort of sense out of, the part about how gyroscopes work, which was somewhere in the first quarter of the book that I had, and I just couldn’t get that to make sense to me, because the way gyroscopes work doesn’t make any intuitive sense. So I stopped doing it because I was frustrated, and I was tired of trying to think about it and not having it make sense.

My learning algebra was more or less goal oriented, although I never reached the goal I was aiming for, which was to be able to read papers and books about nuclear physics and understand them; but it was still goal oriented. It’s just that it was for a goal that I wanted instead of a goal that somebody else told me I should aim for. I think this is how people make themselves miserable: instead of living their lives according to what they want to do, they try to use some other standards to live their lives. I think people are supposed to be happy. They’re not supposed to be unhappy. It’s selfish, but I also think it’s right.

I didn’t think about math and physics very much after I stopped learning physics. Actually I didn’t think about math much until I started teaching some people at school. When I was twelve, I probably would have said I wanted to be a zoologist when I grew up because I was interested in animals.

I started taking piano lessons when I was thirteen. I just wanted to be able to play some songs I liked. After a few weeks, my piano teacher tried to get me to play classical music and I soon found that I really liked a lot of the things she was getting me to play short, easy pieces by Haydn or Beethoven, people like that. Also, I started to listen to a lot of music after I started taking piano lessons. Before, I didn’t listen to much music at all.

I practiced mostly at home for a couple of years, and then after that I practiced some of the time at school. There were days when I would practice a lot more and days when I would practice a lot less. I kept it up for ten years, practicing progressively more and more hours a day. I would have a vision of wanting to be able to play certain pieces, and then I’d get to the point where I could play those pieces and I’d want to be able to play other pieces that were harder. I didn’t think about what it would do for me. I just thought it was something I wanted to do. I believe that everything you do helps everything else you do, because if you’re doing one hard thing, it’s not that different from doing another hard thing. It may take different physical skills, or maybe different mental habits, but it takes the same kind of concentration and requires the same kind of thinking.

For some reason, I fell in love with the way a harpsichord sounded and I really wanted one. It seemed like it would be fun to build one, and it wasn’t that expensive. I had been working part time so I had enough money to buy a kit. I made it in school, and I got a lot of advice from Sam at various stages. The directions were reasonably explicit. A lot of it was tedious and time consuming, but there were only a few things that were hard. The beginning was especially fun; what you’re doing is putting the case together, gluing big pieces together and trying to get joints to come out right and stuff like that. Then later on, there’s a lot more stuff that it’s easy to mess up on and you have to do over again a bunch of times so you get it right.

During the years that I was doing music, I still played outside. Maybe less, but the things I did outside were a little bit different. I still played soccer a lot. I played Capture the Flag some, but the problem was that by then I was too much bigger than everybody else. It’s no fun unless you’re more or less the average size. Everybody’s too scared of you and you can’t be invisible. If you’re small you can slip behind the line and nobody notices you. I also went cross country skiing and walking and digging in the woods for bottles and riding my bicycle around the area, usually with a friend.

 

In my teens, I became interested in the administration of the school. I don’t know why, really. I remember thinking that it was fun to be involved with certain things, like the judicial stuff and the trials. I also thought that the more people that were involved with administration, the better. I felt some sort of civic duty to be involved with it to a certain extent. Everybody felt loyal to the school, but people did different things about it. I don’t think I felt more loyal to the school than my friends who were not interested in administration.

I was Building Supplies Clerk for a while. That was just somebody who went around and kept the toilet paper and the paper towels and the soap in stock. I had to get somebody to take me to the store to buy cases of paper towels and toilet paper occasionally. The soap we had then was terrible, a powdered soap that was so abrasive you could hardly use it. If you had to wash your hands more than three or four times in a day, you’d have running sores.

I was Building Maintenance Clerk one year. I really wanted to know about these things and I wanted to do them and see what they were like. But I never felt I was doing a good enough job at it. It wasn’t as big a job the year I did it as it is most of the time, because there wasn’t anything major going on. There wasn’t any money to spend anyway. All the little things that came up, I could easily fix, like if a doorknob fell off someplace, or a window pane got broken or something like that. Also, I liked fooling around with electrical and electronic things that the Audio Visual Corp. had, so I would keep them going.

I was Law Clerk when I was thirteen. The work was awesome. The judicial system is streamlined now compared to the way it was then. We kept track of everything by hand then. There was a listing of each trial by trial number, and there was a listing by charge, and there were listings for each individual too. So there were all these records to be kept, and the first time I had to do it I was overwhelmed; it took getting used to so I wouldn’t forget to put something down some place. I remember sitting at the table with all this stuff and just trying to figure out what to do with it all and where to find what I needed and where to put everything.

I can remember the first time I had to go around and notify people of trials. The scary thing was talking to a little kid who didn’t already understand what was going on. Lots of times complaints could go through, testimony could be taken, and School Meeting could vote a trial for some kid who was new to the school and still didn’t really understand what was happening.

I also ran the mimeograph machine for years and years, and collated whenever we had something long to do, like a long newsletter or when somebody would publish a long article. I can remember collating with Gabriel. We’d put down long planks on a table so you’d get more pages on them. We had a lot of fun doing that. We would just walk up and down talking to each other and collating these long things. It would sometimes take hours to do. It’s funny, I don’t think of myself as being talkative, but I guess I talked a lot, to a lot of people. I talked to Gabriel probably more than anybody else, and I talked to Margaret Parra a fair amount when I was older.

For years there were water fights and nobody ever made a fuss about them because they were always done covertly, and nobody was aware of them or nobody knew exactly who had done them. The best ones were with paper towels which we would soak in water “gloppies” and throw at each other. The best times were at night in the winter, when it’s dark at 4:30. The staff members would all be up in the office and there wasn’t anybody working in the kitchen, so the downstairs of the school didn’t have that many people in it, particularly the art room, the main lounge, the library workroom and then down the stairs into the basement. The basement was the main area for the water fights. You had to be careful running from the art room (where you usually got the paper towels and water) to the basement, but once you were in the basement, there wasn’t likely to be anybody there. It felt really neat to be in the building when there weren’t very many people around and it was dark and mysterious. Actually, at the time, water fights weren’t illegal. There was a special law made about them later.

I liked the pot luck dinners at night a lot, but wasn’t so crazy about the spring picnics because I liked to be in the school after dark, running around outside. That was fun and different, whereas when I was a little kid the picnic was always just a pain in the neck. You’d go to school and there would be your school, but you couldn’t really do the things you wanted to because there was way too much stuff going on and there were too many people around and the only people you wanted to spend time with were your friends anyway, who’d be there, only it was harder to do things with them because you were at the picnic.

I think I always knew, as long as I can remember, what the School Meeting was: the place where things got done and decisions got made. Before I started going regularly, I did what most little kids do; they go when something germane to them comes up. At some point I can remember feeling maybe that wasn’t right and maybe everybody should go all the time, and then at some other point I decided that, yes, it was ok, it was alright for me to let other people decide things that I wasn’t interested in. The image I had was that somebody else was taking care of most things and I didn’t have to worry about it very much where “somebody else” was staff members and older students, but mostly staff members. But the thing that went along with that image was that I felt I could complain if there was something I thought wasn’t right or something I thought should be changed.

When I was older, I got really impatient at meetings. I remember thinking that it takes people so long to understand what other people are saying and people miss the point of what other people are saying, and then say things that are way off the point themselves. More recently I’ve learned that people do these things a lot less at School Meetings than they do in almost any other setting, and the School Meeting works as well as any democratic meeting that I’ve ever seen.

Once I started going to School Meetings, I went to Assembly meetings too. I never thought the Assembly had much role in what went on in school and I was usually perfectly happy with that. As a student I always felt a little bit resentful about the Assembly, as if it was the School Meeting that should be deciding these things and the Assembly was sort of beside the point. I’m not presenting that as the truth. I’m just telling you how I felt.

Everybody was on the judicial committee, so we were aware of the functioning of the judicial system in a much more intimate way than the other parts of the school. I think as a little kid, it’s more a part of your life than the other functions of the school. Not only are you using it, but you’re also taking part in running it at some point.

The judicial system was an interesting center of conflict in the school. Especially trials. All the time that I was involved, trials were very rare, so that having one was kind of a special occasion. There would be a lot of buildup and people would talk about it, and then there would be people arguing their cases and trying to convince each other, and it would come down to what the jury thought at the end, so that was always really fascinating. I think the drama of it was very interesting to me. I mean, the justice of it was nice, but I don’t think that was interesting in and of itself.

There was no way not to get fair treatment if you got brought up. The committee investigated and they made some kind of report, and if the report was wrong, then it was not that important because it could get cleared up in the trial. There were enough checks and balances. It was quite difficult to get convicted of something that you weren’t guilty of.

This was important to me because I took advantage of it sometimes. I was a real stickler, and if people brought me up for things that I knew were wrong, but weren’t against the rules, I wasn’t about to let myself get convicted of breaking a rule that I know I hadn’t broken. As a defendant, I wasn’t scared, but I was nervous. It’s more like the fear you experience when you’re going to talk in front of a group of people, than the fear that you experience when you’re afraid of bad things that are going to happen to you. I was always more afraid of being embarrassed than being convicted. In general, it was important for me to learn that I could defend myself and convince people that I was right.

The major interaction I had with the staff was talking to them. They meant something to me because of who they were. I grew to feel really emotionally attached to most of the staff members who were around the school a long time, because they were people I really liked and respected not necessarily because of things they did for me, and not just because of things they did for the school, although that was important too.

