A Fish out of the Hudson – A Sudbury Student goes to India

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You can imagine my excitement when I was invited to speak at The Association of Internation Schools of India (TAISI), the education conference for private schools of India taking place in Goa.

I would get to go to a country halfway across the world on a continent I’d never been to.

I would get to share my views at a conference in a country that’s known to have rigorous views on education.

I was in Germany when I got the invitation email at 1 am. I texted my mom immediately and resisted the urge to wake my brother up and tell him. I was thrilled! I started thinking about what I was going to say. What the goal for my talk would be. I knew I wanted my audience to see my school like I see it. I also wanted them to see there is more than one effective form of education.

But first, they had to understand my school, and I mean completely get what it’s like to be a student at a Sudbury School. I didn’t want to pretend that Sudbury was like a traditional school or try and defend it. I wanted to be real about my experience here and I wanted them to get it.

So, in my talk I wanted to explain how Sudbury is not a school about just academics. Kids here learn how to evaluate themselves, how to set their own goals, and how to be independent. I wanted to talk about how “learning” looks different for every kid here, and how that’s ok. I wanted to show them how our democracy works, how we vote on everything, how the student majority rules, no principal, no veto power. I wanted to tell them how it felt being School Meeting Chair at the age of eleven, what was frustrating and hard, and how it really forced me to understand how democracy works. I wanted to convince them that trust is the most important part of any school. I really believed that I wasn’t just representing what a Sudbury School is; I was representing students everywhere. I had to show that kids have valuable input when talking about education.

I wanted to sound confident, knowledgeable, and natural. To get to this point, I practiced like crazy. I gave my talk to anybody that would listen and when nobody would listen, I gave it to the mirror. Seriously, my friends started being able to recite not only what I was saying but the tone of voice I said it in. I mouthed it silently when it was slow at my job (I actually got into some kind of awkward situations because of that). I whispered it on the plane to India when I couldn’t sleep. I even tried recording myself, but ended up only being able to listen to it for about 10 seconds. I thought about what word to emphasize in every sentence.

So finally, we get on the plane to India! At one point, I look behind me nervously thinking that I’ve lost my cell phone. My eye meets a chatty Indian woman with bright orange hair, who starts setting me up with her grandsons. She starts telling me how gorgeous they are and how their mother is Italian and they are both in law school etc, etc. I was definitely flattered, but – no thank you.

Fifteen very long hours later, we landed in Mumbai. As we drove away from the airport and towards south Bombay, I was mesmerised by just how different it was from Kingston — there were auto rickshaws and two wheelers weaving (kind of like playing Grand Theft Auto) in between traffic. There were slums and multistory buildings right next to each other; dogs, cats, and of course, the occasional cow, the endless broken symphony of car horns, and then the bright colors that seem to shout out to you.

When we got to Goa I was tired, hungry, and just really gross. At this point, we had been traveling for forty eight hours and I was stressed. The cab ride from the train station to the hotel was about an hour and it was all winding roads with what felt like a speed bump every five hundred feet. The houses were so colorful and pretty, the environment was tropical and I swear to god we saw a group of palm trees that looked exactly like the cover of Where the Wild Things Are. My mom kept trying to chat but I was not in the mood (sorry mom!). I just wanted to get to this hotel.

When we finally got there, my panic was temporarily delayed by the ridiculous lavishness of the hotel. I mean, it felt like we were in a movie– it was huge and right on the beach. When we first went in, they gave us a cold towel. Then someone came out and handed us a rose, then a necklace. We were laughing so hard because it felt like a culture shock within culture shock.

I was really excited to get to the conference so I got down there as soon as I could and immediately felt like a fish out of water. There I was in jeans and a t-shirt, the youngest person in a room filled with professionally dressed educators and principals. I didn’t know anyone and I was worried no one would take me seriously. I didn’t even know how to check in!

I found Jeff, the staff member from my school who was also speaking at the conference, and he helped me sign in. I got this cool name tag that said “speaker” on it and I started to feel a little more comfortable, so I talked to some people about Sudbury but the conference was pretty much over for the day. Then Raghava, the curator of our session, showed up and soon after, so did all the other panelists. We all proceeded to a rehearsal.

The first speaker to rehearse was Deepak Ramola who is the founder of Project Fuel. He goes around learning life lessons from all sorts of people and then turns them into curriculum. He was super nice and and a great speaker. He sounded so natural and conversational and was actually interesting. He had obviously put a ton of effort into his talk and I was like, “Damn! I wanna sound like that.”

