The following is an extract from the book Free at Last published by the Sudbury Valley Press and available on their website at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/free-last.

And ‘Rithmetic

Sitting before me were a dozen boys and girls, aged nine to twelve. A week earlier, they had asked me to teach them arithmetic. They wanted to learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and all the rest.

“You don’t really want to do this,” I said, when they first approached me.

“We do, we are sure we do,” was their answer.

“You don’t really,” I persisted. “Your neighborhood friends, your parents, your relatives probably want you to, but you yourselves would much rather be playing or doing something else.”

“We know what we want, and we want to learn arithmetic. Teach us, and we’ll prove it. We’ll do all the homework, and work as hard as we can.”

I had to yield then, skeptically. I knew that arithmetic took six years to teach in regular schools, and I was sure their interest would flag after a few months. But I had no choice. They had pressed hard, and I was cornered.

I was in for a surprise.

My biggest problem was a textbook to use as a guide. I had been involved in developing the “new math,” and I had come to hate it. Back then when we were working on it — young academicians of the Kennedy post-sputnik era — we had few doubts. We were filled with the beauty of abstract logic, set theory, number theory, and all the other exotic games mathematicians had played for millenia. I think that if we had set out to design an agricultural course for working farmers, we would have begun with organic chemistry, genetics, and microbiology. Lucky for the world’s hungry people that we weren’t asked.

I had come to hate the pretensions and abstruseness of the “new math.” Not one in a hundred math teachers knew what it was about, not one in a thousand pupils. People need arithmetic for reckoning; they want to know how to use the tools. That’s what my students wanted now.

I found a book in our library, perfectly suited to the job at hand. It was a math primer written in 1898. Small and thick, it was brimming with thousands of exercises, meant to train young minds to perform the basic tasks accurately and swiftly.

Class began — on time. That was part of the deal. “You say you are serious?” I had asked, challenging them; “then I expect to see you in the room on time — 11:00AM sharp, every Tuesday and Thursday. If you are five minutes late, no class. If you blow two classes — no more teaching.” “It’s a deal,” they had said, with a glint of pleasure in their eyes.

Basic addition took two classes. They learned to add everything — long thin columns, short fat columns, long fat columns. They did dozens of exercises. Subtraction took another two classes. It might have taken one, but “borrowing” needed some extra explanation.

On to multiplication, and the tables. Everyone had to memorize the tables. Each person was quizzed again and again in class. Then the rules. Then the practice.

They were high, all of them. Sailing along, mastering all the techniques and algorithms, they could feel the material entering their bones. Hundreds and hundreds of exercises, class quizzes, oral tests, pounded the material into their heads.

Still they continued to come, all of them. They helped each other when they had to, to keep the class moving. The twelve year olds and the nine year olds, the lions and the lambs, sat peacefully together in harmonious cooperation — no teasing, no shame.

Division — long division. Fractions. Decimals. Percentages. Square roots.

They came at 11:00 sharp, stayed half an hour, and left with homework. They came back next time with all the homework done. All of them.

In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. Six years’ worth. Every one of them knew the material cold.

We celebrated the end of the classes with a rousing party. It wasn’t the first time, and wasn’t to be the last, that I was amazed at the success of our own cherished theories. They had worked here, with a vengeance.

Perhaps I should have been prepared for what happened, for what seemed to me to be a miracle. A week after it was all over, I talked to Alan White, who had been an elementary math specialist for years in the public schools and knew all the latest and best pedagogical methods.

I told him the story of my class.

He was not surprised.

“Why not?” I asked, amazed at his response. I was still reeling from the pace and thoroughness with which my “dirty dozen” had learned.

“Because everyone knows,” he answered, “that the subject matter itself isn’t that hard. What’s hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff — well, twenty hours or so makes sense.”

I guess it does. It’s never taken much more than that ever since.

Classes

We have to be careful with words. It’s a miracle they ever mean the same thing to any two people. Often, they don’t. Words like “love,” “peace,” “trust,” “democracy” — everyone brings to these words a lifetime of experiences, a world view, and we know how rarely we have these in common with anyone else.

Take the word “class.” I don’t know what it means in cultures that don’t have schools. Maybe they don’t even have the word. To most people reading this, the word conveys a wealth of images: a room with a “teacher” and “students” in it, the students sitting at desks and receiving “instruction” from the teacher, who sits or stands before them. It also conveys much more: a “class period,” the fixed time when the class takes place; homework; a textbook, which is the subject matter of the class clearly laid out for all the students.

And it conveys more: boredom, frustration, humiliation, achievement, failure, competition.

At Sudbury Valley the word means something quite different.

At Sudbury Valley, a class is an arrangement between two parties. It starts with someone, or several persons, who decide they want to learn something specific — say, algebra, or French, or physics, or spelling, or pottery. A lot of times, they figure out how to do it on their own. They find a book, or a computer program, or they watch someone else. When that happens, it isn’t a class. It’s just plain learning.

Then there are the times they can’t do it alone. They look for someone to help them, someone who will agree to give them exactly what they want to make the learning happen. When they find that someone, they strike a deal: “We’ll do this and that, and you’ll do this and that — OK?” If it’s OK with all the parties, they have just formed a class.

Those who initiate the deal are called “students.” If they don’t start it up, there is no class. Most of the time, kids at school figure out what they want to learn and how to learn it all on their own. They don’t use classes all that much.

The someone who strikes the deal with the students is called a “teacher.” Teachers can be other students at the school. Usually, they are people hired to do the job.

Teachers at Sudbury Valley have to be ready to make deals, deals that satisfy the students’ needs. We get a lot of people writing the school asking to be hired as teachers. Many of them tell us at length how much they have to “give” to children. People like that don’t do too well at the school. What’s important to us is what the students want to take, not what the teachers want to give. That’s hard for a lot of professional teachers to grasp.

The class deals have all sorts of terms: subject matter, times, obligations of each party. For example, to make the deal, the teacher has to agree to be available to meet the students at certain times. These times may be fixed periods: a half hour every Tuesday at 11:00AM. Or they may be flexible: “whenever we have questions, we’ll get together on Monday mornings at 10:00AM to work them out. If we have no questions, we’ll skip till next week.” Sometimes, a book is chosen to serve as a reference point. The students have their end of the deal to meet. They agree to be on time, for instance.

Classes end when either side has had enough of the deal. If the teachers find out they can’t deliver, they can back out — and the students have to find a new teacher if they still want a class. If the students discover they don’t want to go on, the teachers have to find some other way to occupy themselves at the appointed hour.

There is another kind of class at school, from time to time. It happens when people feel they have something new and unique to say that can’t be found in books, and they think others may be interested. They post a notice: “Anyone interested in X can meet me in the Seminar Room at 10:30AM on Thursdays.” Then they wait. If people show up, they go on. If not, that’s life. People can show up the first time and, if there is a second time, decide not to come back.

I’ve done this kind of thing several times. The first session, I usually get a crowd: “Let’s see what he’s up to.” The second session, fewer come. By the end, I have a small band who are truly curious about what I have to say on the subject at hand. It’s a form of entertainment for them, and a way for me (and others) to let people know how we think.

Persistence

It’s a problem with words again. The way I just described it, learning sounds casual, loose, laid back. Easy come, easy go. Random. Chaotic. Undisciplined.

Often I wish that were true.

When school first opened, thirteen year old Richard enrolled and quickly found himself absorbed in classical music — and in the trumpet. Richard soon was sure he had found his life interest. With Jan, a trombonist, available on the staff to help him, Richard threw himself into his studies.

Richard practiced the trumpet four hours every day. We could hardly believe it. We suggested other activities, to no avail. Whatever Richard did — and he did a lot at school — he always found four hours to play.

He came from Boston, 1-1/4 hours each way every day, often 1/2 hour or more on foot from the Framingham bus station. Like the proverbial postman, “in rain or shine, hail or sleet” Richard made it to school, and to our eardrums.

It was not long before we discovered the virtues of the old mill house by the pond. Built of granite, roofed with slate, nestled in a distant corner of the campus, the old neglected building took on sudden beauty in our eyes. And in Richard’s. In no time at all it was turned into a music studio, where Richard could practice to his heart’s content.

He practiced.

Four or more hours a day, for four years.

Not long after graduating from school, after completing further studies at a conservatory, Richard became first horn of a major symphony orchestra.

Richard was followed soon by Fred, whose love was drums. Drums in the morning, drums in the afternoon, drums at night. Emergency action was in order. We fixed up a drum room for him in the basement, and gave him the key to the school so he could play early, late, and on weekends.

We discovered that the basement wasn’t all that isolated acoustically from the rest of the building. It was often like living near a jungle village, with the constant beat of drums in the background.

Fred moved on at the age of eighteen after two years. We loved him, but many of us wished him godspeed.

It isn’t only music that brings out the stubborn persistence we all have inside us. Every child soon finds an area, or two, or more, to pursue relentlessly.

Sometimes, it isn’t even material they enjoy. Year after year, older students with their hearts set on college drive themselves steadily through the SAT’s, the infamous “aptitude” tests which measure children’s ability to take SAT tests — and which colleges everywhere seize upon to help them make their hard admissions decisions. Usually, the kids find a staff member to help them over rough spots. But the work is their own. Thick review books are dragged from room to room, pored over, worked through page by page. The process is always intense. Rarely does it take more than four or five months from beginning to end, though for many this is their first look at the material.

There are writers who sit and write hours every day. There are painters who paint, potters who throw pots, chefs who cook, athletes who play.

There are people with common everyday interests. And there are others with exotic interests.

Luke wanted to be a mortician. Not your most common ambition in a fifteen year old. He had his reasons. In his mind’s eye, he could clearly see his funeral home ministering to the needs of the community, and himself comforting the grieving relatives.

Luke threw himself into his studies with a passion: science, chemistry, biology, zoology. By sixteen, he was ready for serious work. We took him out into the real world. The chief pathologist at one of the regional hospitals welcomed the eager, hard-working student into his lab. Day by day, Luke learned more procedures, and mastered them, to the delight of his boss. Within a year, he was performing autopsies at the hospital, unassisted, under his mentor’s supervision. It was a first for the hospital.

Within five years, Luke was a mortician. Now, years later, his funeral home has become a reality.

Then there was Bob.

One day, Bob came to me and said, “Will you teach me physics?” There was no reason for me to be skeptical. Bob had already done so many things so well that we all knew how he could see things through to the end. He had run the school press. He had written a thoroughly researched (published) book on the school’s judicial system. He had devoted untold hours to studying the piano.

So I readily agreed. Our deal was simple.