My relationship with them individually was always good. There were certainly times when I was really irritated with Danny, particularly, but I don’t remember anything that was a long term irritation. It was just always about small things that were happening in school. And it didn’t adversely affect the real relationship that we had. In general, I liked the staff to be friendly and I liked them to be there, but I didn’t want them to come seek me out, particularly. I certainly didn’t want them to try to get me to do things, but I didn’t even particularly want them to talk to me unless they had something specific they needed to talk about. I was much happier being able to seek them out if I wanted to. It wasn’t usually a matter of wanting to arrange to do something that was large scale and time consuming with them. It was mostly just getting help with individual things, or wanting to ask somebody a question about something. An example is woodworking, which I did for a while. When I wanted to make something out of wood, I wanted to be certified to use the tools and sometimes I’d want help doing a particular thing, but I wouldn’t want somebody to do it with me the whole time.

If I was somebody who was less determined not to ask people for help about most things, then the staff might have had a larger role in doing things with me or teaching things to me, or trying to help me figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted to be left alone, and in retrospect nothing has made me think that I was wrong to have wanted it. I wasn’t going to go start a class if I was peripherally interested in something; I would just go read a book instead.

I was always worried a little about staff elections. There have been periods when individual staff members were temporarily unpopular and there would be really bad election results which always seemed sad to me. Most of the staff had been there a long time and had put so much into the school that it always seemed horrible when they would get a rash of fifteen “no” votes one year; it must have felt horrible to them. The other thing was that crazy people would come and want to be staff members sometimes, but we were always too smart to elect them, so that wasn’t really a problem. I think it’s a good idea for children to choose their teachers. Everybody makes wrong decisions and I’m sure that we’ve occasionally elected people for staff who probably ought not to have been elected, though I don’t know if we’ve done the reverse. But I think that chances are we’ve made better decisions than any other method. The problem is, who’s going to make the decisions if we don’t do it ourselves? Whoever is, they’re probably not going to do as good a job. I don’t know any good alternative. The alternative of the students not being the ones who decide who works at Sudbury Valley would undermine one of Sudbury Valley’s main points, which is that the students decide what’s good for them. To have everything the way it is and to change that one thing would be really two-faced.

That’s one of the things that makes Sudbury Valley easy to talk about. In a lot of ways the school’s hard to talk about because it’s hard to get people to believe you when you start trying to describe it, but one of the things that makes it easier is that it’s really honest, so that when you say something you can really mean it; and when you say that the school is controlled democratically and the students essentially have the power, there’s no lie there. There’s no lie like, “Well, they have the power except that there are certain decisions they can’t make.” I was saying this to somebody recently: “The students can do anything they want.” She said, “Oh, it sounds like a Montessori school,” and I said, “Well, not exactly, because if you want to go outside and play soccer all day in a Montessori school, that’s sort of hard.” And she said, “You mean, you could go outside and play soccer all day?” I said, “Yuh, the students can do anything they want.” And she said, “Well, I heard you, but I didn’t really believe that.”

People would ask me about the school sometimes, but nobody ever tried to convince me that I shouldn’t be going there. I was probably more obnoxious about it than the people who asked me about it, because I would try to convince them that everybody should be doing it. I thought that it was completely obvious that this is the kind of education everybody should get.

I think my parents worried about me a little bit. I’m not sure about my mother. My father said that he worried some about me, but he was also able to leave me alone, which was good. I imagine I would end up doing the same thing. I would probably worry about my children, but that’s the way it is. One worries about one’s kids. Everybody I know worries about their kids, no matter what, and no matter what their kids are doing, so I’d worry about it, but I hope I’d be able to leave them alone. If I can’t do it, I don’t know why anybody else should be able to do it, because I’ve got better reason than anybody else to leave them alone.

Recently somebody was asking me if I was well prepared for college. I was telling them about Sudbury Valley and they kept asking me, “Was this hard for you when you went to college?” and “Was that hard for you when you went to college?” and I finally said, “Look, nothing was hard for me when I went to college. I did some hard things there because I tried to learn things that were hard to learn, but college wasn’t hard for me.” Yes, I was well prepared. I think that people from Sudbury Valley are, in general; not necessarily because they have exactly the skills that are expected of them, but because they have the skill of knowing how to take care of themselves in a general way, so that when it comes time that they have to do certain things, they can do them. The people I knew in college who had problems were all people who weren’t used to trying to figure out what to do with their day, what to do with their month or what to do with their life.

I was really nervous about defending my thesis. I was seventeen. People usually talked about their last several years of school, and what they were planning to do in the immediate future. I didn’t really want to do that. This was a leftover from when I was a little kid. I had the idea that you should be somehow specifically defending the thesis that you are ready to be responsible for yourself, and I didn’t want to do it by telling what I had been doing recently and what my plans were. So I decided to talk about what I felt responsibility meant and explain why I thought I was ready to live my life in accordance with that. I was a little bit nervous because I hadn’t seen anybody do that before and there were weird questions people could ask me. As it turned out people did ask some weird questions. It was certainly meaningful emotionally, as a rite of passage, getting up in front of all these people who I’d known for a long and telling them that I was ready to leave and why.

I decided to leave the school when I did because I felt there wasn’t anything I wanted from the school anymore. It didn’t take any time at all to decide to leave. I suppose in a sense it took me eight years, but when I felt I was ready, it didn’t take much time at all.

Chapter 12

The first memory I have of the school is that it was a community, a supportive community. The people were invested in the community. People’s attitude staff and students was not only warm, accepting, and sharing, but also a pointed commitment to the educational philosophy. It’s good as a kid to see other people who are committed to something you believe in too. It gives a team camaraderie; it’s kind of like a goal-oriented friendship.

I thought it was a funny kind of school. I had gone to a private school and a public school, and I thought there would be set up classes. I thought the administrators would tell us what to do, although from my interview I realized there were no tests, marks, quizzes, or that sort of thing. It was totally different from anything I’d participated in before, besides living on the street.

I was fifteen when I heard about the school. I had been having some trouble in public school that was “unexplainable.” I was labeled an “underachiever,” and the school administrators and teachers thought that if I was challenged some more I might do better; but that didn’t work out. I went to a prep school for more challenge, I guess. While I was there, there was a lot of academic pressure and social pressure. I felt like I didn’t fit in. I went to the famous rock concert at Woodstock in the summer of 1968, and when I came back to school that fall, my summer vacation went right through till Christmas! When I came back from the Christmas vacation, the administration asked me if I really wanted to be there, and I said, “No.” So I went to a career counselling service and they mentioned Sudbury Valley to me. They said, “We’ve directed some kids there and it might be something for you to check out,” which I did. My parents supported me in any decision I made.

When I enrolled at Sudbury Valley, most people were friendly. Some of the staff had kind of a “wait-and-see” attitude; more like “What is this kid about? Will he come to me?” The staff had the kind of mindset that said, “What does this individual need? What is their style and how do I respond to that?” And that was appropriate.

I settled into the school very quickly. I was oriented towards the smoking room. Later, in turn, I helped take in new kids. I saw myself as being a part of things, and felt that it was important for me to be hospitable and treat them the way I was treated. I was just passing along what was passed on to me, really.

It didn’t take me long to understand the philosophy of the school. I had been in other types of participatory democracies. One was a Unitarian Church group for kids, and I had been on sports teams and those sorts of things. That aspect of the school was important to me as a kid who was kind of formulating where he was going. It allowed me to go in the directions I was interested in.

I come from a politically, socially, and religiously liberal family, so the school fit in with my life expectations. I don’t mean to say that I expected that from schools; that’s why it might have been hard for me at first to catch what Sudbury Valley was. I expected to sit in a chair for eight hours a day, and to have a certain time of day to run and play and a certain time of day to eat. When I went to my first School Meeting I started to see the difference. That was about the time that the blue and white paperback [The Crisis in American Education] was published so discussions of ideas about education were always flowing around.

For the first month or so, I spent a lot of time in the smoking room, getting to know people, listening to music. Then as time went on I got into photography. A student who had a camera showed me how to develop and enlarge. Later I became more involved in other activities, like baking bread. But even at the height of my involvement in organized activities, I was probably engaged less than half of the time. A great majority of my time was spent talking to kids my age, some a little younger or a lot younger, and some a little bit older. We talked about kid things, like who’s in what band. Near the beginning of my enrollment a lot of the talk was ventilation about different school systems I’d been in. We’d also spend time planning activities outside of school. I don’t think I was ever bored.

The school helped me go in a direction I was already going, but it really accelerated and helped focus it. For me, Sudbury Valley was a graduate school for community organizing. I look at my first organizing experience as taking place there. Another one shortly followed it, but a lot of the specific techniques and basic philosophy that I used later in community organizing were almost lock-step with a lot of the educational philosophy behind Sudbury Valley for example, the idea that self-motivation is a key to learning. In organizing, self-motivation is a key to participation in the organizing effort, whether it be building a water tower in rural West Virginia or forming an alternative PTA for the Chicano population in California. Also, the “participatory democracy” idea in organizing is like Jeffersonian Democracy in that the issues come from the bottom and go up as opposed to a lot of other systems where community planners generate professional plans of what is needed for the citizens, what I call “talk down.”

Let me tell you a specific practical outflow. About halfway through my experience at Sudbury Valley I had some friends in the public school system who were complaining about different things that were happening at their school. I guess I kind of brought some of Sudbury Valley with me and helped form what we called “the Progressive Student Party.” The way it started was kids thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, sitting around, almost like a board of directors, at one of the kids’ kitchen table talking about what was going on. One of the girls took notes. She said “I’ll be the secretary,” and then we generated these notes into a newspaper for which one of the churches donated a mimeograph machine, paper and ink; and we handed them out at their school. The school administration in that town was up in arms and called it “outside agitation.” I was the only one involved who was not a student there, but they demanded we all get off the public school property. So each week from then on we handed it out at the edge of the school property. People in that town still come to me and say, “Ah, I remember you: Progressive Student Party!”