Then went Babar Ali, who was one of the only kids in his village to go to school. When he was nine, he would go after school and teach the other kids what he had learned that day. At the age of sixteen, he was named the youngest school headmaster in the world by the BBC. He now has over five hundred students between two schools, both of which are completely free. All of the teachers are former students. Recently, Babar was offered a full scholarship at a prestigious university in the United States and turned it down because he knew his students would suffer without him. He was really shy, but he talked to me a little and showed me the text book where one of the chapters was about him. It was like the sweetest humble brag I’d ever heard. Throughout the whole rehearsal he seemed really tired and looked like he was about to fall asleep and I was like, “Me too, Babar”.

Kalyan Akkipeddi, who is the founder of Protovillage, talked about his village which is the prototype for a sustainable village in rural india. He bought 5 acres of land and he, his family and 12 other families built (and are building) the village. They harvested 200,000 gallons of rainwater and started a seed bank for the other villages. His point was to show surrounding villages how to be interdependent within the village. During his talk I was just like, “Oh, my god!” Everything they did was so inspiring.

Then followed Saba Ghole, who after graduating from MIT, started a maker school in Cambridge, MA where instead of classes, they have studios where the kids have projects they work on like designing things for wheelchairs or bio clothing. She was really nice and even laughed at a silly joke I made, so I liked her even more.

On the morning of my talk, I arrived at the venue early enough. There was someone speaking before our session. His slides were full of boring statistics, graphs, and more graphs. He talked about how much more money there was to make in the International School business in India. I was just thinking the whole time, “Wow! This is the exact opposite of our panel.” His talk was followed by some great talks by my fellow panelists. After Jeff’s talk someone asked a question about Sudbury. Something about how they had had trouble with how little structure they had in college and how much worse off they would’ve been in a school like Sudbury. That question completely freaked me out and I figured that they already hated us, so I went to the bathroom and frantically practiced one more time. I was determined to change their minds!

Finally, I gave my talk, just as I had practiced it: clear, slow and articulate.

After my talk, to my surprise, everyone wanted to talk to me. One woman even told me I was inspirational. Someone else said I was a great speaker. One person even wanted me to speak at his conference! And there was this one very earnest woman who looked me in the eye and asked, “Amelia, how can I make my kids self driven?” (I bet she didn’t even see the irony in that)! Someone else said they were questioning everything, not only as a teacher but as a parent. And then, the guy who had asked Jeff that question, came up to me and I was like “ok, here we go”, but to my surprise, he only wanted to know more. “What do younger kids care about in school meeting? What motions do they make? How do they vote on things like staff salary?”

It seemed as though everyone really understood Sudbury. I was honestly so proud of myself. Earlier, I said my goals were to show that there was more than one effective form of education, and that kids do have valuable input to add. I felt like I had done that and that felt really rewarding.

All of this attention went straight to my head and I was like, “I can’t talk about Sudbury any longer, I must go for a swim!” So I did.

There was a wine and cheese social that night and everyone there was trying to talk to us! This stern looking headmaster came over and was like, “I wanna be part of the cool people conversation” or something like that while I thought to myself, “Ah, so this is what being famous is like.” Again, straight to my head.

Afterwards when everything started to calm down, I started to realize how important it is for schools like ours to go out and be a part of the larger education world. We can’t just stay in our bubble. I saw the need for student perspective. I realized that nothing is going to change without it. I had just done one of the scariest, yet most rewarding, things in my life and it was over and that sucked but all I could think about was how lucky I was to have wormed my way into this group of people. I can’t wait to do it again!

It Feels Good

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Yesterday was the second day of school at The Hudson Valley Sudbury School. For me it was an emotional start to the year. My youngest is now officially enrolled as a fresh five year old, and two of my oldest graduated last year leaving me to start the year without them. It’s been bittersweet. I know that they were ready to leave.  One is at Sarah Lawrence College, not too far from home so I can still lay eyes on him every so often. I look forward to watching him grow, I eagerly await the stories of his classes, his adventures and what it’s like to be a Sudbury grad, and of course to watch him serve as an alumni at various school events. The other has flown across the world to conquer the professional video game stage, signed as a well-paid, pro player on a team in Asia. He’s on a team that is navigating having players who speak 4 different languages; he’s training, he’s greeting fans, he’s keeping color-coded spreadsheets about technical play – the opportunity of a lifetime. They are both exactly where they should be, and they have taken these steps with a grounded confidence that makes me proud. And I’m doing what I can to miss them in a positive way.