I gave him a college textbook, thick and heavy, on introductory physics. I had taught from it often in the past, even used an earlier version when I was a beginner. I knew the pitfalls. “Go through the book page by page, exercise by exercise,” I told Bob, “and come to me as soon as you have the slightest problem. Better to catch them early than to let them grow into major blocks.” I thought I knew exactly where Bob would stumble first.

Weeks passed. Months.

No Bob.

It wasn’t like him to drop something before — or after — he had gotten into it. I wondered whether he had lost interest. I kept my mouth shut and waited.

Five months after he had started, Bob asked to see me. “I have a problem on page 252,” he said. I tried not to look surprised. It took five minutes to clear up what turned out to be a minor difficulty.

I never saw Bob again about physics. He finished the whole book by himself. He did algebra and calculus without even asking if I would help him. I guess he knew I would.

Bob is a mathematician today.

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 following is an excerpt from Education in America: A View from Sudbury Valley, by Daniel Greenberg.  The book is published by the Sudbury Valley School Press and is available for purchase at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/education-america

Why Force Reading?

Were you ever forced to eat broccoli when you were a child? Or carrots? Did you grow up hating them, having nightmares about dinner plates heaped high with brussels sprouts and kale?

Everyone likes to eat. Nature has seen to it that this is so, for survival. But even such a popular pastime can be made repugnant through force feeding, because more than anything else in the world, people hate coercion.

We Americans know this better than anyone. We are the land of the free, and our freedom has made us the most creative, vital, innovative nation on earth, ever.

If you think about this for a minute, you’ll understand why “Johnny can’t read.”

Man is by nature a communicator. Many scientists feel that our ability to create and to use language effectively is what distinguishes homo sapiens most clearly from lower animals. People love to talk, and children will even invent whole languages if they are raised in isolation. Nothing absorbs more energy and concentration in infants than the effort to learn how to speak – a struggle children initiate on their own and pursue relentlessly when they are ready. And we all know that once they get going, it’s all but impossible to shut them up!

The invention of writing many thousands of years ago gave mankind a whole new dimension in communication. Left to their own devices, people have been enjoying the written word ever since. So here is a human activity, verbal communication, which people love to do, and which reaches its highest form in the written word.

You’d think that educators would leave well enough alone. As with any other human passion, all you have to do is make the stuff available, and wait. When the children are ready to go after it, they will, and nothing will stop them.

Instead, we are impatient. We sit our children down when they reach the age at which we think they should read, and force it down their throats. The result is that a lot of them come to hate reading, many never learn, and some 10-15% of them develop “reading disorders” such as dyslexia, for which they pay dearly – and we too pay ever so dearly with expensive reading therapists and remedial programs.

Not long ago, in 1968, Sudbury Valley School decided to take a fresh look at reading. Children were left alone and never forced to learn how to read. The result was stunning. During the years that have elapsed since the school was founded, all the children learned how to read, but at widely different ages. Some learned at 4, others at 6, others at 8 or 9 or even later. By the time they were teenagers, you couldn’t tell the difference between early readers and late readers. No one hated reading, all did it quite well, and there have been no observed functional disorders at all.

Isn’t it time for other schools to take a new look at reading? Force feeding doesn’t work. Neither does force reading. Is that so hard to believe?

So please pass the vegetables. And could you also lend me that book when you’ve finished with it?

Democracy Must be Experienced to be Learned

There is much talk these days about the importance of teaching democratic values in our public schools. It appears that newspaper columnists, teachers’ unions, public organizations, and other civic-minded persons have suddenly come to realize that our youth is growing up ignorant of, and uncommitted to, the great principles upon which our nation is based. Although I fully agree that a problem exists, I am afraid that the proposed cure – more classes on democracy – is no better than the disease. Why is it that people persist in thinking that the solution to real-life problems is talking about them? Does anyone really believe that subjecting children to yet another course will achieve really meaningful goals? We can’t even get our kids to read or write or do arithmetic properly, despite endless hours of classroom effort. Are we going to make them into defenders of freedom by adjusting the curriculum once more?

The simple fact is that children are not committed to democratic principles, or political freedom, or the bill of rights, because they themselves do not experience any of these lofty matters in their everyday lives, and in particular, in their schools. Children do not have rights in school, they do not participate in meaningful decision-making at school (even where the decisions directly affect their own lives), nor do they have the freedom of self-determination in school. In fact, the schools are models of autocracy – sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel, but always in direct conflict with the principles on which our country is based.

The way to ensure that people of any age will be deeply committed to the American Way is to make them full participants in it. Make our schools democratic, give our children freedom of choice and the basic rights of citizenship in the schools, and they will have no problem understanding what this country is about.

Private Schools Should be Wary of Tuition Tax Credits

A lot of private schools are pushing hard for legislation that would give some form of tuition tax break to parents who enroll their children in private schools. Their enthusiasm is a classic case of shortsightedness, where long-term interest is sacrificed for short-term gain.

All that private schools see in a tax-break bill is the prospect of an immediate gain in enrollment and, consequently, some quick financial relief in the form of increased tuition income. A tuition rebate offered by the government, in whatever form, appears little different than a publicly funded financial aid program for private schools, which makes private school education easily accessible to a much greater population.

How often have educators been lured into the same seductive trap! The first thing to suffer is the independence of independent private schools. As soon as government gets involved in an enterprise, it seeks ways to insinuate its power and influence into the operation of that enterprise. How well I remember the debates that raged throughout the country’s academic institutions when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations proposed large-scale Federal assistance to education at all levels. When the programs were in the planning stage, everyone supporting them piously insisted that this aid would come without any strings attached, a pure gift for local educators to do with as they wish. It took very little time before Federal aid to schools became the back-door through which literally thousands of different Federal regulations were made to apply to every nook and cranny of the educational enterprise. The fact is, if the government is providing public support, either directly or indirectly, then it has the legal (and probably moral) right to demand adherence to the full range of public policies currently in vogue.

But independent schools will find more than their freedom of action impaired as time goes on. More significant is the potential threat to their very existence. You see, public school authorities are enormously resourceful people, and they do not sit around idly while outside forces threaten their existence. It has happened before, and it will happen again: when the public schools sense competition that can do them real harm, they plunge right into the marketplace and do whatever is necessary to regain their clientele.

The most recent example of this is the so-called “alternative school movement” that swept the country in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In thousands of communities, private schools were set up to provide styles of education that differed substantially from the prevailing public school styles. In many towns and cities, these new schools made serious inroads into the public school enrollment, and threatened to undermine the stability of the public educational system. It took only a few years for public school authorities to set up their own alternative schools within the public school systems! These public alternative schools were, of course, free of charge, and often offered, or appeared to offer, highly imaginative programs. Before long, the overwhelming majority of private alternative schools closed their doors due to lack of enrollment, having lost their clientele to the enterprising public sector.

The wisest course for private schools to take is to steer clear of public funding, in whatever form it is packaged. Otherwise, as Little Red Riding Hood found out a bit too late, the wolf could gobble them up, and there just might not be a friendly woodsman handy to bail them out.

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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 following excerpt is taken from the book A Clearer View, by Daniel Greenberg.  The book is available from the Sudbury Valley School Press at their online store at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/clearer-view

Why Sudbury Valley School Doesn’t Work for Everyone: Real Learning Disabilities

During our founding years, we thought that people would flock to the school. We thought we would be mobbed and we’d be turning people away at the door. We expected a cast of thousands. Who wouldn’t want happy kids? More to the point, what kids wouldn’t do everything in their power to gain their freedom? We expected, even if the parents weren’t willing, that the kids would be knocking down the walls, making their parents’ lives miserable. “Send us to Sudbury Valley, or we’ll go on a hunger strike.” We were very quickly disabused, and instead we underwent a long struggle to survive, to grow, to gain acceptance.

It’s a fact that the whole idea of the school started spreading to other places only during our third decade. The question we were always asked in those first twenty years was, “If it’s such a great idea, how come everybody isn’t doing it? How come there are no other schools like this one?” I had an answer, but not in my heart. I didn’t really know why. It took us a good two decades to become respectable in the educational community, to become accepted as a legitimate educational enterprise. We struggled to understand why it was so hard.

We weren’t naive. We understood that cultural changes don’t happen overnight. There have only been a handful of major cultural changes in human history. The shift from hunter/gatherer societies to urban society took hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. The shift from a pre-industrial to an industrial society took over a hundred years. These things take time. We were not ignorant of history. But we thought that the reason most shifts took time was that they ran counter to human nature. The hunter/gatherer state was a state of relative freedom, of a certain kind of relationship with the environment and with oneself. We felt that’s the natural evolved human condition, so to shift from that, in a counter- evolutionary way, to urban living, or from an urban pre- industrial society to an industrial society — that’s hard. That’s why there’s resistance. Societies had to figure out if the tradeoff was worth it, if the benefits were worth the cost. In each case society made those major shifts only after struggling to understand that the benefits outweighed the costs. For example, the benefit in going to an urban society was a certain amount of stability — political stability, safety, shelter, a more dependable food supply, a more organized social order. So society gave up its freedom in order to have certain things that enabled people to live in a way that was, overall, more satisfactory. That’s why efforts to save hunter/gatherer societies today are all basically doomed to failure; Indians living in the Amazonian rainforest can resist the tradeoff only so long before they realize that there are benefits to living in an urban setting that they don’t have. Similarly, we all know that the wrenching transition from a pre- industrial to an industrial society was almost a Faustian deal. Society lost even more freedom, but gained material benefits that were never dreamt of before, available to a much larger segment of the community than ever before.

We thought, “That’s why these changes took so long. That’s the reason for the resistance.” But here we were talking about a transition from an industrial to a post-industrial age, which goes with evolution, which is consistent with human nature. We thought, “When we create a suitable educational environment for the post-industrial age, people should heave a sigh of relief, because finally they’ll be able to act naturally.” I remember using a phrase over and over again in the first ten or fifteen years, because it was so real to me: “Now you can have your cake and eat it too!” I thought, who wouldn’t like to have his cake and eat it too? People can enjoy all the benefits that they had all along, even more so in post-industrial society, and they can also have the freedom that they had to give up way, way back in pre-history, when they gave up their original relatively free state of Nature. We thought people would respond eagerly to that. That’s why we thought the change would occur fairly rapidly.

It was only much more recently that we realized that our problem was really part of a larger global ecological problem — namely, the difficulty of restoring the natural balance once it has been ravaged.