I attended School Meeting and added two bits here and there. I saw it as the core of the school. This was how we ran our school and I wanted to be a part of that to learn about what was going on as well as have some input in directing which way it went. I can’t say specific outcomes that I suggested came out the way I said, but I have a definite feeling that, in subjects that I talked about, my opinions were blended with others into acceptable outcomes.

Some of it was, to me back then, “high-brow” business. School Meeting talked about money and stuff, and I just said “Hey, I don’t know how much a dollar is worth. People who have the skills or interests can take care of those issues.” I’d leave if that issue came up and it was something I wasn’t interested in. Money is dry and boring to me, even today. I realize it’s important but… Overall I really had the feeling of giving the best I could give.

The judicial committee was “the news.” It was what was going on. Who made a mistake and who did they make it against and what were the consequences! Once I was involved in a little prank where three or four of us picked up and turned someone’s Volkswagen “Bug” around in the parking lot. That was an infringement on the owner’s rights which was brought before the judicial committee for punishment. I don’t remember any big incidents, though.

Mrs. Parra was so much older than a lot of the rest of the staff. That was real good because that made it more of a complete community; also that was somebody I could look at and say “Hey, even people that age believe in the kind of things that are going on here.” She was very giving. I look back at myself as kind of a punk, and having some punk come into the kitchen and try to learn how to make bread didn’t scare her away. She would show me, and she was very gentle and understanding as she taught me.

In general, though, I wanted to be left alone by adults. My special interest while I was at school was making friends, building a support system, sharing, getting to know each other. I wasn’t consciously thinking about these things. I was just being a kid, an outgoing kid.

I decided to do a thesis defense because I wanted to have a high school diploma, but also because I wanted to live the whole experience of Sudbury Valley. Everyone who comes there doesn’t have to get a diploma, but that was one of the things that meant success to me. It wasn’t something that I casually entered or planned in one day. I spent a lot of time by myself working on it, and some time with my advisor. It really pulled together and summarized my experience at school, and made it more clear in my mind.

The thesis defense gave me self-esteem. There was some real pressure put on, which there has to be. I made one little comment about God or religion or something and that opened the door. “What’s your belief in God?” and so forth, and it took direction, which was good. It was a challenge.

I think the school is a definite positive institution. One reason is because it’s part and parcel of what it’s trying to get across. In other words, it’s sort of like the medium and the message. I don’t know how else to put it. And I can tell you from my own experience that the kind of issues and philosophies that Sudbury Valley advocates are core to my life now.

Chapter 16

I grew up in an upper middle class community that was supposed to be “sheltered” from a lot of things, but it really wasn’t. That was a hard time to grow up. The Vietnam War was raging on. I had a lot of exposure to what oppression was even before I was out of grammar school, specifically around racism and civil rights issues. My father was wrapped up in that. He was one of the freedom riders who went down to Selma. He was a public school teacher, and he went to the school department and said, “I’m going to go. I have to do this.” They respected him for it, and they said, “Ok. If you have to do that, go ahead. Your job will be waiting for you when you come back.” I had an awareness of injustices at a very early age.

I had some very early negative experiences in the public school system. I had a lot of trouble learning how to read when I was in the first grade and I obviously frustrated my teachers, but it was really sickening how they dealt with it. I can remember at the end of my first year my teacher saying to me in front of the entire class, “The only reason you’re going to pass here is because your father is a teacher. He’s going to tutor you all summer long to read.” Then I remember a teacher in second grade. She was kind of eccentric. One day I could not differentiate a ‘b’ and a ‘d’, and she absolutely flipped out and couldn’t accept it. She humiliated me in front of the class, saying, “Look, he cannot differentiate between a ‘b’ and a ‘d’. Can you imagine that?” And it didn’t stop there. She took me back to my home room and humiliated me again in front of my entire home room to my teacher: “He’s so stupid, he can’t even do this.” I was in a rage, as much as you can be when you are seven years old. I don’t think I told my parents about it because I was too ashamed and humiliated and angry.

It was depressing for me. But then I had a really unique experience in the summer of ’69. I traveled abroad with my parents all over Europe, and I met a lot of kids who were high school age who I really got close to. That was a time when “hippies” were prevalent, and I just fit right in and really started to feel good about myself for the first time. When I went back to begin the second year of junior high, they were giving me constant grief about dress codes. At that age, to look a certain way means more than just about anything else, and to be told, “Your hair’s too long,” or “You can’t look this way or do this” set off a lot of resentment toward the administration right off the bat. So when we heard about Sudbury Valley, and when I first went, it was a welcome relief.

My whole thing was, “Why won’t people leave me alone, why won’t people let me do my own thing?” And then when I was in the Sudbury Valley environment, I was just so taken aback, I didn’t know what to do with it or how to take it at first. But I really have thought on several occasions that to be in that predicament was the best thing that ever happened to me just to be left alone and to go ahead trying to sort things out and be myself and develop self-confidence, in and around people a lot younger and a lot older too, and not to be hassled all the time.

A lot of my immediate family and relatives never understood me or my parents anyway. Not that we didn’t get along with most of them, because we did, but I think there was a lot of skepticism: “Oh, what a totally radical place. Who do they think they’re kidding?” That became a lot less of an issue when the school became accredited. But the first few years the school was open, I’m sure that the skepticism was a lot more prevalent in society at large when they came to hear about the way the school was, because there hadn’t been a chance yet to reflect on people who had been through the system as students.

When I first came, there was a long period of time when I kind of sat back and watched the world go by and took in as much as I could and tried to sort a lot of things out in my own mind. Initially, I was more apt to hang around in the main lounge. Other people around my age spent a lot of time there, and then there were some younger kids, who were pretty entertaining. After about half a year or so, the place to be, for whatever reason, became the smoking room. We lived in there. I also used to love to go out and walk around on the grounds quite a bit, around the pond and state park.

When I first went to the school, I was fairly confused for a lot of different reasons: my experience in public school, as well as what was going on in the world at the time. It was a pretty hard time to grow up! When I got to know people better, I developed more self-confidence just sitting around and doing anything from talking about anthropology to chatting about how you felt about things, where you were going, and what your expectations might be in life. What gave me confidence was the environment of the school, where you had such a great cross-section of humanity, from kids four years old all the way up to people who were there doing graduate studies. So you really had a lot to reflect on and many experiences to share with people. I think a lot of us who were in that environment developed an edge in everything from communication skills to not being afraid to go out and deal with things and with people.

We had days we did nothing but sit around and smoke cigarettes all day and listen to music and just talk. We had days when we would play Monopoly or different games all day long, constantly. We had days when we would go out and walk around on the grounds and be involved in different athletic activities. I had days when I was really wrapped up in different types of art work ceramics or painting or hanging out with people who were involved in photography. I had days when I would be in the library for a good part of the day, picking books off the shelf just at random, whether it be a Rolling Stone magazine or an encyclopedia, just sitting there and reading it. I spent a lot of time listening to music no question about it. The first couple of years, that seemed to be the focus of a lot of our attention, just hanging out doing that. I used to hang around with Peggy in the darkroom. She was a sweetheart. I never really got involved in learning how to develop photographs and all that, but I was with people who did. That’s when I started to cultivate one of my main hobbies, being an amateur photographer. I would say that at one point or another I used almost every different part of the main building. I even got involved in the art room in my last year.

Then, during my last year, I also had my first job, working for a geotechnical engineering firm. I did everything from developing sepias to working on the job site with geologists. I also worked as a carpenter’s helper. So, towards the end of my experience at the school, I spent more time off the campus as opposed to actually being there. But again, the concept of having an “open campus” and seeing what was out there in the job market was part of the way the place was run.

I really needed the breathing space that the school provided me with to sort things out in my mind or speculate about what I might want to do.

Voting for the staff was a pretty radical thing. What student ever had any say over who was going to be a teacher of theirs? It certainly was far out that students had an input into it. The staff always seemed to be wrapped up in something, involved in something. But they were always pretty much there for us, if we had an issue we wanted to raise or a concern or question that we wanted to ask. Certainly what little time I did want to devote to doing anything academic, they were very willing to spend with me.

I think that every staff member who was involved had something to offer, but I seem to remember some of them were maybe doing a lot of soul-searching of their own too, which there’s nothing wrong with . . .

Jan was one of the more aggressive of the staff members in his manners. One day I accidentally broke one of the windows in the smoking room and I came forth and said that I did that. He got the building supplies and said, “OK, go and fix the damn thing.” I was surprised, and I guess afterwards, when I fixed it, I was glad that I had the experience to learn how to do it. That was just the way he was. He was straightforward in his manners and his approach.

I don’t remember there being any significant vandalism or anything like that. A lot of kids did stuff like that out of their resentment towards a structured environment. I can relate to that from the time before I went to Sudbury Valley. I seem to remember when I was an early teenager, and younger, a lot of kids were wrapped up in that sort of thing out of anger. I don’t ever remember that occurring at the school because of the way it was set up.

There was a lot of apprehension when the school tried to become accredited. Some of us worried about, “What are we going to do if we get out of here and graduate and it doesn’t end up being accredited?” It wasn’t just the student population either. Some of the staff too were wondering if they were going to be able to convey the philosophy to those people or make them understand it. Then the accreditation committee came down and saw the place and how it was run and what people were doing and what they had accomplished after leaving that was the icing on the cake, the school becoming accredited.