My five year old has taken to the school with gusto. He wakes up early so he can take the school bus (even though I go in two hours later) and makes sure to check if I will be leaving later than the bus. He comes home exhausted after hours of make believe games, of running hard. He’s excited to tell me how he beat a new level in a game he’s been playing, bought something from the school store or was the first on his team to be ready for End of Day Cleaning. His confidence and independence are soaring. While I miss having my baby at home, attached to me, it is blaringly obvious how happy and ready he is to be there. He has also been a walking reminder of what my 17 year old was like when he enrolled just shy of 5. It’s a changing of guards as his graduation means we no longer have any students from when we first opened.

So many things have changed within these walls and on this campus since the day we opened 14 years ago. With the exception of two staff the entire student and staff body is different. The building has been painted, there is an incredible playground, a garden, and an entirely new building has sprouted up. The processes, for the most part feel well oiled and there is solid history behind law decisions and culture. It feels secure and grounded. It feels good.

Now, feeling that the school is stable, that the ship is in good hands, I can look toward the future. We have some exciting projects in the works: we’re looking at ways to build a strong endowment, maybe even so strong we could run the budget off the interest, and we’re thinking about ways to support the Sudbury philosophy worldwide – sending ambassadors out to help startup groups, etc. – we’re thinking a bit outside these walls. It also feels good.

Yesterday, as I sat on the swings and looked around the campus I was struck by how many things had changed and at the same time everything is the same. I watched a group of boys climb high into the trees, a couple of young girls walking arm in arm chatting, 3 young boys were playing hard in the sandbox – leaping from the boulder while battling imaginary bad guys, a group of teens were talking in the garden, surrounded by fresh veggies and flowers…. They were all so happy to be back at school. And I could feel it from the swings as I surveyed the campus. So I hopped up and took an hour finding each person in attendance, and I asked them one question and wrote down their unfiltered answers. It confirmed my beliefs. I am so grateful to be part of a school where feeling “good”, “great”, “awesome” or “serene” is at the forefront of their minds.

  • Their answers to “How does it feel to be back? (and for the new members of the community – “How does it feel to be here?”)
  • It so serene, cool and chill. Weird, but cool chill. I’ve never been so relaxed in a school setting before. It’s weird to get used to.
  • It’s like family
  • Liberating
  • It feels really good. I feel more grounded. I missed all the people more than I thought I would. It feels great to be back with people who feel the same way as I do.
  • Cool
  • Good, good, great!
  • Amazing
  • Good
  • Feels pretty good
  • Fine, great, it’s nice to be back
  • Good!
  • I like it!!
  • Weird
  • Good
  • Thumps up
  • Little bored
  • Good
  • It’s good
  • Pretty good, better than my last school!
  • Yeah, it’s gooood
  • Good
  • Why did it start so late??
  • Oh yeah, it’s great!
  • I had a great summer but it’s good…so what are you doing?
  • Good
  • Good, I mean, you can’t top good!
  • Welcome. And I’m not alone all the time, my life is back on track!
  • Energizing
  • Same old same old – I’ve got this one (pointing at a friend) and this one (pointing at another friend)
  • Pretty good, bored, a bit stressful
  • I never left, but for the most part it’s absolutely wonderful to have all the kids and commotion back. I like having kids back even if it’s harder to get work done.
  • It feels pretty good, but surreal not having the people who left.
  • It feels real great.
  • Good, I’m bored at home
  • LIT
  • Really awesome, best day. I’m really so happy. I’m glad to have some time away from my family and to be with my friends.
  • Awesome la vista, awesome ba bista
  • Awesome, awesome, for real!
  • Good, great
  • Great
  • Amazing, really! I missed my friends
  • It’s the cat’s pajamas to be back
  • Good
  • Meh
  • It’s good, I like it
  • It feels amazing, like I never left
  • I missed school
  • A hearty 7 out of 10
  • Cool
  • Good!
  • It feels like chocolate pudding
  • Hopeful
  • Invigorating – there are so many opportunities
  • Good
  • Good, I’m excited to have something to do
  • Great
  • Feels like a reset on my brain, a nice exhale, first stretch of the morning, first sip of coffee all at once, all day long.
  • Pretty good
  • Radical
  • Feels kind of like…something
  • Pretty fantastic
  • It feels like Christmas morning, lots of anticipation, bubbling excitement and surrounded by family

Welcome Back to Choice

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That school bell’s ringin’! Giddap! Whoa! Welcome back, everyone.

