“We were long time homeschoolers and when we were looking for the next chapter in our children’s educational journey the only school that really fit our unstructured, variable, and free style was The Hudson Valley Sudbury School. All the staff and students there are real partners in the community that is Sudbury. Everyone is supportive, accepting and caring. My children have formed many bonds and expanded their horizons in several ways. We Love HVSS!”
-Mike Chase-Salerno
Earlier this year a new parent mentioned to me that she had suffered through a couple awkward conversations about the school in nearby communities. The people she had spoken with in these instances made pained, disconcerting facial expressions and offhand remarks about “things they had heard” about HVSS, like “kids play all day at that place!” She found herself, for the most part, stymied as to how to proceed in these conversations. Like any self-respecting educator, I’m quick to offer unsolicited advice, so I immediately directed her to read Jeff’s excellent blog post, The Sudbury Conversation, which has good tips on how to begin responding to the negative caricatures of our school which do regrettably exist, lingering in the atmosphere like ghosts from Salem, perhaps belying a puritanical distrust of homo sapiens per se, in this puffy educator’s opinion, at least.
And then the response to our new promotional video was extraordinarily positive (especially considering that comment threads have become society’s repression-ventilation-system) but it did score a few negative comments (we had decided that we’d know the video was a success when that began) which we have also heard in the past. So I thought I’d just take a moment out of my laborious holiday feasting schedule to provide expanded responses to these hasty assumptions (and then I don’t want to hear them anymore, ok?). Please consider this essentially to be part II of Jeff’s Sudbury Conversation post. And actually it will consist of three posts, because I am long-winded, another classical quality of a good educator that I happen to possess. The posts will take up the following…we’ll call them “questions,” because I am also passive-aggressive (I’ll leave it up to the reader to determine whether or not that is also in the classic suite of educator-traits):
This post will include the response to question #1…
Special Snowflake Syndrome!!!
On Wiktionary, SSS is defined as, (derogatory) The conviction that one (or often, one’s child) is, in some way, special and should therefore be treated differently than others. A few people, after watching the video, have made some variation on the comment, “oh great – more snowflakes!” I think I get how people arrive at this thought – they see kids making decisions about what to do with their lives and equate that with indulgence. But at HVSS, students don’t just get to decide what to do – they have to work to make it happen, and not only that, but they have to figure out what they want to happen in the first place.
The school doesn’t offer a menu of options students can simply select from, nor does it hand out trophies to 11th place finishers (or first place finishers, for that matter). When our students want something, or to engage in a particular activity, they have to take the initiative to ask for the resources required, follow through by collaborating and organizing with others, and then by maintaining their commitment. What’s more, the democratic structure of the school means that students need to advocate for themselves, create and articulate arguments, and claim responsibility for their communities. The school is, thus, quite challenging. “Snowflakes” are created by a style of child-rearing (including schooling) antithetical to this, namely one which does not ask the child to take any responsibility for themselves or their community. Our program is about as liable to create that type of subject as I am likely to wake up tomorrow a penguin. Covered in snowflakes.
This is part 3 of the 3 part blog. Part 1 can be seen here: Special Snowflake Syndrome and Other Good Questions. Part 2 can be seen here: But What about Academics?
Many people – and the institutions they create – insist that kids cannot handle autonomy in their personal lives, because free kids will inevitably debase themselves, developing indulgent self-regard and fail to learn vital skills like the discipline to delay gratification. At other points in history, majorities of people have also insisted that members of particular races, ethnicities, and genders could not handle autonomy either. But this patronizing attitude has been consistently proven wrong, and it turns out that people, including children, thrive when they are free, provided they have a basically safe and nourishing environment.
In my last post, I explained that, actually, yes, our students, particularly younger ones, often do screw around all day, insofar as “screwing around” means “playing.” In fact I can see them playing right now, as I write, all around me. I am sipping my third cup of coffee, sighing, and wondering how they keep it up, and why I do not feel like playing. God, they are loud!. But anyway – play certainly seems to be the primary format of activity that young people are drawn to, and there is clear evolutionary reasons as to why, namely that play is the primary means by which we learned the skills we needed to flourish for hundreds or thousands of years prior to the proliferation of mass schooling. The original goal of mass schooling was nation-building, and it was effective. However, schools created a more rigid dichotomy between “play” and “learning” in the societies it was implemented in, because the schools taugh skills students didn’t want to learn. Thus, “learning” became “work,” and “play” became nothing more than a diversion from work. Schooling, along with the learning-play dichotomy it implies, have been ubiquitous for long enough that we now take it for granted as a necessity for the education of children and the proper functioning of society. Within this context, it makes sense that one might be suspicious of children’s ability and willingness to develop into adults without long-term, vigilant, and invasive intervention, and to equate “screwing around” with “wasting time.”
But the dichotomy between work and play does not exist in nature, nor in children who have not yet been schooled; kids learn all sorts of things in play, even if unintentionally, including the skills which are valued in their economy (although, given that play is by definition voluntary, they do not tend to master the suite of skills necessary to function well in an authoritarian regime). At the same time, when kids are playing, they’re enjoying life, which we should be careful not to underrate, because fun is an important nutrient, and most of us are not meeting the RDA. In fact, it’s hard to overrate having fun. Usually when we say we’re “having fun” we mean we’re engaged in an activity so fully we’re in a state of flow, an experience which reliably leads to happiness, fulfillment, and enhanced creative capacity; call it “educational” if you must.
The concept of school itself implies that the purpose of a child is to grow up. But this assumption, aside from being gloomy, is wrong. A child’s purpose is to be a child, just as an adult’s is to be an adult. When children are allowed to fulfill that purpose, they do end up developing into competent adults, even though it was never an explicit goal. Certainly, our students usually graduate with some weird holes in their “content knowledge,” but this hardly seems to hold them back. And such holes are far easier to fill then, say, a hole where there should be confidence, self-respect, or curiosity. You will rarely find our students bent over textbooks with furrowed brows, chewing on the eraser of a pencil, training for their adulthood. It is much more likely you will find them “screwing around,” fulfilling their purpose, being who they are today, one precious day at a time.