I started to understand the school more when I saw people who were older than me go through the system and graduate. The whole concept of the school became clearer when people went through that process. I just sat back and observed it all. Actually, the full meaning of the school’s philosophy didn’t really come to me until I was out of it and entered adult life, when I found an area of focus that I was interested in and, for the first time in my life, from an academic point of view, I really sat down and was disciplined about it. My own drive, my own motivation was applied to the area that I wanted to get into. Basically the school says you’re responsible for your own education and when and if you want to study a given subject, or whatever area you want to enter then you’re going to meet obstacles along the way, but if you put your mind to it and apply yourself to it, it’s going to work out and it’ll have more meaning because it’s come from within you.

When it came time for me to leave, I was self confident, for the most part. I had a good self image. I had an idea of a few different avenues that I might pursue; nothing concrete, but I was ready to leave the school to go out and find my way, so that’s essentially what I did.

The thesis defense was, naturally, a little bit scary. But other people who were friends of mine had already been through it. Based on their experience and my experience at the school, it really wasn’t too hard.

One of the things the school did for me was that I have no problem getting up in front of a group of people and talking. As long as I know what I’m talking about and why I want to say something, I don’t mind. I learned it by being part of the School Meeting and having an opportunity to be heard before I graduated. And then from the thesis procedure, by being in front of the student body and staff and Trustees and so forth.

At Sudbury Valley we were handed the opportunity to be our own person and cultivate our own interests and academic pursuits as individuals, but we weren’t handed the diploma. We, in turn, had to recognize as individuals when we were ready to go out and pursue whatever we were going to do, and we had to convey that to all the people involved. We were left to do and pursue what we wanted to, but when we were ready to leave we had to convey that we were at least partially “together,” responsible enough to be able to go out into the world.

Chapter 29

I don’t know if I really understood everything about the school right away, but the thing that I did understand was that I loved it. It was somewhere that I wanted to be. And it stayed that way until it was time for me to move on!

Most of the time as a little kid I played. I loved exploring. We spent a lot of time going into the woods, building forts. We built amazing pine needle forts that were set up all over the land adjoining the school. They were very, very secret, although select people got to come out and learn about them. As a matter of fact, when I got involved with them, there were some older kids who were building them and they had brought me and a few other people out to see them, and then we found out how to do it, so we started our own secret ones. We thought that was so cool!

We were outdoors winter, summer, fall and spring. There was no difference at all. Winter, we’d take the toboggans up the trails. We would go down this big, long hill in Callahan State Park. There would always be skimobiles, during the day too, and we hated them. We were nature guys! We never used anything with power, and we were very much against that. One day we took a huge, twelve foot toboggan down the hill. As you came down the hill, the trail went into a field; you just continued down the path and you’d eventually just stop. We came to the bottom of the hill and saw a skimobile come down. We all bailed out at the same time and the toboggan went right into the skimobile, broke the toboggan and the guy’s skimobile.

Sometimes I wished there were more kids. When I got a little older and I was interested in girls I was never interested in the girls who were close to me in age, only in the older girls there never seemed to be enough kids. But it didn’t really make that much of a difference to me. I enjoyed everybody. I enjoy people.

I loved to cook with Margaret. The great thing about Margaret was when you cooked with her, she’d show you how to do something and you’d do it. And then while you were waiting for the things to bake or to cook or whatever, she’d sit down and tell you these unbelievable stories. She always had a great story, and always kept us very entertained.

The first time I realized that I was actively learning something was one night when I was about seven. I picked up a book I had never been able to read (but was read to me often) and read the whole thing, and I was so excited! From that day on, I could read, just like that. There’d be words that I’d have to ask the meaning of, but I could read the words after that night. By the time I was ten or twelve years old I was reading a lot. Later, I read a lot of Shakespeare, Greek and Roman tragedies, a little Thoreau and Steinbeck, and I was into plays for a very long time.

I felt that there was an expectation from outside people, there was a little bit of pressure put on you, when people asked you what you did in that school, and how you learned in that school. When I got a little older, I would say, “I’m as ignorant as the next guy.” And I’m probably a lot less ignorant from having the experience of going to Sudbury Valley. I had friends who were so rebellious about everything that by the time they got out of public high school, they didn’t know what they wanted to do, or who they wanted to be. And they would be the same people who would say to me, “You go to that school. How can you learn anything?”

I picked up the guitar when I was seven or eight years old. A student at school taught me my first lessons. At that time none of the younger kids I knew had any interest in playing music. So I started taking lessons at a few different local places. It was just your basic method books that they were teaching out of, and I got bored with it quickly and stopped. Then I took classical guitar for a while, which I really loved, but it was too hard for me.

I’d play at home. There were teenage kids at the school like Dominic, who I thought was great because he had all the gear and he could play fast; he could learn songs off of records, which I couldn’t do, so I felt almost embarrassed. But I’d sit at home with my guitar and play. My dad got this old reel-to-reel tape machine from a friend of his, and I found out that if you plug your guitar directly into the input jack where the mike goes, halfway in, you could get distortion, and it would sound great. So that was my amp, a reel-to-reel tape recorder! Later on, when I was about fourteen, I bought a big old speaker cabinet with four twelve inch speakers, and I put my tape recorder amp on top of it. It was kind of funny.

There was a kid, Gene, who played drums at the school, and he and I jammed a lot. Somebody else was jamming with us too. Then Gene’s father told me that he didn’t want his son playing with me because Gene was a much better musician than I would ever be, and he couldn’t have his son playing with me!

That crushed me, but I continued to play, and to this day, no matter what kind of comments I get, I just keep going on. That’s something the school taught me. You can’t just end things because someone tells you you’re not good or you can’t do this, or they’re not interested in what you’re doing. You have to do what’s true to yourself. You just go on and you live your life; you survive and you move on, and you do what’s important to you.

Let’s say someone is playing and it’s terrible. If they ask my opinion, I’d probably tell them the things they were doing wrong, and then give them advice as to how to go about making it better. I’d never tell anybody, “Give it up. Don’t do it.”, because I don’t believe in that at all. I believe if somebody is involved in what they’re doing and they love it, then if they’re not talented, they’ll find that out on their own. For myself, I had a lot of belief in what I did.

By the time I was ready to leave school, I had reached the decision that music was the most prominent part of my life. One of my first memories of the school had been music. That was at the end of the sixties, when you had a melting pot of great experimental music. I was hearing all this fantastic music as a six or seven year old kid: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Doors, and I never realized until recently how important those bands were to me. That was what got me involved in music. As I got older, those bands were no longer the hip thing. There was a big ’70’s surge of pop rock bands, and I got caught up in the mainstream; it was different from the earlier bands, but it really wasn’t. It just appeared to be because it was all covered up in gauze. And I went on and I graduated and kept moving in that direction, and it wasn’t until maybe five years ago that I realized that the real music for me was those bands that I heard as a child. They were my teachers.

Music was the common bond between all of us in my peer group at school. We talked about music and we explored music together. I remember when Alan made a harpsichord and everybody was in awe. We all did different things, but we seemed to do them together.

When I was seventeen years old, I felt I was an adult. I felt that I’d learned everything that I could inside the school and by that time I had befriended people who weren’t at the school, and I wanted to meet more people. I felt it was time to move on. But my memories of the school are probably the fondest of my life.

Books by the Sudbury Valley Press ® are available from bookstore.sudburyvalley.org, by calling (508) 877-3030, or by sending a fax to (508) 788-0674. You may write to the Sudbury Valley School Press ® at The Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701. You can contact the school here

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The Sudbury Valley School ® is a democratic school run by a School Meeting. Students and staff each get one vote on all matters of substance; including the school rules and hiring/firing of staff. The school has no grades, tests, or scores.

The Sudbury Model of Education

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The Responsibility Spectrum

 

The fundamental difference between a Sudbury school and any other type of school is the student’s level of responsibility. In a Sudbury school the students are solely responsible for their education, their learning methods, their evaluation and their environment.

In a public school, the state takes responsibility for most aspects of a student’s education including curriculum and evaluation. The student is left with little responsibility except to learn what is taught, how it is taught, in the environment in which it is taught and then to reiterate it back at evaluation time.

In a non-Sudbury private school, the school administrators take a larger role in determining a student’s curriculum than in a public school. In some private schools, the school takes responsibility for evaluation, while in others the school administers the state tests. In most private schools, as with public schools, a student has personal responsibility only for learning what someone else determines is important to learn, at a time they think it is important to learn it, in a way someone else has determined it should be taught, in an environment designed by someone else, and they must do this well enough to pass the evaluations written and graded by someone else.

In a home schooling environment, parents take most of the responsibility for the student’s education. In New York and many other states, however, the state still takes some responsibility for determining the home scholar’s curriculum and for evaluating the home scholar. Home scholar’s are required to take the state mandated tests, and home schooling parents are required to fill out and submit progress reports to the local school district four times a year. Like public schools and most private schools, the responsibility is not with the student.

These educational options describe a range of responsibility. This range of responsibility starts with the student and extends to the parents, the school, the community, the state government and the federal government. We refer to this as the Responsibility Spectrum. Educational options with a compulsory curriculum (e.g. most public schools) tend to be on one end of the spectrum. Private schools span a large portion of the spectrum, with the school’s specific educational philosophy determining exactly where it falls on the spectrum. Home schooling also spans a large portion of the spectrum, with the parent’s specific educational philosophy determining the student’s level of responsibility. A Sudbury school is the only educational option where all of the responsibility is with the student.

 

The Sudbury Philosophy

 

Sudbury school students have total control over what they learn, how they learn, their educational environment and how they are evaluated. They choose their curriculum. They choose their method of instruction. They choose, through a democratic process, how their environment operates. They choose with whom to interact. They choose if, how and when to be evaluated _ often they choose to evaluate themselves. This is radically different from any other form of education and this is what differentiates a Sudbury school.