People have come to understand this pretty well in environmental studies. If you have forests that have been clear cut, rivers that have been contaminated, oceans that have been rid of their fish and polluted, land that has been poisoned by toxic chemicals, we have learned that it takes decades, perhaps even centuries, to recover, even if you allow them to revert to their natural condition. It’s not enough simply to suddenly stop the ecological degradation. In conservation circles, there’s a great deal of discussion about ways to restore the natural balance. One method that is receiving a great deal of attention is to pick small environments to restore first. Conservation societies are buying a few hundred acres here, a few thousand there, and trying to accumulate a patchwork of small areas that might be amenable to restoration. They look for areas relatively close to their natural state, which are difficult to find. You cannot go anywhere just at random, put your finger on a map, and say, “I’m going to buy a million acres here and I’m going to make this into a great, wonderful, pure, natural preserve.” If that million acres happens to be a Superfund area, you can’t do it. So you have to look for small areas that are already somewhat in sync with nature, and the hope is that gradually people will see what it looks like for nature to be restored to its pristine beauty and come to say, “This is something we really want. Let’s do more of it. Let’s change our life pattern so that we, too, can be surrounded by a beautiful natural environment.”

In a sense, what we learned is that we have to view Sudbury Valley as a cultural restoration program. We have to realize that not every person is in a position to benefit from this because of the damage that’s been done by urbanization and industrialization. That’s when we began to understand why we had to start with a very small number of people. It’s inevitable. The people we had to start with are the ones who are somehow more in touch with their naturally evolved state. Slowly, we would add a group here and a group there in the hope that, eventually, people would see that these little restoration projects that happen all over the country, or all over the world, are something that they want to adopt and emulate.

That picture gives you a perspective on what’s happening. That’s the basis for two questions that I want to address. The first one is, “Why are so few people still adapted to their natural state? What is the nature of the damage that’s been done — culturally, emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually — that so alienates people from their natural state?” The second question, which I’ll address later, is: “Who are those few people who are able to benefit from this environment?”

Let’s begin with the question, “What’s the nature of the damage?” Or, stated another way, “What are real learning disabilities, things that really stand in the way of people adapting to their natural evolutionary state?” It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the material of the first five talks gives the framework for the answer.

Let’s consider the first subject we talked about, play. We talked at length about the importance of play — how crucial, how central play is to the natural development of all the skills that are important to a creative life. Yet, over and over again, we find that kids coming to Sudbury Valley have forgotten how to play. This is an absolutely staggering phenomenon. For example, young kids are the ones you really expect to be able to romp freely, to do their thing, to be joyous. Yet, occasionally we see young kids who have no idea how to play! When we get to know them a little better, we see that what they learned at home, or from some other environment, was that play is something directed — the opposite of what play really means. Play has become, for them, what commercial and educational groups have turned it into: something oriented in a visibly educational direction. They have to learn their alphabet from play, their shapes from play, their colors from play. I could never understand any of this when I first encountered it; and when I saw the damage it does to kids, it became even more amazing. Why do you have to teach kids shapes? What is going on? What child who has grown up in even the most remotely normal environment doesn’t figure out at some age or another that there’s a difference between a square and a triangle, and what that difference is. What child (who isn’t color blind) doesn’t eventually learn that something is called red and something else is called blue? Do we really have to create games for which that is the goal? We get kids who have been brought up on that, and they come to our school, and they’re at a loss because we’re not doing it. They’ve simply forgotten how to play freely.

With older kids, it’s even more sad. The whole point is to retain that ability to play throughout life. Older kids, however, have been taught to “put aside childish things.” They’re embarrassed about the idea of play. A lot of teenagers will look at the younger kids who are playing and tell you, “Gee, I wish I had come here when I was seven”; and you know exactly what they mean. Some of them will start playing with the little kids, which they feel is OK, because they’re “being nice to little kids,” so that justifies it. In reality, they’re trying to learn how to play again themselves. That’s a terrible disability, when you’ve forgotten how to play. Anybody who’s forgotten how to play cannot begin to comprehend how an environment like Sudbury Valley is a school, how it has anything to do with education. They can’t possibly take it seriously. That’s the first thing you hear, “Is this a school? People play all day!” They don’t get it, because they’ve forgotten how to play, and they’ve never had a chance to realize the tremendous benefit that play gives you.

Let’s turn to conversation. Sometimes, children come to the school who are almost mute. They just don’t talk. It’s not shyness. It’s a response to something they’ve been told all their lives: children should be seen and not heard. “Shut up!” is probably something that’s been said to children more than any other two words. At school? You’re never supposed to talk to other students at school! You get demerits if you talk to your neighbor in class. You can’t get up out of your seat and talk to somebody on the other side of the room. You certainly can’t talk to the teacher whenever you please, because that’s disrupting the class, unless you’re answering a specific question. You’re not supposed to speak unless spoken to. As a result, many children never learn how to converse, how to tap into somebody else’s world, to probe it, to appreciate it, to listen, to share their own world with others. Children in that position tend to be closed in on themselves. They have to reinvent the wheel. They have to discover everything on their own. It’s like being cut off from the culture.

Conversation is, as we have seen, a tremendous key to learning. It’s that “open sesame” that relates you to global knowledge. People who don’t have the ability to converse and to articulate their thoughts are at a tremendous disadvantage in an environment like Sudbury Valley. They can’t use one of our most important tools. I’m not talking about children who are naturally reserved. I’m not talking about children who know that there’s a time to talk and a time to listen, who sometimes just keep quiet and watch what’s going on. I’m talking about children who really haven’t learned how to converse. For children like that, the vibrant atmosphere of the school is sometimes absolutely frightening. What you encounter as soon as you walk into the school is a cacophony of live, vibrant conversation. The child who cannot converse doesn’t benefit from that at all.

We talked a lot about the parental role. That’s another huge area for potential damage. Kids whose chief motivation is pleasing their parents don’t know how to please themselves. They don’t know how to tap into their inner voice. They’re looking to see what is it that their parents really want them to do in this school, and they try to do that, with the result that they miss the whole point of the school. We see that in so many different ways, some so subtle and seemingly so harmless. The parent who leads their younger child to the bulletin board and says, “Let’s see what’s posted here today” — there doesn’t seem anything wrong with that. “My kid can’t read and I’m helping him see what’s going on.” But actually, there’s a lot wrong with that. You’re signaling to your child, “I don’t really trust you to find out for yourself what’s going on in this place.” In reality, even the youngest children know what’s going on in the place when they care about it. They can recite half the Lawbook. They can’t read, but they can tell you that there’s no running, no abuse of property, no this, no that. They know what their sentences are. They can smell the smells coming out of the kitchen and they can see the other kids going skating. They’re not deaf, dumb and blind. But the combination of parental anxiety and the desire to please the parent suffuses that little interaction at the bulletin board, and the kid goes away feeling, “I should be doing this. If I did this, I’d make my mom real happy.”

With older children, we get that all the time with classes. I’m not talking about the parent who stomps in like a bull in a china shop and flatly says, “I want you to take classes at school.” That’s beyond the pale. I’m talking about the parent who is gently inquiring, “Have you found anything interesting going on in the school?” Or, more commonly, “You’re interested in so and so. Have you found somebody in school to do that with?” Innocently, thinking: “I’m not pushing. I’m just asking.” My mother would always say, “I’m only asking.” But I knew she wasn’t asking. She was telling me exactly what she wanted. We get a similar problem with children trying to please parents when we have two parents in a family who are conflicted about the school. It’s perfectly legitimate for a person to say, “I don’t think Sudbury Valley is the right environment.” That’s a right any parent has, to say this is or isn’t good for my kid. But when a child is in a family where one parent is saying, “I’m behind the school and I think it’s a wonderful place,” and the other parent is saying, “I really have my doubts about the place. I’ll go along with it, but I sure hope I see some progress” — that kind of conflict will tear a student apart; not only is there the problem of pleasing parents in general, but s/he doesn’t even know which parent to please. Something like that often crops up in families where one child goes to Sudbury Valley and the other children don’t, especially if the reason, as we so often hear, is that “He (or she) is the only one who is having problems. The others are doing fine.” There’s only one possible message that a child can get from that. “If I was OK like my brothers and sisters, I wouldn’t be here. This isn’t a place where what goes on is really learning. I’ve just been parked here because I can’t do the right thing.” Many of these children are plagued by a nagging sense of having failed their parents. That’s a terrible thing to carry through life.

Let’s talk about democratic empowerment. Almost all the children who come to Sudbury Valley, even the youngest kids, have had other outside experiences where they have suffered from a lack of respect. The fact of the matter is that in society at large, kids are treated like dirt. It can be at the shopping mall, it can be driving on the road, it can be at a party, it can be in school — anywhere. Kids are non-people in a very real sense. They don’t have rights, and they can be abused in many ways without consequence. The more original and creative, the more maverick, the more full of life the child is, the more likely s/he’ll be treated with disrespect, because s/he doesn’t even have the “courtesy” of going along with the standards that the adults want them to obey.

This is something that was almost impossible for me to understand when we first opened in 1968. I remember many conversations about it. I couldn’t comprehend why children who were given full respect and equality in the school, who were completely empowered from the word “go”, still felt powerless. I just couldn’t get it. When they would try to explain it, I would say, “But that’s the past. It’s not like that here. I don’t have power over you. I can’t tell you what to do. Even if I want to, even if I stand over you and I say, ‘Do this,’ you could look at me and say, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ because I don’t have that kind of authority. This is an environment in which you have full respect and in which you are empowered.” They couldn’t let go of that deep feeling of powerlessness with which they had first arrived. Year in, year out, it leads to a kind of “us vs. them” mentality, especially in older teenagers, where they just can’t help feeling: “This is a hoax. There’s something fishy about it. There must be a hidden agenda. I don’t know what it is. But I know in my bones that the adults must run this place. Somehow.”

It’s interesting and sad to watch this sense of powerlessness play itself out. For example, you can come to School Meetings where there is an issue that is really important to a lot of teenagers. The room will be packed with teenagers. So, you think, they’re obviously coming to vote; they’re participating in the democratic process this school developed and nurtured. And then, even as they talk and exercise their empowerment, the content and the feeling of what they say is, “We are powerless, and we resent the fact that somebody is trying to push something down our throats.” It’s inside them. It’s a tremendous impediment. People who grow up feeling powerless are not going to go out into the world and be powerful adults.

This brings us to Nature vs. nurture, the subject that we took up most recently. I am referring to the damage that’s been done to children who grow up in an environment where the adults have not let Nature take its course, have not been patient, and where each child’s unique destiny has not been treasured as a valued life goal.

Now, that may be all very high-sounding, but in fact I talk to parent after parent who says to me, “My kids are not that special. They’re not Einsteins or Mozarts. This kind of education may be OK for that type of person, but not for my kid.” It’s an expression of a basic parental belief that “My kid isn’t really unique. My kid is mediocre.” Such parents look at the life projected for that child of theirs as basically a life of drudgery, to be slogged through somehow.