As I write this, the rest of the staff are scurrying around, collating files, scrubbin’ tiles, and wrastlin’ crocodiles, puttin in dat elbow grease, while I tap away on my keyboard, 33 tabs open in chrome, planning next summer.  Just kidding – I’m working harder than anyone else, I’m sure you’ll agree.  I happen to be drinking coffee, too, and for some reason today my coffee tastes like grilled cheese, and strangely enough, I love it.  I’m just slurpin’ it down.  Go figure.

I’d like to congratulate our students, and their parents, for making the bold decision to be a part of our school.  Surely it would (at least appear to) be safer to sign up for the traditional program and march off down the corridors, backpack stuffed with the good stuff.  My daughter is nearly five, and I feel the pull myself, so my congratulations are quite sincere; I know it isn’t always an easy choice, but I think it is a decision well made.

My final adventure of the summer was a trip to the Maine Primitive Skills School for a five day immersion program.  I built and slept in a debris hut, wove cordage from plant fibers, made friction fire, and skinned and roasted a chipmunk (I didn’t eat it though, smelling it was way more than enough, I needed to shower and brush my teeth like six times immediately afterwards but you know: baby steps).  You gotta get your kicks somehow right?  I went for the skills, but I was startled by how emotional the experience became for me.  The instructor emphasized that the most important aspect of survival – far and away – is attitude.  In survival situations (particularly in real ones, not merely when you’re “playing survival” like we were), circumstances can deteriorate rapidly and it can be extraordinarily difficult to meet basic needs.  It’s quite easy to panic, become angry, exceedingly anxious, impatient, depressed, and then, well, die – even when there are accessible pathways to survival.  But if you can remember yourself and choose a positive mindset, your chances of survival (or at least a dignified death) increase dramatically.  

We all know very well that attitude is important to outcomes, that it shapes the meaning of our experience, and that it’s possible to change it if we need to, but these truisms were illuminated and refreshed for me by the unnerving – if contrived – context of primitive skills training.  I made it my practice to continually check my attitude and adjust as needed.  The skills themselves are important, but they came more easily, and I could use them to greater effect, when I approached them with patience and gratitude.  The lesson was an old one made new: there is always choice, whether we recognize it or not, and if we don’t, or if we don’t exercise it, the choice will be made for us by impersonal and often brutal forces.

When I think about what is most important to me for the education of my own children, it’s intimate knowledge of this principle of choice.  An understanding of the possibilities it offers, and the ability to access them, is not only the basis of imagination (and therefore innovation), but also positive behavior (self-discipline), and – most importantly – it makes you secretly (“spiritually”) invincible, because you always get to choose how you respond, internally and externally, to circumstances. I’m not making a metaphysical claim about free will or anything like that – I barely care – I’m talking about plain psychological truth.  

Given that’s what I want my kids to know about, I want their educators to use pedagogy which emphasizes the truth of choice with enthusiasm, clarity, and consistency.  I want them to become familiar with the process of choice, and I want them to practice it, become strong and confident with it.  I see it as the Master Skill which will ensure a Good life for them however fickle fortune (or the economy) may be.

Of course, choice is the raison d’etre of our school.  We do choice like google does search.  Our students have to grapple with the reality of choice the entire time they’re here.  Our model fits the human condition like a glove, it fits our psychology like the Greek pantheon, it’s the local organic option – what the body really wants, what the genome craves.  Even our digimodern lives are really just extended survival trips, and there will be hard times and close calls for all, guaranteed.  As a parent, sometimes I suffer miserably reflecting on this hard, clean truth, but it always clarifies for me what I want my kids to know, and where I want them to go to school.

Welcome back all you brave, creative, thoughtful people, to our sweet, bold little school, where the kids are free to learn and struggle and practice being a human being and the printer is always out of toner and the coffee tastes like grilled cheese maybe because some kid used your mug to eat mac’n’cheese and you like it like that.  Welcome back to this real place.  Welcome back to choice.  

Sudbury and the Fear of Falling Behind

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Not long ago a parent told me that her son had “never been happier” since he enrolled earlier this spring.  And indeed, that very morning I had seen him running across the back hill with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back; it was like a scene from Free Willy.  His parent told me that, while his former school had stretched itself to make things work for him, he remained miserable there.  His needs, for space and time and companionship, were not being met.  I hear it a lot: it was like trying to fit the old round peg into the unforgiving square hole, but here, at last, there was no hole to conform to.  Out the window at this moment I can see three little bands of kids wandering the grounds, gesticulating excitedly, creating worlds beyond my kin.  One of them has green hair and no shirt.  One of them is carrying a bag by a strap around his forehead.  And one of them is being led by another…on a leash.  It’s so easy to forget that homo sapiens have developed a complex set of needs – and the skills to meet them – over 200,000 years of evolution, and they are embedded in us like algorithms that find expression one way or another.  We need to explore our identities and forge them in the context of intense social interaction in order to be successful, healthy, and happy.  Welcome to our “school.”