Why does a Sudbury school give this level of responsibility to the student? It is because Sudbury educators believe that children are capable of assuming this level of responsibility. It is not a type of pedagogical tool used to motivate the students. The responsibility is real; the students absolutely have the ultimate say in their education. Giving real responsibility to the students allows them to gain experience making decisions and handling the consequences of their choices. In this way, the students gain experience and maturity.

Much of the current effort in education is spent attempting to motivate students to learn. A Sudbury school doesn’t spend any time attempting to motivate students; we believe that they are inherently motivated. We believe this because all the evidence of childhood development supports it. Anyone who has observed a baby attempting to take his or her first steps or learn to talk can clearly see this. They struggle and fail and continue to struggle and fail until they finally _ on their own _ get it right and start walking and talking. If not suppressed, this inherent motivation to grow and develop does not die when the child reaches school age.

 

 If not suppressed, this inherent motivation to grow and develop does not die when the child reaches school age.

 

External motivation is only necessary when someone else determines what the student should learn. When the students determine their own curriculum, external motivation is not necessary. Studies have shown that when people determine for themselves what to learn, they retain the subject significantly better than if someone else determines what they should learn.1

The general consensus in our society seems to be that if left to their own devices children would never learn anything. They must be told what is important to learn and when to learn it. At a Sudbury school, the staff and parents believe that the students are the ones to decide what is important for themselves to learn. They are the ones responsible for choosing their interests and, eventually, their life goals. There are a number of examples of this in a Sudbury school. One of the clearest examples is the case of a young girl who, in the judgment of the Sudbury school staff, had a tremendous writing talent. For years after the girl started at the Sudbury school, the staff thought that they should encourage the girl to focus on her writing skills. Instead the girl spent the time socializing with her peers. After a few years of writing little or nothing, the girl returned to writing and her writing ability had taken a significant leap forward in depth and the understanding of human emotions. It became clear to the staff that her years socializing were not “wasted”. They had been spent, consciously or unconsciously, learning about people. When the staff reflected on this, they realized that the girl had spent her time exactly the way she needed to spend it. If they had forced, or even subtly encouraged, her to spend her time writing, she would have probably improved the mechanics of her writing skill, but would have lost the depth and the feeling that her writing developed by being able to socialize with and understand other people.

No one at a Sudbury school will tell the students what they have to learn. No one will exert any pressure on a student to learn a subject. No one will even suggest that it would be a good idea that students learn a subject. The entire responsibility is left to the students; we refer to this as Student Initiated Learning. When students are left to decide for themselves what to do and what to learn, they spend much of their time socializing. Unlike compulsory curriculum schools, a Sudbury school believes the time spent socializing is invaluable to a student’s education and growth.

One of the common questions asked of Sudbury educators is, “what happens if a child doesn’t want to learn to read?” Our answer is that this just doesn’t happen. It is akin to asking, “what happens if a child doesn’t want to learn to talk?” In our society reading is an important communication tool. People are inherently motivated to expand their ability to communicate, and this inherent motivation will result in children learning to read. However, in a Sudbury school, reading is seldom “taught” in the way we think of reading being taught. No teacher stands in front of 5 and 6 year olds and breaks words into their phonetic elements. Instead, reading is part of the culture _ just as talking is part of the culture. Students learn to read, and largely teach themselves to read, because they want to be able to more fully participate in the world. The original Sudbury school, the Sudbury Valley School, has been in existence for 36 years. During this time, they have had thousands of students. No child has failed to learn to read in the school’s entire history, and yet they have never had a formal reading class. This same experience is seen in learning other “basics”, such as writing and math. The students learn them because they recognize that they need to learn them in order to survive and prosper in the culture.

Sudbury schools do not have formal evaluations of their students. There are no grades and there are no tests. We believe that the best person to evaluate a student’s progress is the student. Students know when they understand a subject or a skill and when they do not. Experience has shown that when a student self-evaluates, they have a much higher standard than when someone is evaluating them. They tend to measure themselves against perfection – not against “good enough”. Occasionally a student will ask for outside evaluation from either a staff member or another student. When they do this, they demand an honest critique. They are not interested in being lied to. They are striving for perfection and want to know if they have reached it.

In a Sudbury school, there is no separation by age. All of the students are free to mix with other students of any age. In a school with a compulsory curriculum it is necessary to separate students by ability so that they can all be instructed at the same time _ the easiest way to do this is to assume that children of the same age have the same abilities and interests. This can lead to some students becoming bored if the pace of instruction is too slow, and some students becoming stressed and eventually disenfranchised if the pace of instruction is too fast. In a Sudbury school, the students can pursue their education at their own pace so there is no reason to separate students by age.

Sudbury schools believe that there is a great advantage gained by being able to allow students of different ages to freely mix. In fact, age mixing has been called a Sudbury school’s “secret weapon”. There are emotional, social and educational advantages to allowing different ages to mix. Emotionally, older students can play the role of big brother or sister to the younger students. Younger students gain security and comfort in this relationship. Age mixing provides a safe environment for students to work on their social skills. Students that are not confident of their social skills can practice them and work to improve them by interacting with other students; whether older, younger or the same age. Students of all ages can look to more mature students or the staff as role models.

In Sudbury Schools, it is very common for students to learn from other students. Sometimes the teaching student is older than the learning student, sometimes the teacher is younger than the learner, and sometimes they are the same age. The only constant is that both the teacher and the learner improve their knowledge of the subject. One of the best ways to improve knowledge of a subject is to teach it to someone else.

In order for the students to be able to be totally responsible for their education, they must have _ or at least share _ the responsibility for creating their learning environment. This means that Sudbury schools are run as a participatory democracy. All of the students and staff (together known as the School Meeting) are part of the democracy and all of the students have an equal voice in discussions and an equal vote in decisions. In other words, a 5 year old student has the same voice and power in the school as a staff member. The staff have no veto power of decisions made by the School Meeting. The only limit placed on the School Meeting is that they cannot make a law that would violate local or state laws and they cannot make a rule that would put the school community at risk.

 

 In other words, a 5 year old student has the same voice and power in the school as a staff member. The staff have no veto power of decisions made by the School Meeting.

 

Through participation in the school’s democratic process, the students gain experience working with others to make decisions. They gain experience advocating their positions on important issues that effect their day-to-day life. They come to understand that their opinions matter and that they can have an effect on the larger community.

 

Day-to-Day Operation of a Sudbury School

 

Sudbury schools operate very differently than any other type of school. In order to create an environment where the students are responsible for their education, the structure of the school had to change. The most striking difference is that there are no “classrooms” and there are no “teachers” _ at least not in the traditional sense of the words. Students are free to determine how the spend their time each day, they are not limited to a classroom where an adult tells them what they have to learn. They might work on an art project, play sports, cook, dance, read, talk to other students or staff, build a fort, watch birds, do a science experiment, climb a tree, write a story, play a computer game, or work with an off-campus mentor. When students decide they want to learn something new, whether it is an academic subject or not, they either ask a staff member for help, ask another student, or simply learn it on their own.

Each week there is a meeting, the School Meeting, where most of the day-to-day issues of operating the school are discussed and voted on. The School Meeting is run like a New England Town Hall Meeting. The School Meeting is run by the School Meeting Chair and the minutes are taken by the School Meeting Secretary. In most cases, the School Meeting Chair and Secretary are students who have been elected by the other students and staff. An agenda is published prior to the meeting and all students and staff members are welcome to attend the School Meeting. All students and staff have an equal voice in the discussions and an equal vote on the decisions.

The School Meeting has the final authority over all matters of a Sudbury school’s operation with the only exceptions being the yearly budget, the staff pay scale, graduation requirements and the Open Campus policy. These issues are the responsibility of the Assembly. The Assembly is composed of the students, their parents or guardians and the staff and is also operated as a participatory democracy. The Assembly typically meets once a year to approve the following year’s budget. The Assembly gives parents an important voice in vital issues pertaining to the school.

One of the most important aspects of running any institution is enforcement of the institution’s rules. In a Sudbury school, the School Meeting is responsible for making and enforcing these rules. This responsibility is often delegated to a smaller group of students and staff known as the Judicial Committee or JC. In most Sudbury schools, the Judicial Committee is composed of two JC Clerks, 3-5 students from different age groups and one staff member. The JC Clerks are typically students and are elected by the School Meeting and usually serve for two months. It is their job to ensure that the JC runs smoothly. The students from the different age groups serve on a rotating basis _ similar to jury duty. The staff member is typically rotated on a daily basis.

When a student or staff member believes that a school rule has been violated, he or she fills out a JC complaint form. The complaint describes what happened, where and when it happened and any witnesses. The JC meets on a daily basis and reviews all of the current JC complaints. For each complaint, the JC investigates the incident, writes a report of their investigation and determines if any school rules have been violated. If they determine that a rule has been violated, they press charges against the person (student or staff member) who they believe violated the rule. The person can then plead guilty or innocent. If a guilty plea is entered, the JC determines the appropriate sentence for the violation. If an innocent plea is entered, a trial takes place. Just as in the School Meeting, each member of the JC has an equal voice and vote.

One of the most important responsibilities of the School Meeting is to determine the staff. This is done each year by voting on whether current staff members should be re-hired for the next year. It is a very radical idea that students are allowed to help determine the staff of a school, but it is a necessity if they are to be given true responsibility for their education. There is no such thing a partial responsibility. The students are either responsible or they are not. They are either trusted or they are not. If the students were not allowed to participate in the selection of the staff members, one of the most important aspects of the school’s environment and operation would be taken from them. The message would be that they are not trusted with the responsibility of making really important decisions.

 

It is a very radical idea that students are allowed to help determine the staff of a school, but it is a necessity if they are to be given true responsibility for their education. There is no such thing a partial responsibility.