I think this is the damage that we see most frequently at Sudbury Valley: kids who don’t believe that they can do something really special with their lives, whatever it is — to excel at something that they love and to contribute in some way to the betterment of society, to the enhancement of culture, to their own personal joy. In many ways, that’s the worst of the learning disabilities. What happens in that situation is that since you’re destined for mediocrity, the pressure that is put on you by society, by your parents, by everybody, is to be a successful mediocrity. That’s really important. You can at least be a comfortable drudge. There’s time pressure, career pressure, expectations, a whole panoply of eternal forces. “Let’s get on with it. Don’t waste time. Focus on something. Go to school. Do this. Do that.” It’s pressure, pressure, pressure.

The most common result that we see of that kind of pressure is depression or anxiety, and a complete inability to be at peace with the concept that you should learn and do what you really want to learn, do what you really want to do, and follow your own star. I think the saddest example we see of this particular learning disability is the “A” student who excels in all of his/her studies. I myself am a lifelong recovering “A” student. When I think about all the energy I spent in validating someone else’s concept of what’s important to my destiny, it’s just mind boggling. What on earth did I get A’s in? What did I get 100’s on tests for? They were inane. They had nothing to do with my life. They had nothing to do with reality. But there I was, slogging away, getting the first prize in Latin. The first prize in Latin! Do you know how useful that’s been to me?¹

Children totally focused on getting A’s are like any person who’s hooked on something, or who has a major problem: if they don’t recognize the problem, and they’re not ready to fight to free themselves of whatever it is that their problem is, somebody else can’t do it for them. There’s no point in lecturing them; they have to be ready to get themselves out of it. We’ve had some pretty remarkable situations like that over the years. One that comes to mind is the young lady who came to us at age 16 after having been a totally successful student in public school. She had decided that wasn’t what she wanted. She was very conscious of this, and she left her high school career right in midstream. All she had to do was hang in there for another year and a half and she would have been out, but she wasn’t ready to play along any more. She knew she had to save herself and she worked very, very hard during the two years that she was here. Did she get back to her natural evolutionary state? Probably not. But because of her intense desire to make a change, she did make huge strides.

It’s important to distinguish between giving good grades and providing encouragement through positive feedback. The kind of positive feedback we’re interested in is saying, “We’re listening to you. We respect you. What you’re doing is worthwhile because you want to do it.” It’s a whole different way of looking at things. We don’t substitute our judgment for the child’s judgment. What we give them instead is the consistent reply that what you do, what you value, is valuable because you value it, not because we think it’s great.

There’s a wonderful story in Kingdom of Childhood,² which is a book we publish consisting of reminiscences of former students. The student was on her visiting week when this happened. She entered the art room as a little four year old and drew a sun. The sun was green. She probably didn’t get enough color training in her early play. She showed it to Joan. Joan’s response wasn’t, “That’s an ‘A’ drawing,” or “That’s an ‘F’ drawing.” It was, “That’s fine! It’s your drawing, and if that’s the way you want to draw the sun, it’s perfectly OK.” She remembered that all her life because, being four and very smart, she was testing Joan on that first day to find out, “Is this another school like all the others? Is she going to tell me the sun is yellow and I don’t know my colors?” So that’s the kind of feedback they get: if they value it, it’s fine. That’s not always easy. If you walk into the sewing room on an average day, there are thirty people having three or four different very animated conversations. Some of the stuff these kids say is off the wall, having no relation to any reality whatsoever that I can detect. But there they are, going at it, this one sure of his point of view and that one sure of her point of view and that’s the point, that this is a place where they’re each saying, “OK, if you want to have this world view, I’ll listen to it. I’ll interact with it, and I’ll tell you mine, without us necessarily agreeing with each other.” There is that fundamental respect for other ways of doing things.

That’s the kind of feedback students get here. And they leave thinking, “I guess there is a place where what I do is valued for the fact that I do it and I want it.” That’s the gift we can give them.

The sad part of it is that the public school kids who are most creative, the kids who really, really don’t care about school, who cannot pay attention to what their teachers are saying, who cannot tolerate the discipline of the inane classroom, are labeled as mentally challenged in one way or another and are even often medicated, while the kids who are most damaged are treated as healthy.

Let’s turn now to the second question that I posed: “Who are the mavericks?” In other words, who are the ones who are suitable, who can be successfully reclaimed? How have they managed to maintain their individuality, to retain some initiative, to somehow be in touch with their evolutionary nature? We’ve been asking these questions for thirty years, but the fact is, we don’t have a clue to the answer. People ask it all the time. Why me and not my brother? Why you and not somebody else? We know it’s not a question of class, because we have people from every class, every economic level. We have people from every religion. We have people from every cultural background. It’s funny to hear the assumptions that other people make about who comes to this school. People say, “You probably have a lot of university people, because this is something that has been given so much thought.” We say, “No, we don’t do too well with those.” We have some, but not too many. They say, “You must have people who are left of center politically because it sounds like a leftist-radical place — empowerment of the common man and all that.” We have some, but we also have a lot of very non-left people here, a lot of old Yankee conservatives. They make all these assumptions about the kind of people who they’re sure populate this school. The fact of the matter is, we haven’t been able to make any generalizations at all. We don’t know.

In every case, it seems to be an accident of individual genetics and personal background that brings each member of this strange collection of people to Sudbury Valley. I mean that quite literally. When we started working on the school in 1966, it was the same kind of phenomenon. We hoisted our flag and declared, “We’re starting this kind of school.” We sent out mass mailings hither and yon, and people just appeared from all kinds of different places, people we never knew. It wasn’t our friends. It wasn’t some group that had a lot in common with each other. We didn’t know any of the founders. Most of the founders didn’t know each other. They just came; where, how, and why has been a puzzle ever since.

Let me conclude by addressing the question of why Sudbury Valley isn’t for everyone. The answer is that Sudbury Valley is for everybody in a stable, self-sustaining, post-industrial society where everyone is on board. It’s not a special kind of school for special kids. It’s really a place where people in their natural state can flourish. But because there are so many real disabilities that exist during this transition period in history, the full benefits of the school are basically available only to mavericks, to those who haven’t sustained a lot of damage that’s made them incapable of living in their evolutionary natural state. To be sure, a lot of people who have sustained some damage, if they stick it out, seem to get considerable benefit from being here. That’s more than a little consolation. In a sense, they get a glimpse of the Promised Land, like Moses on the top of Mount Nebo, just before he died. He looked at the Promised Land and then he died. They get a view of what the school is about, and then they move on. We often hear that from former students, even those who have been here a very short time. It’s our hope that as these benefits become more widely recognized and accepted, the whole culture will adapt, and the disabilities and damages will fade away

¹I guess Latin is useful sometimes. Isaac Newton wrote a book when he was twenty-one, his first real production. It was a new theory of optics. It was a fabulous book. Physicists still read it with joy, and a lot of the ideas that he put into the book are still talked about. But they ran contrary to the accepted theories of optics in his day and, in particular, they ran contrary to the theories that the elders in the English physics establishment held to be sacrosanct. So he was lambasted for being an upstart, for not toeing the line, and he decided to never write another book. “I’m happy. I’m doing my thing. I know what I like.” He had a professorship, so he didn’t have to worry about his income, and he just sat in his place in Cambridge and did his stuff. Twenty years later the rumor got out that he had solved the problem of gravitation. So a couple physicists who heard about this in London came up and said, “We heard that you solved the problem of gravitation. Is it true?” He said, “Yes, that’s true.” They said, “What is it?” He showed them. He wrote it out, and they were flabbergasted, because they immediately saw that he was right. They said, “Write it.” He said, “I’ve done my writing for my lifetime.” They begged him and begged him to write it, and he finally wrote it in a book called Principia Mathematica, which was written in Latin. The optics book had been written in English. His new book was written in Latin that almost nobody could understand, and all the simple proofs that were easy to read he replaced with obscure proofs that were very difficult to follow. So perhaps I could have used my Latin. Maybe Free at Last should have been written in Latin. But I didn’t.

² Kingdom of Childhood is available from the Sudbury Valley School Press.

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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 following excepts are from Reflection on the Sudbury School Concept, edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg. The author of each except is listed with the except.  Reflections on the Sudbury School Concept can be purchased from the Sudbury Valley School Press on their website at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/reflections-sudbury-school-concept

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Day of the Eclipse

by Sharon Kane

One day, in the middle of June, there was a much-heralded solar eclipse. When I walked into school that day, a few of my piano students asked to be rescheduled because of the eclipse. “You mean you want to miss your lesson today because of the eclipse?” I asked incredulously. “Yeah, we wanna watch it. Please, please, please?” “Well, alright, I can reschedule you later in the week. Sure. No problem.”

I taught the early lessons and went on a coffee break. The kitchen was curiously quiet. I noticed a lot of activity on the porch and went to check it out. An unusually large number of students were congregating on the porch and around the four-square court. An easel was set up. Some kids were passing around framed Mylar films and were looking at the sun through them. I got hold of one and had a look. It was really exciting to see the moon moving on a path in front of the sun.

At the easel were some cards with holes in them. One small boy was trying to figure out what to do with a card. I flashed thirty-odd years back to my next door neighbor’s easel and telescope. I saw the image of the eclipse on the easel. It looked interesting and weird. I didn’t really understand the meaning or impact of it then. I thought he was a weird enough guy to begin with, and even weirder that he was doing scientific stuff in his driveway. Science belonged in school, not in the driveway.

I showed this small boy how to use the card and tried to explain what it was he was seeing. He said, “Oh, cool,” and ran away.

I wanted to see the eclipse through the film again and, after a little waiting, had a turn. The moon was closer to covering the sun. The energy level on the porch had increased as well as the number of students. I noticed kids on the dance room porch with their own sets of stuff set up for viewing.

I wanted another look, and while I was waiting this time I realized there were about fifty kids on the porch and only about five films. I was impressed at how patient people were as they waited their turn and how they kept the films moving after they had their look. No grabbing, no nasty words; just excitement and high energy.

That same little boy ran back and looked at the sun directly. Instantly a bunch of kids told him he could hurt himself if he did that and showed him how to use the film. He looked through, said “Wow,” and ran away.

Some girls were waiting for a pizza delivery up at the parking lot. Their friends were screaming at the top of their lungs to come back down as soon as they could because the eclipse was going to happen soon.

Teenagers strolled onto the porch wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, strongly colored hair and various body jewelry. They wanted to know what was going on and, upon hearing, turned to look directly at the sun. Instantly people explained how they could hurt their eyes and showed them the alternative techniques for viewing. “Cool,” they said, and continued strolling.