But something downright insidious has been popping up a lot around here lately.  It’s that old shade of capitalism’s angst – a 20th century zombie staggering relentlessly into the 21st – the fear of “falling behind.”  At our school, a sanctuary in a world which works relentlessly to colonize places, bodies, and minds, it manifests as the fear of “being stupid,” or, “dumb.”  Compulsory universal schooling has such a hold on us that even parents bold enough to send their kids to HVSS sometimes worry about academic achievement – and the kids do, too.  But the idea that everyone should be instructed in a uniform curriculum of academic minutiae, or even study academics at all, is a yarn spun by the past.  Even the belief that it’s necessary to study academics in order to attend college is no longer tethered to reality.  It’s the fakest news this side of Trump Tower, and there’s no more reason to worry about it than about Vladimir Putin influencing your choice of breakfast cereal.  Kids here do not “fall behind,” they attend to their real needs and learn how to thrive.  They are not pushed, pushed, pushed to do and be things opposed to their reality.  So I would suggest that the kids crammed into classrooms are the ones missing out, and anyway, as my grandmother used to say, “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”  

It’s become cliche to critique the current system of education by comparing it to a “factory model” and describe it as an artifact of the industrial age.  While it seems obvious that the traditional model – classrooms, desks, chairs, teachers, students, textbooks, bells, etc. – is outmoded, this narrative is really just a caricature that serves more as a rhetorical device to shape the future of education rather than as the true story of its complex history (and as a fan of history, I have noted many times how, the more I read about a particular era, the less confident I am that I can explain its basis).  To me, though, the interesting aspect of the “factory model” narrative is the broad implication of it, which is that school is designed to meet the needs of society – to maintain cultural stability and eternal economic growth – rather than the needs of real people, and what’s more, the societal needs it serves have already been left in the dustpan of history.  This appears to me to be mostly true.  Neither we nor the system needs us to study academics any longer, or to learn the lessons of traditional school.

One thing our model maximizes is flexibility, and in a world which is changing at an exponential rate, flexibility is an inherent good.  As society and technology change, certain of our needs change too.  But our model also maximizes opportunities to develop timeless skills – the ones that aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  Take for example this quote from Wes’s thesis:

“Sudbury has equipped me with a lot. I can talk and think in the realest way there is. I can make choices about what I want, choose things that I will work incredibly hard for, stick with those things, and succeed at them. I can lead and listen and I work well with others. I am not afraid of a challenge and I have the strength and problem-solving to overcome what’s in my way. I feel prepared to go on to college and both have a great time and succeed at what I hope to do there, which is figure out what’s next. I am looking forward to finding out what that will be, and navigating that path once I do. I think what Sudbury has given me, in the simplest terms, is to be prepared to always make the next choice and then the next one and every one after that.”

Wes has learned how to function interdependently – that is, to listen, speak articulately, reflect, evaluate options, and make decisions.  And when he needed to write a thesis, he figured out how to write a damn good one.  Thank goodness he wasn’t distracted by minutiae and the judgements of random adults while he was in high school.  There may be holes in his academic knowledge when he goes to Sarah Lawrence next fall (and there are absolutely no holes in our academic knowledge, having attended traditional school, isn’t that right dear reader), but he’s become such a solid person that any challenge posed by that deficit will be trivial to him.  Unfortunately, many students coming out of traditional model schools can’t say the same, and in fact there is a mental-health epidemic well underway on our college campuses.  

And then there’s the simple truth that none of us remembers most of the academic knowledge we learned in school.  My wife studied advanced mathematics in high school, but yesterday in the car she whipped out her smartphone to compute 14 x 3.  14 x 3?! And you know what? It didn’t matter – she got the information she needed.  Dare I say it, I doubt it will be necessary to even know how to read or write a few generations from now (sue me!)  There’s so much to learn, so much we have to know and be able to do to be a successful adult, and the traditional domain of schools is a tiny and mostly irrelevant sliver of it.  The world races madly along, increasing production to meet the manufactured needs of the economy, afraid to “fall behind;” thank goodness again that we have this sanctuary where we can work to meet our own authentic needs together.