 

If the staff members are not responsible for directing a student’s education what are they responsible for? What is the role of staff? At a Sudbury school, the staff members are responsible for the continuing operation of the school. The staff members are expected to be role models of responsible adult behavior. They are expected to offer their insights and experience to School Meeting discussions. They are expected to be available to the students when they ask for assistance and guidance. Most of all they are expected to help ensure the continued operation and success of the school by providing continuity in the school community and culture.

One of the most striking aspects of a Sudbury school is the relationship between the staff and the students. Sudbury school staff members have high expectations of the students. They expect them to be able to take responsibility. They interact with the students as if they were adults _ perhaps young and inexperienced adults, but adults none-the-less. They listen to the students.

At times, students in a Sudbury school will decide that they want to learn a subject or they will decide that they want to pursue an educational or career path. When they decide this, the staff is there to support their choice and to help them achieve their goals. This can be done by actively teaching a subject, recommending a book or other reference material, identifying an outside resource or setting up an internship. An example from our school is a student who is very clear that she wants to become a veterinarian. She approached the staff and asked what she would need to do in order to get into a good college as a pre-veterinarian major. The staff helped identify the subjects she would have to know. The staff also helped her set up a short program with a local veterinarian. During this program the student visited the veterinarian’s office during school hours. When the program was finished, the veterinarian was very positive about the experience and indicated that the student would be welcome to come back for an internship once she reached the legal age of employment. The key to all of this is that the student knows what she wants. The staff is there to support and to encourage her along her path, but not to determine her path.

 

Results of a Sudbury Education

 

Because the Sudbury Model of Education is so different from any other form of education, many people wonder about the results of a Sudbury education. Specifically, they wonder if Sudbury graduates will be able to get into college or if they will be able to handle the “real” world. In short, Sudbury graduates have historically done very well when applying for college. The Sudbury Valley School has done an extensive study of their former students2. The results of their study show that a large majority (87%) of the graduates continue on to some form of further education; 4-year college, community college, performing arts school, culinary institute, etc.

Unlike Compulsory Education schools, graduates of a Sudbury school do not get into a college based on their transcript and their extracurricular activities. Sudbury school graduates get into colleges because they tend to be very focused on their career choice. This results in college applications that stand out from the crowd. Sudbury student’s have had the time during their high school years to investigate different options and to discover what they are passionate about.

One of the most striking facts discovered in Sudbury Valley School’s study of their former students is that 42% of the students who responded to the survey are either self employed or involved in entrepreneurial situations.2 This is understandable given the educational philosophy of a Sudbury school. The students have been able to develop their interests and to develop their ability to take responsibility. Once accustomed to having responsibility, it is difficult to abdicate responsibility to someone else.

 

Conclusion

 

One of the common misconceptions about a Sudbury school is that it must be easy _ after all, the students are free to do what they want to do without a teacher telling them what to do. This could not be further from the truth. A Sudbury school is hard for exactly the same reason people think it is easy. With no one telling the students what to do, the students are left with no choice but to decide what to do on their own. This is much more difficult than simply following instructions.

Once people understand the Sudbury philosophy, they often ask “why doesn’t everyone send their children to a Sudbury school?” My answer is simply that many parents do not believe or trust that their children are motivated to learn. I cannot count the number of times that a parent has told me, “it sounds great, but my child would just play all day and never learn anything _ she needs to be pushed”. Out of politeness, I do not question this belief. In my mind however, my response is, “if your child is not motivated, she would still be lying in her crib, crying for food when she was hungry”. The child was motivated enough to learn how to walk, how to eat solid food, how to talk and many, many other skills. It would truly be easier for children to just lie in the crib and cry for food, but they choose to take the harder path of learning to move from babyhood to childhood. Likewise, children will choose to take the difficult and empowering path of moving from childhood to adulthood.

 

(Footnotes)

1 Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R. M. (2002). The paradox of achievement: The harder you push, the worse it gets. In J. Aronson (Ed.)

2 Greenberg, D., & and Sadofsky, M. Legacy of Trust: Life After the Sudbury Valley School Experience (1992) (Sudbury Valley School Press; Framingham, MA) pp. 249.

“OK, So You’re Sort of Like…”

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After hearing a short explanation of our school’s philosophy, many people understandably try to link it with something already familiar to them. The most frequently mentioned “so-you’re-sort-of-likes” are listed below. We have tried to be fair, but clear, in distinguishing ourselves from other philosophies. However, all the subtleties of these educational models are not laid out and comparisons are not made from every angle. We hope that the explanations below serve to clarify what the Sudbury model is really about, and what it is not.

. . . A MONTESSORI SCHOOL? There are some ways in which the Sudbury model is similar to the Montessori approach. Children in both settings are allowed more freedom to make decisions about what interests them and how to pace themselves than in most other schools. Both models also hold the basic assumption that children are naturally curious and don’t need to be forced to learn. But Montessori children may choose only between the specific options presented by the teacher, not from the full array of activities which life itself presents. Montessori educators believe that all children learn according to specific patterns and sequences. They base classroom activities on the model’s assumptions about what is “developmentally appropriate” for each age group, and restrict access to certain activities if earlier activities in the preplanned sequence have not been completed. The Sudbury model makes no assumptions about how individual children will learn at any age. There is no expectation that one learn multiplication before negative numbers or how to draw a circle before a square. Interest is the only criterion for engaging in any activity, and satisfaction the only evaluation of success.

. . .A WALDORF SCHOOL? Like Waldorf schools, Sudbury schools care about the whole child. We are not only interested in academic success, but in the happiness and full human potential of each individual. Like Waldorf schools, we do not push children to read early, as traditional schools do. We both value play, “deep” (intensely involved) play, in particular, as crucial to the development of children’s mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual selves, indeed as the fundamental “work” of children. We both respect the intuitive wisdom of children, and take their world views and interests quite seriously. But the Sudbury model espouses no particular path of spiritual or emotional growth. Rather than listening to children in order to better guide them, we listen to them to respond to their self-determined needs. Unlike Waldorf education, we have no predetermined curriculum. We trust children to make their own mistakes, work through their own problems, and come to their own solutions, with help, when it’s needed, but without the assumption that we know the best outcome. Waldorf educators endeavor to move children, and society in general, in a particular direction, and seek to set up an environment which fosters such social transformation. By contrast, Sudbury schools seek to create an environment where children can recognize and pursue their own agenda. Children and adults together assess and modify the culture of the school through the School Meeting. The democratic process in a Sudbury school can be loud and contentious; it involves special interest groups politicking, voters making judgments, defendants being sentenced. It is “real” and not necessarily “enlightened” (although always respectful). The Sudbury model simply aims to give children access to the full complexity of life, and the curiosity, confidence, and competence to participate in — and perhaps to change — society according to their own interests, experience, knowledge, and goals.

. . . A PROGRESSIVE SCHOOL? Sudbury schools believe, as progressive school reformers do, that traditional schooling is not working. Both identify authoritarian teaching and administration as problems, and seek to reduce the stresses students experience in being coerced into learning and evaluated by “objective” testing. But the Sudbury model also rejects the notion that the alternative to authoritarianism is permissiveness — kind teachers giving kids second and third chances to shape up, trying to prevent any unhappiness, and bending over backwards to “make learning fun,” getting children to learn without them noticing they are learning. When kids are treated permissively they do not learn personal responsibility for their actions. Adults in progressive schools are still retaining the authority to grant or deny that second chance, to step in to resolve disputes, to establish the rules of conduct in their schools. There can be an illusion of freedom or democratic decision-making in progressive school, but if kids make poor decisions, adults always retain the power to step in and solve the problem for them. In the context of learning, progressive schools often try to have the curriculum follow students’ interests. But the effect of teaching to a child’s interests is, as Daniel Greenberg has argued, like a parent waiting for a child to open her mouth to speak before popping in the medicine the parent wants to give her. Children who show an interest playing Cowboys and Indians for a few hours, might be subject to six weeks worth of projects about Native Americans, regardless of whether their interest is sustained or not. The child administered medicine in such a manner may learn never to open her mouth around a parent with a spoon; the student administered education in such a manner may learn not to show interest, at least in school. Learning something new can be hard work, and children are quite capable of hard work — when they are working on something they want to do. When a student has a serious interest, there is no stopping her, and “making it fun” is often an intolerable distraction. When a student has an interest, we believe she should be allowed to pursue it only as far as she feels necessary. She may return to an important idea later, to deepen her interest, but forcing or manipulating her to deepen it will only serve to lessen her curiosity and sense of self-determination. Some progressive schools offer an array of courses, but do not require attendance. Sudbury schools do not have standard offerings, because learning to pursue one’s own agenda can be challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes boring. We think boredom is a valuable opportunity to make discoveries about one’s self. It is often easier to sit in classes, be entertained (maybe not as well as TV entertains, but still better than nothing), and avoid parental pressure, than it is to schedule one’s own life, wrestle with one’s own questions, learn how to seek the answers, and master one’s own destiny.

. . . HOMESCHOOLING? There is a particular philosophy of homeschooling, often referred to as “unschooling,” which shares many similarities with the Sudbury model. John Holt was its best known proponent, and his writings have been invaluable to us in helping to explain just how learning can happen without teaching, and why on earth a child might choose to learn arithmetic or some other supposedly dreadful subject. Unschoolers believe, as we do, that children are born curious about the world and eager to succeed in life and that kids learn best through experience and experimentation rather than by being told how and what to think. In the words of John Holt: “Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. . . They include time, freedom, and a lack of pressure.” But unschoolers, for the most part, see the family environment as the best place for children to grow, while the Sudbury model believes that, as the African proverb states, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Children and parents have complex relationships and interdependencies which make it harder for children to discover true independence within the family. In the environment of a Sudbury school, children face direct personal responsibility for their actions, without the emotional baggage that family-based accountability can sometimes carry. In addition, children are more able to develop some important social skills in a democratic school — the ability to tolerate diversity of opinion, to speak out against inappropriate behavior, and to develop and carry out group projects, for example. In most homeschooling families, the parent sees him or herself as ultimately responsible for the child’s education, while at Sudbury schools, that responsibility rests squarely with the child.