By this time the high point was close. The general color of the sky and land was darkening. It was a bit eerie. Then I noticed the shadow of lilac leaves on the porch. I had never seen anything like it. Each shadow of each leaf had a crescent shape. Hundreds of crescent shape shadows emanating from a shrub with heart shaped leaves. It was fantastic.

Now the eclipse was at its height. The energy level was at an all time high. Lots of talking, lots of viewing. Films being passed around dizzyingly. Kids running off the porch and back on the porch. I remembered for about the zillionth time how fortunate I feel to be working at the school, where students can go outside freely to experience occasional earthly events and whoop and holler if they feel so moved.

The excitement was beginning to quiet. People began dispersing, moving on to other things. The lilac leaf shadows were still crescented, but flipped in the other direction as the moon had passed the center of the sun by now. I felt so privileged to have shared this day with so many people on the porch.

As I continued through my day, the high energy stayed with me.

When I arrived to teach my first after-school piano lesson in a nearby town I asked the young girl, “What did you think about the eclipse today?” “The eclipse?” she said, “Oh, no. We weren’t allowed outside today because of the eclipse. We didn’t even get recess!”

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Bells

by Martha Hurwitz

At 7:48 each weekday morning, I hear First Bell. I’m usually sipping my coffee. Early in the school year, when the days are warm and my kitchen door is open, I can listen to the low monotone of the female voice pushing through the P.A. system. Soon after, another bell sounds (it’s certainly not a ring), and I imagine roomfuls of like-sized and uniformed students moving through corridors like cars through a trafficked intersection. By this time, I’m making the final preparations for my commute to Sudbury Valley. Although the school with bells is only a stone’s throw away from my back steps, I’d much rather commute 45 minutes twice a day to have the freedom that is the keystone of Sudbury Valley.

Freedom seems impossible at this school next door. The bells themselves betray the lack of freedom inside the school. They demand: Are you where you should be now? Are you doing what you’re supposed to be doing? Have you done what’s expected of you? Especially coming out of summer vacation, I imagine that those students moving to the sound of the bells must be suffering a great transition, from the relative freedom of their summers to the virtual loss of self during the school year.

Of course, there aren’t bells at Sudbury Valley; the questions they pose would be entirely inappropriate. However, at the beginning of each year, or the beginning of a student’s experience at the school, Sudbury Valley students also go through a transition. Typically, what returning students, new students, parents and even staff experience getting used to the school year at Sudbury Valley may seem a surprising reversal of what happens elsewhere. Here, the difficulty is in getting used to freedom, not in relinquishing it. As welcome as the possibility of freedom may be, it is not always easy to achieve. Rather, it is a formidable challenge. School members are effected on many levels: as individuals each with a unique sense of self, as members of the Sudbury Valley community, and as responsible citizens in the wider society.

For new students, the transition into the Sudbury Valley school year must be exceptionally profound. Not only do they move out of summer and into school, but they must change their very understanding of what school is. For some, SVS may seem like a continuation of the summer or as if they’d dropped out of school for something frivolous, even illegitimate. Younger new enrollees tend to adapt without a second thought; they haven’t yet become burdened with expectations. Older new students may sputter and stall like a car that needs warming up. For years they’ve been urged or forced to replace natural inclinations with the should’s and supposed to’s of a life structured by bells. Many are former ‘good’ students who did everything they were told, and did it well, yet felt an intense disassociation with their lives. Others were the ‘bad’ ones, those who wouldn’t succumb to the structures and directions imposed on them. For both, summers were perhaps their only chance to exercise personal choices about what they want to do.

In a way, our new students are similar to the slaves just after emancipation. For generations, the slaves barely had names with which to establish their sense of personal identity. Choosing a name after emancipation was both powerful and symbolic. It meant a former slave was now a person with a sense of self. Many new SVS students describe their previous school experience as if they were imprisoned or stultified. Their liberties were impaired, not rendered obsolete as were the slaves; but in both instances, time and respect are essential in allowing them to find out who they honestly want to be. Sudbury Valley deliberately gives room for this. To many outsiders, the students’ experience of self-exploration looks suspiciously like they’re doing nothing. To new students, this introductory experience feels challenging, often confusing, but certainly not like they’re doing nothing.

Returning students start the new school year by reacquainting themselves with what it is that they want. This is relatively easy for the lucky few whose summer experiences are as much their creation as their days at SVS. The transition is more pronounced for those whose time and choices were circumscribed during the summer; they have to learn (or relearn) to find and honor their wants. They must experience the traumas and rewards of time undetermined, apart from the norms of the society at large, adapting to the norms of the people and structure within the SVS community. Often they feel that what they want doesn’t amount to much, especially in the discriminating eye of parents, relatives, friends from other schools, or our culture in general. Indeed, they must learn about what the idea of amounting to much actually means in their lives.

For parents the transition into Sudbury Valley entails giving way, although for them it may be less of an annual event than it is for the students. This means embracing and allowing, believing and trusting, not of the school and of its staff, but of the students in all their interests, lack of interests, indecisiveness or singleness of pursuit. Parents may never know how their children spend their time at SVS, but they will know if their children are happy, energetic, thoughtful, or engaged. There can be no documentable picture of what a day at Sudbury Valley looks like. Parents may ask “What did you do today?”, but the student’s answer will invariably be incomplete: doing at SVS can mean anything from eating lunch with some friends, to curling up on a pillow in the sun in the conservatory, to getting brought up, to sitting on the playroom porch watching four-square. Even doing nothing is considered doing. “What did you learn today?” is a more dangerous question, depending on how it’s asked. Too often the interest isn’t for conversation, but for evidence. It sounds like what the sounds of school bells intimate, “Are you doing what you’re supposed to?”

Even some of the staff experience a transition in returning to SVS for a new year. For those of us who work elsewhere for all or part of the summer, being at SVS is something of a relief. At SVS, the staff are demystified individuals who relate honestly and directly with the students. In many other institutions, the role of the educator is as a masked performer who participates in limited and predetermined relationships with his/her charges. Even though I tend to work for what are considered particularly ‘progressive’ educational organizations during my summers, I end up reconciling many conflicts of assumption: that my students need to be supervised at all moments, that my clients won’t choose the right things if given choices, or that being honest with the group may undermine the authority I must maintain over it. As with any other Sudbury Valley member, I am challenged to articulate my position, and not to compromise myself beyond what may be useful. I’m sure others from SVS also know the thrill of having a particularly SVS-like position acknowledged or adopted once it is explained.

Although public perception might suggest otherwise, freedom is neither easy or free. Often people assume that a school with so much freedom would support chaos, invite atrophy, or generally be a free-for-all for the privileged few participants. Freedom, by definition, is freeing, but it isn’t free. It takes a lot of work. There are many things we’re taught as members of our society; being free isn’t necessarily one of them. It takes courage, tenacity and commitment to participate in such an unusual and controversial institution as Sudbury Valley, whether as a student, parent, or staff person.

A few blocks away from my house, in the opposite direction of the school with bells, is a church with a carillon tower. Every fifteen minutes the bells ring out. The sound bounces off the school behind my house, making a quick echo, “Bong-ong, bong- ong.” I find the sound of these bells soothing. They seem to pose those questions we at Sudbury Valley enjoy being asked: Where are you at this moment? What are you thinking right now? What has your day been full of up to this point? What are you choosing to do at this moment of your life?

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How it Feels to Send your Child to a “Free” School

by Mimsy Sadofsky

Over the years, we have found that the parents who choose to send their children to Sudbury Valley School have very few things in common. They don’t seem to come from the same socio-economic class. In fact, most of them seem to be impossible to “class”ify at all; certainly it is impossible from the cursory amount of information we collect from them. Clearly, however, there are always more parents who struggle to pay our modest tuition than parents who find it easy.

These parents also have widely different standards for all sorts of categories of behavior in their homes, or at least so they and their children tell us.

Very often they turn out to be parents who would not ordinarily be sending their children to private schools; that is to say, they are the kind of people who generally feel that private schools have an odor of elitism about them, and they find that odor unpleasant.

However, what our parents do share is an overwhelming desire to do the best they possibly can for their children. Even though they might be people who only questioned the process of public schooling because their children forced the issue, they are not people who accept the status quo in child rearing or in education.

We have written extensively about what happens to kids who have had all or part of their education at Sudbury Valley. It has also become pretty obvious that their parents examine their own lives in many of the ways that every Sudbury Valley student must do over time. That in itself is enough to scare away many parents who are not willing to accept this challenge. It seems that this willingness to undergo intense re-examination of their own lives is one of the few generalizations we can make about our highly individualistic parents.

So, let us say that someone has examined the philosophy of Sudbury Valley, feels confidence in their child’s curiosity and judgment, and decides to enroll that child. One might hope that the enrollment would signify the end of anxiety; that the decision to put full trust in the child’s judgment would be a relief to parents. And it is a relief. But it also isn’t. This is what a parent of a teenager in his second year at Sudbury Valley had to say to the other parents at an informal Assembly meeting:

For our son, the philosophy of this school made so much sense that coming here seemed like second nature. For us, however, slow learners that we are, the decision was much more an act of faith than one of reason. Molded by our parent’s values, our own educational experiences, and the predominant thinking of today, it was clear that in order to be “good” SVS parents we would have to let go of many deep-rooted expectations of what education should be. We needed to get in touch with what we felt really mattered about school, and disregard the rest. This reorientation process hasn’t been easy, and has offered a number of terrifying moments, as well as some extremely happy ones. I realize that in many ways hope is merely the flip side of fear. We hope that something good will happen, while fearing that it won’t. Some days one face of the coin is up, other days the opposite side is showing. This contributes to a pretty exciting ride on an emotional roller coaster, especially where SVS is concerned.

None of us lives in a vacuum. Everyone has friends, relatives, parents, sometimes other children, who feel that allowing a student so much freedom is tantamount to telling that child that no one cares what happens to him/her. Most everyone is in a workplace or a neighborhood in which such a brave decision is treated as a sign of abdication of the responsibilities of parenthood. And the very same people who might hesitate to criticize if they thought one’s child had been nursed for too long, or put in day care too early, or not forced to sleep through the night, have no trouble spending a great deal of time denigrating the educational philosophy with which parents at Sudbury schools are trying so hard to align themselves.

Partly that is comforting. It opens up many forums for discussion. But partly it isn’t, because a lot of the people one has these discussions with are working from a very small amount of information mostly from the tops of their heads or from what you have haplessly told them or from a position in which many of their beliefs are threatened. A lot of the people each parent knows are sure, totally positive, that the structure of education that is most familiar to them and it will almost always be a variation of the structure that most children are in today is the only possible one that guarantees that we will not produce a generation of savages, ignorant savages at that. They feel threatened by the idea of the loss of adult power and control that such a “free” school is predicated on.

