Back to Basics

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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.

The Art of Doing Nothing

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The following is from the book The Sudbury Valley School Experience, Edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg.  The author of the article is Hanna Greenberg.  The book can be purchased at the Sudbury Valley School Press online store at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/sudbury-valley-school-experience

“Where do you work?”

“At Sudbury Valley School.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing.”

Doing nothing at Sudbury Valley requires a great deal of energy and discipline, and many years of experience. I get better at it every year, and it amuses me to see how I and others struggle with the inner conflict that arises in us inevitably. The conflict is between wanting to do things for people, to impart your knowledge and to pass on your hard earned wisdom, and the realization that the children have to do their learning under their own steam and at their own pace. Their use of us is dictated by their wishes, not ours. We have to be there when asked, not when we decide we should be.

Teaching, inspiring, and giving advice are all natural activities that adults of all cultures and places seem to engage in around children. Without these activities, each generation would have to invent everything anew, from the wheel to the ten commandments, metal working to farming. Man passes knowledge to the young from generation to generation, at home, in the community, at the workplace and supposedly at school. Unfortunately, the more today’s schools endeavor to give individual students guidance, the more they harm the children. This statement requires explanation, since it seems to contradict what I have just said, namely, that adults always help children learn how to enter the world and become useful in it. What I have learned, very slowly and painfully over the years, is that children make vital decisions for themselves in ways that no adults could have anticipated or even imagined.

Consider the simple fact that at SVS, many students have decided to tackle algebra not because they need to know it, or even find it interesting, but because it is hard for them, it’s boring, and they are bad at it. They need to overcome their fear, their feeling of inadequacy, their lack of discipline. Time and again, students who have made this decision achieve their stated goal and take a huge step in building their egos, their confidence, and their character. So why does this not happen when all children are required or encouraged to take algebra in high school? The answer is simple. To overcome a psychological hurdle one has to be ready to make a personal commitment. Such a state of mind is reached only after intense contemplation and self analysis, and cannot be prescribed by others, nor can it be created for a group. In every case it is an individual struggle, and when it succeeds it is an individual triumph. Teachers can only help when asked, and their contribution to the process is slight compared to the work that the student does.

The case of algebra is easy to grasp but not quite as revealing as two examples that came to light at recent thesis defenses. One person to whom I have been very close, and whom I could easily have deluded myself into thinking that I had “guided” truly shocked me when, contrary to my “wisdom,” she found it more useful to use her time at school to concentrate on socializing and organizing dances than to hone the writing skills that she would need for her chosen career as a journalist. It would not have occurred to any of the adults involved with this particular student’s education to advise or suggest the course of action that she wisely charted for herself, guided only by inner knowledge and instinct. She had problems which first she realized and then she proceeded to solve in creative and personal ways. By dealing with people directly rather than observing them from the sidelines, she learned more about them and consequently achieved greater depth and insights, which in turn led to improved writing. Would writing exercises in English class have achieved that better for her? I doubt it.

Or what about the person who loved to read, and lost that love after a while at SVS? For a long time she felt that she had lost her ambition, her intellect, and her love of learning because all she did was play outdoors. After many years she realized that she had buried herself in books as an escape from facing the outside world. Only after she was able to overcome her social problems, and only after she learned to enjoy the outdoors and physical activities, did she return to her beloved books. Now they are not an escape, but a window to knowledge and new experience. Would I or any other teacher have known how to guide her as wisely as she had guided herself? I don’t think so.

As I was writing this another example from many years ago came to mind. It illustrates how the usual sort of positive encouragement and enrichment can be counterproductive and highly limiting. The student in question was obviously intelligent, diligent and studious. Early on, any test would have shown he had a marked talent in mathematics. What he actually did for most of his ten years at SVS was play sports, read literature, and later in his teens, play classical music on the piano. He studied algebra mostly on his own but seemed to have devoted only a little of his time to mathematics. Now, at the age of twenty-four, he is a graduate student in abstract mathematics and doing extremely well at one of the finest universities. I shudder to think what would have happened to him had we “helped” him during his years here to accumulate more knowledge of math, at the expense of the activities he chose to prefer. Would he have had the inner strength, as a little boy, to withstand our praise and flattery and stick to his guns and read books, fool around with sports, and play music? Or would he have opted for being an “excellent student” in math and science and grown up with his quest for knowledge in other fields unfulfilled? Or would he have tried to do it all? And at what cost?

As a counterpoint to the previous example I would like to cite another case which illustrates yet another aspect of our approach. A few years ago a teenage girl who had been a student at SVS since she was five told me quite angrily that she had wasted two years and learned nothing. I did not agree with her assessment of herself, but I did not feel like arguing with her, so I just said, “If you learned how bad it is to waste time, why then you could not have learned a better lesson so early in life, a lesson that will be of value for the rest of your days.” That reply calmed her, and I believe it is a good illustration of the value of allowing young people to make mistakes and learn from them, rather than directing their lives in an effort to avoid mistakes.