. . .STUDENT GOVERNMENTS IN TRADITIONAL SCHOOLS? Sudbury School Meetings are similar to student governments only in that they are composed of students. But the School Meeting is a participatory democracy, where every student and staff member has the option of a direct vote in every decision made. Student governments are representative — students are chosen to represent the larger student body. More importantly, student governments are hardly ever given real power over substantive issues. Elected positions serve primarily as symbols of status, popularity, and “leadership potential” for college admissions purposes. The School Meeting decides who will be staff each year, how tuition will be spent, what each and every rule of the school will be, and who will be suspended or expelled for violation of those rules. Staff members are involved on an equal footing, arguing their positions with gusto. But they are also equally bound to the rules of the school. As a free majority, students experience real control over their lives at school, and real consequences if they fail to meet the responsibilities such control requires of them. That kind of government brings a community identity and sense of individual empowerment no token school government could hope to achieve.

Back to Basics

Written by

Why go to school?

For people who like to think through the important questions in life for themselves, Sudbury Valley stands as a challenge to the accepted answers.

Intellectual basics

The first phrase that pops into everyone’s mind is: “We go to school to learn.” That’s the intellectual goal. It comes before all the others. So much so, that “getting an education” has come to mean “learning” — a bit narrow, to be sure, but it gets the priorities clear.

Then why don’t people learn more in schools today? Why all the complaints? Why the seemingly limitless expenditures just to tread water, let alone to progress?

The answer is embarrassingly simple. Schools today are institutions in which “learning” is taken to mean “being taught.” You want people to learn? Teach them! You want them to learn more? Teach them more! And more! Work them harder. Drill them longer.

But learning is a process you do, not a process that is done to you! That is true of everyone. It’s basic.

What makes people learn? Funny anyone should ask. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle started his most important book with the universally accepted answer: “Human beings are naturally curious.” Descartes put it slightly differently, also at the beginning of his major work: “I think, therefore I am.” Learning, thinking, actively using your mind: it’s the essence of being human. It’s natural.

More so even than the great drives — hunger, thirst, sex. When you’re engrossed in something — the key word is “engrossed” — you forget about all the other drives until they overwhelm you. Even rats do that, as was shown a long time ago.

Who would think of forcing people to eat, or drink, or have sex? (Of course, I’m not talking about people who have a specific disability that affects their drives; nor is anything I am writing here about education meant to apply to people who have specific mental impairments, which may need to be dealt with in special, clinical ways.) No one sticks people’s faces in bowls of food, every hour on the hour, to be sure they’ll eat; no one closets people with mates, eight periods a day, to make sure they’ll couple.

Does that sound ridiculous? How much more ridiculous is it, then, to try to force people to do that which above all else comes most naturally to them! And everyone knows just how widespread this overpowering curiosity is. All books on childrearing go to great lengths to instruct parents on how to keep their little children out of things — especially once they are mobile. We don’t stand around pushing our one year olds to explore. On the contrary, we tear our hair out as they tear our house apart, we seek ways to harness them, imprison them in play pens. And the older they get, the more “mischief” they get into. Did you ever deal with a ten year old? A teenager?

People go to school to learn. To learn, they must be left alone and given time. When they need help, it should be given, if we want the learning to proceed at its own natural pace. But make no mistake: if a person is determined to learn, they will overcome every obstacle and learn in spite of everything. So you don’t have to help; help just makes the process a little quicker. Overcoming obstacles is one of the main activities of learning. It does no harm to leave a few.

But if you bother the person, if you insist the person stop his or her own natural learning and do instead what you want, between 9:00 AM and 9:50, and between 10:00 AM and 10:50 and so forth, not only won’t the person learn what s/he has a passion to learn, but s/he will also hate you, hate what you are forcing upon them, and lose all taste for learning, at least temporarily.

Every time you think of a class in one of those schools out there, just imagine the teacher was forcing spinach and milk and carrots and sprouts (all those good things) down each student’s throat with a giant ramrod.

Sudbury Valley leaves its students be. Period. No maybes. No exceptions. We help if we can when we are asked. We never get in the way. People come here primarily to learn. And that’s what they all do, every day, all day.

Vocational basics

The nitty-gritty of going to school always comes up next, after “learning.” When it comes right down to it, most people don’t really give a damn what or how much they or their children learn at school, as long as they are able to have a successful career; to get a good job. That means money, status, advancement. The better the job you get, the better was the school you went to.

That’s why Phillips Andover, or Harvard, rank so highly. Harvard grads start out way up the ladder in every profession. They are grateful, and when they grow up, they perpetuate this by bestowing the best they have to offer on the new Harvard grads they hire; and by giving big donations to Harvard. So it goes for Yale, Dartmouth and all the others.

So what kind of a school is most likely today, at the end of the twentieth century, to prepare a student best for a good career?

We don’t really have to struggle with the answer. Everyone is writing about it. This is the post industrial age. The age of information. The age of services. The age of imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurialism. The future belongs to people who can stretch their minds to handle, mold, shape, organize, play with new material, old material, new ideas, old ideas, new facts, old facts.

These kind of activities don’t take place in the average school even on an extra-curricular basis. Let alone all day.

At Sudbury Valley, these activities are, in a sense, the whole curriculum.

Does it sound far-fetched? Perhaps to an untrained ear. But history and experience are on our side. How else to explain that fact that all our graduates, barring none, who wish to go on to college and graduate school, always get in, usually to the schools of first choice? With no transcripts, no records, no reports, no oral or written school recommendations. What do college admissions officers see in these students? Why do they accept them; often, grab them? Why do these trained administrators, wallowing in ‘A’ averages, glowing letters from teachers, high SAT scores; why do they take Sudbury Valley grads?

Of course you know the answer, even if it is hard to admit; it runs so against the grain. These trained professionals saw in our students bright, alert, confident, creative spirits. The dream of every advanced school.

The record speaks for itself. Our students are in a huge array of professions (or schools, in the case of more recent graduates) and vocations. They are doctors, dancers, musicians, businessmen, artists, scientists, writers, auto mechanics, carpenters . . . No need to go on. You can meet them if you wish.

If a person came to me today and said, simply: “To what school should I send my child if I want to be assured that she will get the best opportunity for career advancement in the field of her choice?” I would answer without the least hesitation, “The best in the country for that purpose is Sudbury Valley.” Alas, at present it is the only type of school in the country that does the job, with an eye to the future.

As far as vocations are concerned, Sudbury Valley has encountered Future Shock head on and overcome it. No longer is there any need to be mired in the past.

Moral basics

Now we come to a touchy subject. Schools should produce good people. That’s as broad a platitude as mother and apple pie. Obviously, we don’t want schools to produce bad people.

How to produce good people? There’s the rub. I dare say no one really knows the answer, at least from what I see around me. But at least we know something about the subject. We know, and have (once again) known from ancient times, the absolutely essential ingredient for moral action; the ingredient without which action is at best amoral, at worst, immoral.

The ingredient is personal responsibility.

All ethical behavior presupposes it. To be ethical you must be capable of choosing a path and accepting full responsibility for the choice, and for the consequences. You cannot claim to be a passive instrument of fate, of God, of other men, of force majeure; such a claim instantly renders all distinctions between good and evil pointless and empty. The clay that has been fashioned into the most beautiful pot in the world can lay no claim to virtue.

Ethics begins from the proposition that a human being is responsible for his or her acts. This is a given. Schools cannot change this, or diminish it. Schools can, however, either acknowledge it or deny it.

Unfortunately, virtually all schools today choose in fact to deny that students are personally responsible for their acts, even while the leaders of these schools pay lip service to the concept. The denial is threefold: schools do not permit students to choose their course of action fully; they do not permit students to embark on the course, once chosen; and they do not permit students to suffer the consequences of the course, once taken. Freedom of choice, freedom of action, freedom to bear the results of action — these are the three great freedoms that constitute personal responsibility.

It is no news that schools restrict, as a matter of fundamental policy, the freedoms of choice and action. But does it surprise you that schools restrict freedom to bear the consequences of one’s actions? It shouldn’t. It has become a tenet of modern education that the psyche of a student suffers harm to the extent that it is buffeted by the twin evils of adversity and failure. “Success breeds success” is the password today; encouragement, letting a person down easy, avoiding disappointing setbacks, the list goes on.

Small wonder that our schools are not noted for their ethical training. They excuse their failure by saying that moral education belongs in the home. To be sure, it does. But does that exclude it from school?

Back to basics. At Sudbury Valley, the three freedoms flourish. The buck stops with each person. Responsibility is universal, ever present, real. If you have any doubts, come and look at the school. Watch the students in action. Study the judicial system. Attend a graduation, where a student must convince an assemblage of peers that s/he is ready to be responsible for himself or herself in the community at large, just as the person has been at school.

Does Sudbury Valley produce good people? I think it does. And bad people too. But the good and the bad have exercised personal responsibility for their actions at all times, and they realize that they are fully accountable for their deeds. That’s what sets Sudbury Valley apart.

Social basics

Some time ago it became fashionable to ask our schools to look after the social acclimatization of students. Teach them to get along. Rid our society of social misfits by nipping the problem in the bud, at school. Ambitious? Perhaps. But oh, how many people have struggled with reports from school about their own þ or their child’s þ social adaptations, or lack of them! Strange, isn’t it, how badly people sometimes screw up what they do? I mean, trying to socialize people is hard enough; but the schools seem almost methodically to have created ways of defeating this goal.