But of course we parents too feel threatened. There we are, open to attack from all of those other people who think we are crazy, as well as from our own anxieties. It is very well to say in the abstract: “Sure, I know that my kids will grow up constantly busy learning things. I understand that to be the human condition.” But then when the things your kid spends time doing perhaps Nintendo, or playing games in a tree, or poring over Magic Cards for months on end don’t look at all like the things you did in school at that age, and don’t require that they learn the capitals of the states, or how to diagram a sentence, then it is not so easy.

In fact, sending a child to such a school is a courageous and still an almost unique choice. We all want our children to have even better lives than we had, no matter how good ours was. When we think of a better life these days, we don’t usually mean materially better, because most of us have had quite adequate material lives. We mean intellectually, emotionally and spiritually better. And it is hard to keep your “eyes on the prize” of the excellent, well-examined life when the life your children are leading is one in which they can play Nintendo as long as they want, or work with clay for months on end, or read a million science fiction books, or talk to their friends on the phone for hours and hours and hours after talking to them all day at school.

Most of us went to traditional schools, which became the tradition because society was heavily into educating for uniformity. Now that we are adults, we have noticed that uniformity is not much of a selling point when we want to get interesting jobs, or create a work of art, or create a new idea, or create a new product, or create a new way to market a product. In fact most of us are either in creative jobs, or at least totally excited about the creative activities that fill our leisure hours, and we realize that we don’t have to all know exactly the same things as everyone else. Of course there needs to be some overlap between our knowledge and other people’s; being alive in the world makes us crave for that overlap, so we go after it. Often, we look for commonality with others even in areas that are of limited interest, because we want to have things in common with people who are not just like us. That is one of the social imperatives of life.

If you are now a parent, odds are that in your childhood you were educated mostly for a world that was going out of style at the time and is becoming a distant memory now, a world where uniformity was vital to the workplace. Since my childhood the possible ways of earning a living have changed from many, to incredibly many, to no- one-can-count-how-many, because new ideas of how to spend time are invented every minute. Kids need to be educated for a world that changes even faster than today’s world, which is a hard thing even to imagine. But that is why we have to allow them to use their minds in their own ways because that will guarantee the most complete possible development for them, which will maximize their chances of succeeding in a wide-open world.

It used to bother me actually it still does that I had no one to turn to for help with problems once the computers we were using at school had a certain number of programs on them. The configuration became totally unique, and there were so many possibilities that no one who had not studied our system could possibly be on top of them all, and be able to help us; and maybe not even then.

The kind of anxiety computer problems raise in me are the same kinds of anxieties we have about our kids. These are control issues. They are already in a world that is out of our control, all day every day, bombarded with information we hardly have a clue about. We are raising them for a world where there are less and less secure answers, and more and more possible paths, and that means such a total and necessary abdication of authority over them on our part that it is terrifying. I think every one of us who has chosen to send a child to a Sudbury school has contemplated that abdication of authority, that releasing of control, and everyone, no matter how secure, also has some residual worries about making a mistake.

So, now that we have taken a look at some of the things that are guaranteed to make one anxious if one is the parent of a child in such a school, let’s look at the other side of the coin.

What do kids learn at a Sudbury school? Are there any guarantees? I actually think that there are, and I think the things that can be (almost) guaranteed are the most important things of all in an explosively changing world. A student learns to concentrate. A student gets constant opportunities to make ethical judgments. A student learns to be treated with total respect. A student learns to appreciate the outdoors. A student learns to be self-reliant. A student learns to be self-confident. A student learns what it means to set a goal and reach for it, to re-assess, to reach again, to achieve the goal, or to fail miserably, and to pick him or herself up and do it all over again, with the same or a different goal. A kid learns life skills. Real life skills. The skills that it takes to be successful at marriage, at child rearing, at friendship, as well as at work.

What does it mean when I say that a child learns to concentrate? It means that the person focuses in on the interest of the moment, or the hour, or the year, and pursues that passion until it is a passion no more. Which of course also means that the tremendous let-down of losing a passion and having to go out and find a new one is a frequent companion. I see this focus mirrored in students in our school every day. I see it in the student who at 17 has suddenly developed a passion for math, and spends hours a day grinding away at it. I see it in the determination of a kid to get up into the heights of the beech tree, a goal that can take years to reach not that the goal will be pursued, of course, every minute of every day, but more as a theme of life constantly working on climbing skills, and constantly working on what it means to look down 15 or 25 or 50 feet and know only your skills keep you safe. I see it in the kids who constantly design and re-design Lego planes, airports, and space stations; and play elaborate games with the structures they have made. I see it in the drive to learn everything a person has to know in order to be allowed to work in the photolab alone, or on the pottery wheel. And I know, because I have children of my own, and because I have seen a generation worth of Sudbury Valley students, that I see only a fraction of a percentage of what is going on, of the concentration that is happening.

One of the hardest things for all of us to see and to understand is the work necessary for a teenager who comes to our school to do what has to be done first: to come to grips with who s/he is. To many people, a lot of teenagers look like they are wasting their time. They just seem to spend so much time hanging out, talking, drinking coffee, sometimes even unfortunately smoking cigarettes, talking some more, driving around. Yes, they read. Yes, they are wonderful resources and usually extraordinarily kind to younger kids. But what are they doing? Part of what they are doing is forgetting. They have to forget that they spent years hearing that other people had an agenda for them that was touted to be the “best” thing for them to pursue. They have to get in touch with the idea that the person who really knows what is best for them is themselves; that they can become responsible for their own intellectual, moral, spiritual, and even physical development. That is no small trick. And, yes, a lot of the time they are squirming, suffering, struggling to shoulder these burdens or to escape from them. We, the adults around them believe that, in the atmosphere the school provides, the likelihood of them deciding to shoulder the burdens is as high as you can get. So we let them struggle. We let them suffer. They offer each other a tremendous amount of support. All the adults in the school can do is tell them we understand how hard it is. But what every parent must understand is that support offered from the parent must, first and foremost, take the form of confidence that the struggle will be fruitful. This also maximizes the chances for it being fruitful.

The student who grows up learning that the most productive motivation is self- motivation, and that s/he can in fact learn how to fail and how to succeed, has the best chance for a life that is rich. We also notice that children given the gift of trust by their parents become closer and closer to their parents, and sometimes these kids even provide the insights and strength to work to solve family problems that have developed over time.

Students at a school like ours will surely be practiced in ethical judgments. Moral questions are the bread and butter issues of Sudbury model schools. This community has very high standards for ethical behavior, standards that have forced me, over time, to raise my own. The school is run democratically. That doesn’t mean that every kid has something to say on every issue. No one polls every person in the school every time something comes up. It does mean that for every issue that comes up, the School Meeting is a forum in which each person, no matter what their age, is treated respectfully and equally, and also has an equal vote in decisions. But there is much more than that. The system for solving problems that have to do with behavior involve a changing sub-group of the entire population, a sub-group with total age variation in it, that investigates, reports on, and comes to grips with, problems of a social nature. This means littering, this means irritating noisiness, this means taking another child’s cookie, this means not doing the trash when it is your turn. It also can mean more serious violations of the community norms. Each community’s members spend a great deal of time informally and formally defining these norms, to themselves and to others, till they have worked out definitions that will serve them, at least till the issue comes up again.

I would like to end with more of the hopes and fears of the same parent whose remarks were quoted earlier:

Letting my imagination run wild, I hope that when our son is ready to leave SVS, he will move on with an empowering sense of purpose and direction. I realize that this is asking a lot. It’s certainly not something I could have done when I was his age.

Most of all, I hope that SVS will help each one of its students to find happiness deep down inside, to feel loved and appreciated, and to pass that love along to others. I don’t have too many fears about this, because it seems that this is what a whole lot of people around here are hoping for.

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Parents, Children and Staff

by Hanna Greenberg

Usually I like to focus on the positive aspects of being at Sudbury Valley. I enjoy thinking about the many facets of life in our little community which is so rich with wondrous encounters and experiences. Every single student is like a whole world and in the course of time each one of them shows me something new that I never knew before. That is what keeps me wanting to work at SVS all these many years and why it is never boring to be there.

Of course, life is never perfect and neither is Sudbury Valley. Disagreements and misunderstandings often occur, as they would in any group of people who share space, time, resources and responsibilities. Students and staff alike have to learn to live with these problems and overcome the discomfort or anger that they may feel from time to time. I am no exception and I admit to having made my share of mistakes by doing or saying things which were hurtful to others. Sometimes I have been insensitive, neglectful or forgetful. I have done many things at SVS, and I have been seen by students at times when I was less than wise or intelligent. Usually they point out my inadequacies and I can accept their laughter at my expense and even their anger, because it is clear and above-board. They tell me to my face what bothers them and give me a chance to explain or apologize. Most of the time I am astounded by the kindness and tolerance that the students exhibit and it has taught me to be more understanding of others than I had been before coming to SVS.

Occasionally, I am angry or hurt by others’ mistakes or insensitivities and then it falls on me to discuss the matter openly with the persons involved to give them a chance to explain or apologize. By and large people at the school get along quite well because of this ability to air grievances and work things through face to face. In cases where communication between people is impossible they can choose to avoid and ignore each other.

Unfortunately, this mode of interpersonal interactions is thrown out of balance when it is interfered with by others who are important to the individuals in the school but who are not a part of the daily life of the school. What I am going to describe has happened every year since our inception in 1968, and uncannily is enacted as if according to a script which is always the same. I would find it bizarre and amusing but for the pain that it causes to all the participants in this drama, including myself.

This is how it unfolds. Students are led to understand by their parents directly or by subtle suggestion that it would be good for them to take some sort of class. The kids agree in principle but can’t bring themselves to do it. What we see is kids who ask for a lesson, and then behave in a manner which isn’t congruent with wanting to take the lesson. Thus they forget their appointments, or their homework. They may come to the lesson with an attitude of “tell me what I need to know so I can get this boring stuff done with as fast as possible and be free to do what I enjoy doing”. Time and again we see bright kids learning very little and hating every minute of it. They often ask the staff for instruction just before they leave for the day, or while the staff person is in the middle of another activity which makes it clear that no lesson can be given. These modes of behavior are in marked contrast to the way they behave when they want us to help them do something that they really want to do. Then they hound us with questions, wait for us to have time to attend to them, retain what we teach them and avidly do work on their own. They are purposeful and focused and it is evident in their whole demeanor that nothing will stop them from pursuing their interest. The contrast with the behavior of the same students when there is an externally imposed push to take classes is remark- able.