Why not let each person make their own decisions about their use of their own time? This would increase the likelihood of people growing up fulfilling their own unique educational needs without being confused by us adults who could never know enough or be wise enough to advise them properly.

So I am teaching myself to do nothing, and the more I am able to do it, the better is my work. Please don’t draw the conclusion that the staff is superfluous. You might say to yourself that the children almost run the school themselves, so why have so many staff, just to sit around and do nothing. The truth is that the school and the students need us. We are there to watch and nurture the school as an institution and the students as individuals.

The process of self direction, or blazing your own way, indeed of living your life rather than passing your time, is natural but not self evident to children growing up in our civilization. To reach that state of mind they need an environment that is like a family, on a larger scale than the nuclear family, but nonetheless supportive and safe. The staff, by being attentive and caring and at the same time not directive and coercive, gives the children the courage and the impetus to listen to their own inner selves. They know that we are competent as any adult to guide them, but our refusal to do so is a pedagogical tool actively used to teach them to listen only to themselves and not to others who, at best, know only half the facts about them.

Our abstaining from telling students what to do is not perceived by them as a lack of something, an emptiness. Rather it is the impetus for them to forge their own way not under our guidance but under our caring and supportive concern. For it takes work and courage to do what they do for and by themselves. It cannot be done in a vacuum of isolation, but thrives in a vital and complex community which the staff stabilizes and perpetuates.

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

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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.

The Three Rs: Rules, Respect, Responsibility

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Why We Are Not a “School with No Rules”

An article in a local Massachusetts paper recently described Sudbury Valley School as a “School with No Rules.” The reporter obviously hadn’t seen the 30-page rule book which Sudbury Valley’s School Meeting has created (over 30 years) and to which all students and staff are beholden. Why our schools need so many rules? It’s the same question that was posed about democracy when it first emerged. In the absence of an overarching authority figure — king, parent, teacher — rules are the backbone of a just and orderly society. Painstaking attention to the process of rulemaking and enforcing is a necessary component of any democracy.

In most people’s minds there are two general methods of raising kids — the authoritarian and the permissive. In one the adult makes all the rules and enforces them, in the other there are no rules, or the rules are always subject to negotiation and manipulation. One is firm and disciplined, the other is kind and warm. One breaks the will and invites rebellion, the other disregards accountability and invites self-indulgence.

The power of the Sudbury model’s democracy is that it provides an alternative to both approaches to being with children. Kids at Sudbury model schools are treated with respect and are not subject to arbitrary authority. On the other hand, they are fully accountable for their actions and experience real consequences if they violate the rules set by the community. Freedom of education is balanced very clearly against the expectation — the requirement — that everyone treat others with respect and carry out agreements responsibly.

There are costs to this approach. Some people are disgusted with the number of rules a Sudbury school creates and with the huge amount of time and energy devoted to enforcing those rules. Sometimes students meet for hours in the Judicial Committee, calling witnesses and reviewing past offenses, discussing issues of fairness and respect for the community. Such seemingly minor events as a smashed pumpkin or a mess left in the library for the third time can call for serious consequences if they violate the responsibility each member of the community has to the others.

For little ones and other new students, a Judicial Committee meeting itself can seem like a punishment. Facing a group of bigger kids and staff can be quite intimidating. But the message a five-year-old gets from going through the same “grown-up” process the rest of us do, is that they are full participants in the community, fully involved, fully respected, and fully accountable. As members of the Committee, when their time comes up to serve on it, they experience the process from the other side — realizing just how hard it is to strive for open-minded fairness, how complex justice really is.

Sometimes consequences seem harsh. A five year old is suspended for two days for disregarding an important Judicial Committee restriction; a staff member has to stay out of the kitchen for two days for leaving a mess from a baking project; a seven year old is required to stand guard by the door during school meeting for two hours for running through the meeting room the week before; a sixteen year old is expelled immediately, without a second chance, for violating a state law during school.

What distinguishes these “punishments” from those in traditional schools or in most families, is that they come from one’s peers, one’s own community, a community striving to maintain an atmosphere of respect and freedom. In a thriving Sudbury school, Judicial Committee consequences seldom interfere with friendships, there is no such thing as snitching, and untruthfulness in a JC is almost unheard of. Kids understand that in a school which allows complete independence, and genuinely trusts kids to make decisions about their own learning and life, real freedom must be protected from disrespect and chaos.