Take age segregation, for starters. What genius looked around and got the idea that it was meaningful to divide people sharply by age? Does such division take place naturally anywhere? In industry, do all twenty-one year old laborers work separately from twenty years olds or twenty-three year olds? In business, are there separate rooms for thirty year old executives and thirty-one year old executives? Do two year olds stay apart from one year olds and three year olds in the playgrounds? Where, where on earth was this idea conceived? Is anything more socially damaging than segregating children by year for fourteen — often eighteen — years.

Or take frequent segregation by sex, even in coed schools, for varieties of activities.

Or the vast chasm between children and adults, have you ever observed how universal it is for children not to look adults in the eye?

And now let’s peek into the social situation created for children within their own age group. If the schools make it almost impossible for a twelve year old to relate in a normal human fashion to eleven year olds, thirteen year olds, adults, etc., what about other twelve year olds?

No such luck. The primary, almost exclusive mode of relationship fostered by schools among children in the same class is competition! Cut-throat competition. The pecking order is the all-in-all. Who is better than whom, who smarter, faster, taller, handsomer and, of course, who is worse, stupider, slower, shorter, uglier.

If ever a system was designed effectively to produce competitive, obnoxious, insecure, paranoid, social misfits, the prevailing schools have managed it.

Back to basics

In the real world, the most important social attribute for a stable, healthy society is cooperation. In the real world, the most important form of competition is against oneself, against goals set for and by a person for that person’s own achievement. In the real world, interpersonal competition for its own sake is widely recognized as pointless and destructive þ yes, even in large corporations and in sports.

In the real world, and in Sudbury Valley, which is a school for the real world.

Political basics

We take it for granted that schools should foster good citizenship. Universal education in this country in particular always kept one eye sharply focused on the goal of making good Americans out of us all.

We all know what America stands for. The guiding principles were clearly laid down by our founding fathers, and steadily elaborated ever since.

This country is a democratic republic. No king, no royalty, no nobility, no inherent hierarchy, no dictator. A government of the people, by the people, for the people. In matters political, majority rule. No taxation without representation.

This country is a nation of laws. No arbitrary authority, no capricious government now giving, now taking. Due process.

This country is a people with rights. Inherent rights. Rights so dear to us that our forefathers refused to ratify the constitution without a Bill of Rights added in writing, immediately.

Knowing all this, we would expect þ nay, insist (one would think) þ that the schools, in training their students to contribute productively to the political stability and growth of America, would

  • be democratic and non-autocratic;
  • be governed by clear rules and due process;
  • be guardians of individual rights of students.

A student growing up in schools having these features would be ready to move right into society at large.

But the schools, in fact, are distinguished by the total absence of each of the three cardinal American values listed.

They are autocratic — all of them, even “progressive” schools.

They are lacking in clear guidelines and totally innocent of due process as it applies to alleged disrupters.

They do not recognize the rights of minors.

All except Sudbury Valley, which was founded on these three principles.

I think it is safe to say that the individual liberties so cherished by our ancestors and by each succeeding generation will never be really secure until our youth, throughout the crucial formative years of their minds and spirits, are nurtured in a school environment that embodies these basic American truths.

Back to basics

So you see, Sudbury Valley was started in 1968 by people who thought very hard about schools, about what schools should be and should do, about what education is all about in America today.

We went back to basics. And we stayed there. And we jealously guarded these basics against any attempts to compromise them. As we and our successors shall surely continue to stand guard.

Intellectual creativity, professional excellence, personal responsibility, social toleration, political liberty all these are the finest creations of the human spirit. They are delicate blossoms that require constant care.

All of us who are associated with Sudbury Valley are proud to contribute to this care.

Books by the Sudbury Valley Press ® are available from bookstore.sudburyvalley.org, by calling (508) 877-3030, or by sending a fax to (508) 788-0674. You may write to the Sudbury Valley School Press ® at The Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701. You can contact the school here

Permission to freely copy and distribute this document is given, provided that the text is not modified or abridged and this notice is included. For more information about SVS titles available electronically, check this web site periodically.

The Sudbury Valley School ® is a democratic school run by a School Meeting. Students and staff each get one vote on all matters of substance; including the school rules and hiring/firing of staff. The school has no grades, tests, or scores.

A Few Words on SVS

Written by

The Sudbury Valley School has been in operation for more than 30 years now, and several other schools around and outside our country (the United States) see our school’s success and are modeling their schools on ours.

The school accepts students from ages four and up, and awards a high school diploma. It is a private school, which relies upon tuition and does not engage in fundraising. Studies of our alumni show them to be “successful” by any criteria; most have gone on to their first choice career or college, most have a comfortable income, and (the best definition of success, in my mind) most are happy people.

The physical plant is a beautiful Victorian mansion on a ten-acre campus. It is furnished like a home, with couches, easy chairs, books everywhere (rather than hidden in a library), etc. The grounds are excellent for sport and games, and the school has several facilities; music rooms, an art room, a high speed Internet connection, a darkroom, a piano, a stereo, a pond great for fishing, several computers, etc.

Students (from age four on up) are free to do as they wish during the day, as long as they follow the school rules (more on school rules later). The campus is “open” and most students come and go as they please, without having to check with an office or other such nonsense. No one is required to attend classes and, indeed, classes are rare and bear little resemblance to the usual notion of a “class.” There are no tests or grades of any kind. Students and staff (teachers) are equal in every regard. The students and staff refer to each other by first name, and the relationships between students and staff can’t easily be distinguished from the relations between students.

The school is governed democratically, by the School Meeting. The School Meeting meets weekly, and is made up of students and staff (one vote to a person, following Robert’s Rules of Order). It decides all matters of consequence; electing administrative officers from among its own members (yes, no distinction is made between students and staff as far as eligibility for an office), deciding school rules (enforced by the Judicial committee, see later), making expenditures, submitting the annual budget to the Assembly (see later) for approval, hiring, firing and re-hiring staff (there is no tenure, all staff are up for re-election each year), etc.

The school Assembly meets annually, and is made up of students, staff, and parents of students (as most parents pay tuition, it is considered only reasonable to give them some voice in the use of their money). It must approve the budget (submitted by the School Meeting) which includes tuition rates, staff salaries, etc. It also votes on whether or not to award a diploma to any students that have requested one. The Assembly is the broad policy-making body of the school.

Within the school, the rules are enforced by a judicial system which has been re-defined by the School Meeting several times over the last 30 years. Its most current incarnation revolves around a Judicial Committee (JC) made up of two officers elected every two months (always students, ever since the positions first opened), five students selected randomly every month, and a staff member chosen daily. The JC investigates complaints of school rules being broken, and sometimes presses charges. If the JC presses charges against someone, and (s)he pleads innocent, there will be a trial. If a person pleads guilty or is found guilty by the trial, that person will be sentenced by the Judicial Committee. Verdicts and sentences deemed unfair by the accused (or others, for that matter) may be brought before the School Meeting.

All School Meeting members are equal before the law. In fact, the first guilty verdict ever was against staff members. Typical sentences are things like “can’t go outside for two days,” “can’t enter the upstairs for a week,” etc.

Democracy alone is not enough to create a stable happy community. The revolution-torn democratic city-states of ancient Greece are testimony to this. It is also important that personal freedoms and rights be respected. As such, the school grants the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to its students; normally in American society students are not given freedom of thought or religion (a parent may force his/her child into Sunday school), free assembly (they’re not even allowed to leave their seats to go to the bathroom in traditional school, without permission from a teacher), etc.

It is understood that the “purpose” of schools is to educate. So let me put forward the reasons why persons in Sudbury Model Schools believe that freedom and democracy is the best environment for children to learn.

People are born with an amazing capacity for knowledge — the brain. It makes little sense to assume that such a thing could have evolved (or been created, or whatever) without the means of using it also being natural to human beings. Let me list some of the more obvious “natural” mechanisms by which children (and adults) encode information about their world. Curiosity (crushed in a classroom where you must study what others wish, rather than that subject which you are burning to know), role-modeling (not easy when the only person older than you is a teacher whom you probably dislike and is almost certainly not practicing the profession you would choose) and spontaneous play (that’s right out the window, for children are so restrained by school that even “recess” becomes a time for working off violent energy rather than exploring one’s world).

People sometimes ask how Sudbury Valley students are “exposed” to different things. I find this a very odd question, for in reality how can a person keep from being exposed to things? We are in an age of endless information, and it takes a cell (like a traditional school) to keep a curious person from finding out anything and everything (s)he wants to know.

People naturally learn to deal with the environment in which they are placed. In a place with grades, where knowledge is spoon-fed to them and they never have any reason to make use of it apart from passing a test, students will learn to get good grades (whether that means learning to cheat, or learning how to “cram” for a test). In a place where people do what they want, they find the intrinsic value of knowledge. In a place where people are treated as adult human beings they learn that they must live up to certain community standards, but when they are treated as prisoners (read: traditional schools) they learn only that they are untrusted, and they learn to wait for the instructions and orders of others. It is testimony to the strength of the human spirit that there are so few apathetic and helpless people that come out of the public school system. (Sudbury Valley alumni, by the way, often become quite politically active in later life, and often go into helping professions.)

Books by the Sudbury Valley Press ® are available from bookstore.sudburyvalley.org, by calling (508) 877-3030, or by sending a fax to (508) 788-0674. You may write to the Sudbury Valley School Press ® at The Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701. You can contact the school here

Permission to freely copy and distribute this document is given, provided that the text is not modified or abridged and this notice is included. For more information about SVS titles available electronically, check this web site periodically.

The Sudbury Valley School ® is a democratic school run by a School Meeting. Students and staff each get one vote on all matters of substance; including the school rules and hiring/firing of staff. The school has no grades, tests, or scores.