When children are questioned by their parents about classes which they really are not interested in taking but which they engage in to please their parents or allay their anxieties, they are in a quandary. How are they to explain their non-performance? They hem and haw and under enough pressure they begin to project their own behavior on the staff. They say, almost with no variation, that Hanna, or Denise, or Danny, or Joan, or Mikel, or Mimsy, or Carol were too busy to help them, or didn’t show up for class, or were too late to do it, or were uninterested in teaching. Sometimes we are accused of going shopping instead of attending to the students! At first when I heard these complaints say about Joan, or Mimsy I thought to myself, “It’s possible that it’s true, but it is strange that they are both attributed the exact same behavior when I know them both to be so different. Mimsy is so well organized that it is unlikely that she forgot an appointment, and Joan is usually in the Art room and easy to locate. When she goes shopping it is for art supplies with a student and all the other kids in the room know where she went.” I wondered: could it be that the whole staff at SVS talks a good line but refuses to be attentive to the students needs? Could it be that all of us are identically forgetful, uninterested in attending to the students needs and dedicated to shopping during school hours? It didn’t make sense.

It was only after numerous repeats of these accusations, leveled at all of us at one time or another, that the pattern began to show itself clearly. The formulaic nature of these criticisms belied their truth and revealed their origins. The students want to do what their parents think is good for them. However, they find this difficult to do at the school. They are too busy doing what they think is interesting and important. Only at the end of the day do they remember what they “ought” to have done. They need an explanation for their parents and for themselves, which will not reflect badly on them, and so they attribute their own forgetfulness, or lack of interest, or preoccupation, to the staff. The trouble is that what they say doesn’t fit the characters of the particular staff involved. It does, however, fit the stereotypical reaction of kids to parental pressure to learn things which the parents think are important to learn but which the students don’t.

Neither I nor other staff members hold a grudge against the kids. We know that both they and their parents are doing what they think is best and that we have to cope with these complaints as part of our job. But it does upset me that often the parents involved don’t want to hear what we have to say on the matter. They usually are offended when we imply that the child lied to them because the child did not want to disappoint his or her parents. They also often don’t agree with us that “suggesting” things to learn to their children constitutes pressuring their children, and that it is not in harmony with the school’s approach to education.

It looks to me that when things get to this stage the children are better off in a different kind of school, where there is a curriculum which the children are obliged to learn and where the teachers coerce them to learn it. I believe that it would be better for the family, and the children in particular, not to attend a school where they are daily put into a situation of conflict between following their own idea of what is important to learn and listening to their parents’ advice. It causes the kids to be depressed, guilty and anxious and worse, insecure about their future.

Yes, SVS is an all or nothing approach to children. Parents either do or don’t trust their children to acquire the skills needed to survive in America according to their own judgment. If the latter is the case, it would be better to transfer the children to one of the many humane and kind schools available which believe that children need more help and guidance than we provide at SVS.

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Is Sudbury Valley School “Anti-Intellectual”?

by Daniel Greenberg

At first sight, the question posed in the title of this essay appears ludicrous. After all, the school’s walls are virtually all lined with books from floor to ceiling a library that would be the pride of schools far richer and larger than SVS. The staff has always consisted of people who are highly educated and have a wide range of interests. The conversations at school, engaged in freely by children and adults of all ages, are often distinguished by their richness of content, elegance of expression, and wide range of topics. And the school has produced a more extensive literature, probing its philosophical foundations, than any other single school ever. It would seem that to wonder whether this institution has an “anti-intellectual” flavor is to be wholly unaware of who we are or what we are doing on a daily basis here.

Yet, the question is not infrequently asked, and this fact alone must drive us to consider whence it arises. As so often is the case, once we examine the matter more closely, a number of quite significant factors emerge, which shed light equally on the nature of the school and on the underlying outlook of the questioners.

Let’s look at the context which usually raises the issue in the first place. Often, it is one in which parents of children enrolled at the school are told usually by their children, sometimes by other parents that a request to some staff member for help has been greeted with indifference. The story the parents hear almost invariably is something like this: “I went to X [a staff member] and told him/her I wanted to do science. S/he said ‘You aren’t really interested in this’ and didn’t help me.” Or the last sentence might be, “S/he told me to get a book out of the library and read about science.” There are any number of variants, both with regard to the subject matter under discussion, and the specific reply; but the gist of all of them is the same.

Moreover, when the parent inquires about the incident, the reply from the school is always in support of the staff member’s mode of response. In talking about the matter further, the parent and some school representative ultimately get to the question of what constitutes real interest that is, when expressions of interest on the part of children should be responded to actively by staff, etc. subjects I have discussed at length elsewhere.

Up to this point, the concern has focussed on the more general topic of how adults at school deal with requests from students. It is at this point that a new element often appears. Here’s how it usually surfaces.

There are all sorts of activities at school where staff members interact fairly regularly with students, even though these activities clearly do not represent deep, serious interests on the part of the students. Many examples come to mind: all sorts of cooking activities in the kitchen, especially with younger children; various activities in the art room, from fine arts to pottery to sewing to other crafts; outdoor activities, such as rock climbing, skiing, camping trips. In situations like these, it looks as if staff members at school react quickly even to fairly casual inquiries from students perhaps sometimes even initiate the activities!

On the other hand, one rarely finds this state of affairs occurring in areas of interest that coincide with the standard curricular activities of more traditional schools. To some parental observers, it seems as if the school is saying: “Cooking yes; science no. Beadwork yes; spelling no. Skiing yes; math no.” Or, to generalize: “If a student wants to piddle around in some unessential activity that doesn’t involve deep thoughts, the school’s staff will rush to get involved; if a student wants to do something that develops his/her body of knowledge or ability to think critically (a term regularly used by prevailing schools to justify the subject matter that they include in their curricula), then s/he will get a fairly cold shoulder from the staff.” The conclusion these observers draw: Sudbury Valley has an anti- intellectual bent.

Let’s look more carefully at what is going on here. Part of what children enjoy about Sudbury Valley is their ability to interact with adults as people, rather than as authority figures or “teachers”. They enjoy the conversation, the mixing, the friendliness, and in general the opportunity to chat about the life experiences of older people in an informal and unthreatening setting. Former students remember, even after a span of decades, how much they enjoyed simply being around grownups they could be friends with, and from whom they could learn all sorts of things about life.

The students and staff at Sudbury Valley are quite aware of this key role played by staff, and cherish it. Most of the time, they spend time together in a completely unstructured setting sitting around in the sewing room, chatting in the main lounge, playing outdoors together. It is this frequent and casual accessibility of staff that has so often been mistakenly interpreted by outsiders as “the staff doing nothing but hang out”. The staff has on occasion been criticized for spending their time chewing the rag with students and seemingly “doing nothing” even by people within the school community, but rarely by students.

Occasionally, however, either students or staff set up easygoing structured situations where they can interact freely, and enjoy themselves in the meantime. Such situations almost always center around an activity that is relaxed, entertaining, and fun to do. In the context of such activities, staff and students spend gobs of time together, and get to know each other really well; in fact, one of the main points of having these planned activities is to create a natural setting for staff and students to be able to be together for a long stretch without any artificiality attached to the situation.

Thus, a group of students spending a morning in the kitchen with a staff member, cooking some dish or other, do so especially for the joy of being together, though the production of a tasty dish is certainly relevant to the pleasure afforded by the occasion. When an off-campus overnight trip is taken, the depth of the interactions increases significantly. Always, people return from these trips with greatly increased insights into each other’s way of thinking and feeling, and make enormous progress in learning how to handle complex group situations. This is an important motivation behind the students’ desire to go on these trips, and is one of the reasons staff members enjoy them so much, despite the considerable work involved.

The benefits that these relaxed opportunities for mixing afford children cannot be exaggerated. By contrast to most other interactions children have with adults, Sudbury Valley child-adult interactions become laden with positive associations; Sudbury Valley students learn from the earliest age to enjoy being with grownups, to be as relaxed about using them as resources and general role models as they are about using other kids, and to establish relationships that span several generations without any threatening overtones. These are gains that not only remain with students throughout their lives, but also affect the way these students in turn relate to children when they themselves become adults. By providing a setting for pleasant adult-child interactions, Sudbury Valley contributes significantly to breaking the cycle of fear that plagues inter-generational relationships.

The only way the system works, however, is if adults at school carefully avoid structured situations which are associated in the minds of children with the standard societal demands that are imposed upon them in other environments. In the present context of American society, it is not possible to have a relaxed adult-child interaction that involves chatting innocently about subjects that form the curriculum of the prevailing school system. There is no possibility to have casual get-togethers that putter around in science-related areas; for the children, these situations immediately turn into “science classes”, and the adult becomes the “science teacher”. The substance of the interaction immediately gets related to what other kids in other schools are doing; and when the children tell their parents about the activities, the parents having themselves been trained in traditional schools cannot help but reacting with overt or subtle signs of relief and pleasure that “finally, our kid is doing something academic”, or “finally, our child is engaged in real learning in Sudbury Valley.” The focus of the staff-student relationship veers away from person-to-person exchanges towards teacher-student exchanges, and Sudbury Valley is seen as participating, after all, in the same basic game as all the other schools.

Few things can be more damaging to the atmosphere and outcomes for which the school has fought long and hard. There is no way that the staff at Sudbury Valley wants our school to be even remotely associated with the notion that the curricular areas preferred today by other schools have any special value or significance within the total range of subject matter that children or adults can find interesting and absorbing. It is for this reason, more than any other, that the staff carefully avoids encouraging any slight signals given by children at the school that indicate that they want the comfort of tuning into the standard fare, to reassure themselves somehow that they too are “taking” the right “courses”.

So when all is said and done, I think it is fair to say that Sudbury Valley School is staunchly “anti-standard-curriculum”, and gives no special encouragement to students who talk about “doing” the usual school subjects. But in encouraging free-wheeling and open exchanges between adults and students at all times, in all sorts of settings informal, casual, or lightly structured Sudbury Valley promotes a level of “intellectualism” not generally found even in University Graduate Schools these days. The dictionary defines “intellectualism” as follows: “The exercise or application of the intellect.” As we stress over and over again in our literature, the intellect is best exercised or applied in situations where it is self-driven, and free to roam without reference to external constricting pressures. Our major task has been, is, and will for some time remain the establishment of an environment as free as possible from the overwhelming societal pressures favoring certain kinds of pursuits as preferable, as more worthy than others.