Some people bring up Lord of the Flies when they hear that students will “run the school” at Fairhaven. They worry that there is a latent fascist impulse that will make kids inflict cruel and unusual punishments on one another. But one must remember that the children in Lord of the Flies had just come from an authoritarian British boarding school. Hierarchy and brute force were what they knew and what they put into practice. If those kids had come from a Sudbury-model school, a democratic process would certainly have been recreated on their desert island. Kids at Sudbury schools care deeply about their school culture and the process by which decisions are made. They take great care to treat others with fairness and compassion, since they might well be sitting before the Judicial Committee themselves next time.

So many of the “free schools” that started in the sixties and seventies were unwilling to establish clear lines of decision-making and rules of conduct. The belief that natural curiosity was the necessary force behind real learning was tied up with a rejection of “power trips” and any sort of formality. Many of these schools simply ended in chaos and bitterness, or simple entropy, because they were unable to allow for educational freedom and respect for the individual while preventing paralysis by indecision and a behavioral free-for-all on the other. Sudbury Valley’s success and longevity was and is still unquestionably due to the fact that the school understands that freedom requires order and that respect necessitates due process under conditions of rigorous fairness (as well as caring and compassion).

By making sure we treat one another respectfully and uphold our responsibilities, we are practicing what we preach about how people learn. We learn about life by living it; We learn about respect by being respected; We learn about responsibility by being granted it, feeling its weight and carrying it to conclusion ourselves. It doesn’t mean that, being human and relatively inexperienced, we don’t make mistakes. But mistakes are just opportunities to refine one’s approach and try again. By trusting students with their own choices and with the democratic governance of the school community, we tell them that they are worthy of respect, that they are capable and responsible, and that we expect nothing less from them as individuals and as a school.

How Kids Learn and Learn and Learn

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Fairhaven School’s two fundamental principles are, of course, freedom and democracy. But sometimes, since these two ideas are sensible and decent in their own right, we lose sight of their importance as educational cornerstones, of the fact that they set conditions in which real learning can best occur.

In the world of educational and psychological research there are two basic notions of how learning takes place. Learning is seen in traditional schools as a process of transmission — from adult to child or perhaps from book to child. A child is essentially an empty jar into which learning must be poured (or crammed). More recently, researchers have begun to define what has always been true — that learning is, in fact, a process of construction. Kids don’t acquire knowledge, they create it. They build from the inside out their understanding of the world.

From their first year of life, kids are little mechanics, linguists, and scientists developing theories about what things mean and how they work, testing the theories out in a variety of situations, and reworking them as new experiences and knowledge conflict with them. That doesn’t mean that kids learn in a vacuum, that nothing we “teach” them matters. It means that they take what we say (and especially what we do) along with other things they find out on their own, and make meaning of it for themselves. If you haven’t noticed this process already, watch your kids closely for a while. You will begin to see that there is learning going on in every conversation with a friend, every imaginary war game, every walk to the store.

Schools have made half-hearted attempts to take these new (for them) research findings into account, allowing kids to “discover” what teachers have already decided they want them to learn, or using a “whole language approach” which allows kids to read and write without having their mistakes corrected (until they get to second grade). But as long as the schools break down what were once important ideas into a series of tiny (meaningless) steps, and insist that kids learn just what /how/when the teacher wants them to learn, that natural knowledge-building process cannot fully operate.

Education critic John Holt’s description of how educators might teach babies to talk demonstrates wonderfully the counter productivity of traditional teaching methods: First, some committee of experts would analyze speech and break it down into a number of separate “speech skills.” We would probably say that, since speech is made up of sounds, a child must be taught to make all the sounds of his language before he can be taught to speak the language itself. Doubtless we would list these sounds, easiest and commonest ones first, harder and rarer ones next. Then we would begin to teach infants these sounds, working our way down the list. . . Everything would be planned, with nothing left to chance; there would be plenty of drill, review and tests, to make sure that he had not forgotten anything.

Imagine how devastating this process would be for children trying to learn to talk. Most kids in school get tired of being required to regurgitate things for which they have not been allowed to make meaning. Real learning either begins to shut down or continues to operate only outside the classroom. Curiosity is deadened and school becomes a race for achievement or a meaningless exercise in frustration, not a place to learn and grow.

So how do we help kids learn without disrupting the natural knowledge-building process? John Holt says, “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.” At Fairhaven School, where kids have those three things in abundance, as well as plenty of stimulating activity around them, they will not just learn skills and facts and ideas. Children will learn to perfect their own knowledge-constructing process, just as one learns to handle and use a tool well with practice. They will learn to apply their knowledge in “real life” situations, across and beyond academic “subjects.” They will not have every “wrong” theory corrected, even by the time they leave the school. Their range of knowledge may not match perfectly, or even remotely, that of a traditionally schooled child. But they will know how to locate information, acquire skills, and make meaning of important ideas. Their lives will continue to include a constant, internally regulated learning process which will serve them well as long as their lives and the world keep changing and demanding new things of them.