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Uncommon Sense

by Alan White

What seems so self evident at one time in history often seems infantile and quaint when later generations look back and have the advantage of hindsight. It isn’t that earlier generations were any less intelligent, but what our forebears took to be self-evident, to be “common sense”, strikes us as naive or primitive.

During the day we see the sun rising in the east, traveling across the sky and setting in the west. When our ancestors assumed we were standing still and the light source they saw was moving, it made perfect common sense. It is little wonder that Copernicus’ theory that the earth was rotating while orbiting the sun took the better part of three hundred years to become generally accepted. The reason for the resistance to Copernicus was the endless set of arguments people were able to muster in defense of the obvious: our observations told us that the earth was stationary and the sun moved! When we are convinced of something, new information is often irrelevant.

Being out on a large lake or on the ocean in a small boat is a most vulnerable position and a sudden squall is often fatal. When our ancestors assumed that they were dealing with supernatural forces, angry or capricious gods, it made perfect sense to think back on what they had been doing or thinking for a cause and effect connection for a storm. They assumed something they had done or thought had angered the gods or spirits.

The idea that organisms so tiny that they could not be seen were the cause of plagues and other illnesses flew in the face of common sense. Now we understand that crystal clear water as seen by the naked eye can be a broth of harmful bacteria.

Our history is filled with new discoveries which, at the time they were proposed, were looked upon as the product of a deranged mind or at least as the product of a lively and fanciful imagination. It is often the case that the “experts” in any field at the time new ideas are proposed find them so contrary to their ingrained beliefs that only the death of the experts makes way for the new discoveries to become established in the next generation.

Nowadays, we assume that teaching is essential for learning, and we organize our schools from preschool through college on this assumption. When we want to know how someone is doing in school we ask what classes they are taking. For those of us in my generation this was as ingrained an assumption as the sun traveling across the sky was for my ancestors. For those children who did not learn what was being taught, we had an excellent explanation: the fault lay in the child. Either the child was not paying attention or the child was mentally deficient. Of course, many children did learn the skills and course contents, and that kept us comfortable in our basic assumption. In our attempts to be fair to the child, we sometimes assigned some of the fault for those who didn’t learn to the teaching or to other factors, like too much tv, not enough discipline, etc.

Sudbury Valley School Press has published extensive writings on the topics of courses, curricula and testing, but these are not the only insights that can help us to reevaluate the real value of courses. Every one of us who has taken courses for years is in a position to reflect on what we really learned. We know that we learned arithmetic and how to read. We all can remember teachers whom we admired for their mastery of their subject. We know that we were able to get a job and take on the responsibilities of being an adult. We were told that we had our schools to thank for our success and we believed what we were told. (And the earth stood still while the sun traveled across our sky. . . . .)

There are always individuals who question the obvious. The founders of Sudbury Valley School and their decades of experience have given us new insight on how we learn and how we do not learn. Very few courses are given and only a small minority of students are interested in arranging these courses. (I suspect it is a carryover from their traditional school experiences before enrolling in SVS.) Yet, all students at SVS learn the three R’s and so much more. Those who wish to go on to college compete very well with students from traditional schools. But all children who go to SVS are given a precious gift; they learn to trust themselves and their judgment. They feel that they are responsible for, and are in control of, their lives. They have been able to use their childhood years to master their environment, gain maturity, and focus on how they wish to spend their adult years. When we adults reflect upon our school experiences, we know that we cannot remember how we learned. We know that we were given tasks to do, that our teachers explained things to us and we passed the test that they gave us. We know our three R’s and we give credit to our teachers, but it took us years to learn the skills that SVS students may learn in months. The truth is that most of us can remember only a small part of any lecture or course. What we have experienced is a performance, a performance we can enjoy and appreciate but in truth we learn very little from such performances that aid us in mastery of the subject.

If we pay attention to very young children we can see how their determination to communicate with older children and adults around them leads them to being able to learn the language of their culture. All the sounds they make and play around with are exercises in learning how to communicate. And they do with very few exceptions. Children at SVS use similar techniques to teach themselves all sorts of subjects. What the school setting provides is the opportunity to focus in on this task when they become aware of the need. Because we are all unique, we approach solving problems differently. The approach chosen by the learner is much more efficient than an approach chosen by others because the learner is fitting things into the mosaic of his/her understanding of the world. Attempts to help are counter-productive unless the learner requests a piece of information s/he needs for understanding the problem s/he is trying to solve.

Babies become aware of what they need at different ages and they have their own priorities. This explains why some children learn to talk at one year of age, while others wait until three; why some children learn to walk sooner than others; why some children at SVS learn to read at five while others wait until they are ten or older. Learning to read in our culture is an essential skill. Sooner or later children become aware of this fact, and when they do they focus in on what is needed to gain a level of mastery that satisfies their need. It is becoming aware that counts, not being told. As a species we are all born with the capacity to learn and we spend our entire lives trying to make sense out of the world in which we live. When we watch the news, read newspapers, engage in conversations and read books, we are continuing our lifelong quest to understand the world in which we live.

When we enter the world of work, those of us who want to succeed learn what we need to know to keep our job and advance in our chosen field. It isn’t that we come to these jobs without any prior preparation, but most of what we need to know to be successful on the job we learn on the job. The reason SVS graduates do so well is because they have been their own teachers from birth. They have learned to trust their sensory input and to rely on themselves throughout their school years.

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Is Sudbury Valley a School?

by Daniel Greenberg

When visitors arrive at the Sudbury Valley School for the first time, they usually get the impression that they’ve come during “recess.” Everywhere children are playing and happily enjoying themselves in various ways. If they stay a while, they start wondering when recess is over as do many parents when they discover “recess” extending for years.

When people first encounter the Sudbury Valley environment they undergo a kind of culture shock. They bring their expectations of what it is that a school ought to be, but they immediately come face-to-face with a very different set of images, and they don’t quite know how to deal with the situation.

This kind of thing happens all the time in trans-cultural encounters. It’s what took place for hundreds of years when Westerners encountered indigenous peoples all over the world. From the vantage point of a Western industrial society, native peoples weren’t doing any of the things associated by the Westerners with “culture,” so it became common to label such peoples as “uncultured savages.” When people call a tribal culture “savage,” what this really means is that they do not recognize in the tribe any of the usual clues or images that indicate “culture” to them.

Now, one of the more humane lessons we’ve learned over the last fifty or so years is to be a little more cautious in our labeling, and to understand that when we encounter such a dramatic clash of expectations and images, we should pause before we call something that we’re not familiar with “barbaric.” We have learned to say, “Let’s try to understand that society and see what it’s about.” What I would like to explain here, from that perspective, is what’s behind the culture shock that makes people wonder whether Sudbury Valley is a school.

What is the Sudbury Valley culture? What are the expectations that the school set out to meet?

There isn’t much disagreement that a school is supposed to develop the intellectual potential and moral character of children and, at the same time, to prepare them to perpetuate the culture and to function as citizens in the community. There’s really a two- fold function that any educational system undertakes in any culture a personal and a social function. These two have to work in harmony in order to make a viable school.

Usually educators start by saying, “What is it that we want to achieve on the social side?” That’s where we start as well, by asking, “What kind of people are needed in this era in history to make this country function?” And in order to answer this, we have to evaluate carefully what is going on in our society.

When we first opened, in the sixties, people had just started waking up to the fact that the United States was entering the post-industrial era. That was a new phrase back then; today it’s commonplace. A new social and economic environment was being created in this country, that went beyond the factory, beyond the industrial revolution, and looked toward a different kind of economic system, the key to which was the idea that repetitive routine work would no longer be done by human beings.

Such transformations don’t happen overnight. But we have always felt that our society is moving inexorably toward a future in which people will have to be imaginative, to find new ways to lead productive lives. This requires every child to grow to be creative, to be responsible, to have initiative, and to be self-starting. All these phrases are widely used in educational circles today, because by now everybody has realized it. Every school talks about producing people who will have these attributes.

A second, no less important, requirement in this country is that people have to know how to function as free citizens in a democracy. It used to be that when we talked about this, people would say, “What do you mean, you have to learn how to be free? What’s the big deal?” Nowadays, it’s a lot easier to explain what we mean, because within the last few years half of the world has suddenly rid itself an unspeakable tyranny, and there are literally hundreds of millions of people out there who do not have a clue how to function as free citizens in a democratic society where they all have to share in decisions, where they all have to make compromises, where they all have to make political judgments, day in, day out. Today, all you have to do is look across the ocean and you can see that it is no easy task to learn all this.

So all in all, any school has a very challenging, two-pronged task: to produce creative, self-starting, imaginative, responsible people, and also to produce people who know how to be free and know how to function in a democracy.

We started from scratch. We didn’t assume anything. We just said, “Given these requirements, where do we go from here? Let’s consider ideal situations and then see how much we can put into practice.”

The first thing we had to ask was, “What’s the raw material we’re working with?” Clearly, we are working with a child. “How much modification do we have to produce in that child?” If we had a glob of clay and wanted to make a pot out of it, we’d have a lot of work ahead of us. We’d have to throw it on the wheel, get it centered properly, and be sure that it doesn’t collapse or it’s not too wet or not too dry, or that it not crack in the kiln. These are big concerns because clay that comes out of the earth doesn’t have a natural tendency to form pots.

The raw material that we have when we work with children is, by contrast, much easier to deal with. It is “made to order”, because children are designed to become all the things we want. That’s their evolutionary inheritance. Children are born with the capacity to interact with their environment in a way that will process it, challenge it, work on it, and understand it in imaginative ways. This ability is something human beings were endowed with by nature. You don’t have to take a one-year-old and say, “Look around you,” or grab a two-year-old by the scruff of the neck and say, “Go explore the environment,” or a three-year-old and say, “Move around a little, don’t lie on your back all day.” You can’t stop them!

The raw material is perfect. Our major task as adults is to get out of the way, to provide an environment where we don’t interfere, where we minimize to every extent possible the barriers that prevent children from doing what they want to do naturally. To the extent that we succeed, they’ll be alert, they’ll explore, they’ll be active, they’ll be healthy. They’ll be solving problems all day, problems that they set for themselves and attack with a passion. Leave children alone and what’s the first thing you notice? Their intensity. Their involvement. Their focus.

Where does the social part fit in, that has to do with living in a free society? The only way to accustom children to democracy is to practice it. There’s no escaping that conclusion. We certainly aren’t going to teach them by telling them the virtues of democracy. To take people you’ve been pushing around for twelve years in the authoritarian environment of traditional school, and sit them down for fifty minutes of talking about this being a free country, and what freedom is about, and what their rights are, is laughable. The only way to bring up free citizens is to make them free citizens from day one. And there’s no reason not to.

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