What are They Doing?

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Well it’s the first warm day of March, and most people here are outside, climbing trees and rolling in the mud, building sandcastles and playing street hockey.  I just played a game a student created called, “Sharktooth.”  I lost.  I was also, for a time, the overburdened father of two very demanding young girls, busily making dinners to order (why do I let them get away with that?!)  while attempting to regulate their screen-time (the “screen” was a slab of bluestone) and mediate their conflicts (you’d have to be a saint to do this well, I assured myself). I had to quit that game after less than an hour.  People sometimes complain about “kids these days” preferring the virtual world to the outdoors, but I don’t think it’s true; when all the obstacles – obstacles that adults have created –  are removed,  they go outside.  A lot, and really in all weather, not only when it’s nice.  But the spirit today is more celebratory than usual.

So what else do “kids these days” do when the typical yoke of post-industrial childhood is lifted?  Well, it’s always different –  freedom tends to variety – but I’ll tell you some of what I’ve seen today. This morning in the office a student came bursting in explain to anyone who would listen that she had, unexpectedly, been moved to undertake the writing of a memoir; her friends had encouraged her, expressing fascination with her life.  She said she was surprised, because all of a sudden, filed with purpose, she felt she was a writer, and what’s more, she was getting some clarity about certain elements of her life.  There was another student in the office sharing the news of the impending birth of her brother, talking excitedly about her hopes.  Later, in the kitchen, there was a group of girls making and sharing lunch.  I was on tapping away on my screen (work-related, ok?) and they told me to put it away and “go outside,” so I did, deciding that was probably a good idea.  On my way out the front door I passed a teenager leading a crying six-year-old with a barely-scraped knee to the nurse’s office.  “He doesn’t need medical attention,” I said with the cold, calculating logic of a robot.  The older student rolled his eyes and whispered, “It’ll make him feel better, Matthew.”  Right.  I went outside and walked over to the stage.  There was a group of 8-11 year-old boys crowded around a tire swing, taking turns winding it up as far as they could and riding out the spin.  It was going crazy fast.  But some guys didn’t want it wound too far so they wouldn’t go too fast, and at first there were mutterings about “backing out,” that sort of thing, until the most adventurous guy out there, yelled, “Hey! Everyone responds to G-Forces differently! No one should be pressured to experience more “G’s” than they want!” and that fixed ‘em.  Meanwhile, there was one student sort of prowling around looking for people to mess with.  Everywhere he went he was leaving howling kids in his wake, “leave us alone!!!”  I was about to talk to the guy to see what was up when one of our oldest students came striding out of the building and right up to him and said, “what’s up?”  I’ll have lunch, I thought.  

So, our students are taking care of each other, putting their ideas into practice, getting into and out of quarrels, and having fun together, but what’s the point – what are they preparing for (assuming a school is at least on one level a place of preparation)?  They’re preparing for the new economy of the Creative Age.

As Thomas Friedman points out in this pithy piece in the New York Times,

Software has started writing poetry, sports stories and business news. IBM’s Watson is co-writing pop hits. Uber has begun deploying self-driving taxis on real city streets and, last month, Amazon delivered its first package by drone to a customer in rural England.

The robots are here, folks.  Already, not only manual labor is being mechanized, but mental labor as well. Even AI Dr’s which have all the medical knowledge ever created at their fingertips (“buttontips?”) may not be too far off. Friedman goes on:

In short: If machines can compete with people in thinking, what makes us humans unique? And what will enable us to continue to create social and economic value? The answer, said Seidman [author of the book How: Why How we do Anything Means Everything] is the one thing machines will never have:“a heart.”

Therefore, Seidman added, our highest self-conception needs to be redefined from “I think, therefore I am” to “I care, therefore I am; I hope, therefore I am; I imagine, therefore I am. I am ethical, therefore I am. I have a purpose, therefore I am. I pause and reflect, therefore I am.”

Our economy has moved from “jobs of the hands” to “jobs of the head,” and we’re on our way to “jobs of the heart.” Our students are free to study or engage whatever sets of knowledge and skills they want to, and the school does not privilege or value any one above the any other, but whatever choices they make, they’re learning their own hearts. They may roll in real mud and climb real trees – or maybe not – but everyone here ends up rolling in the mud of life, and climbing the trees of emotion. They learn to navigate the forest.  It can be messy, like birth and death and family and culture and- well, you get the point. But our students learn to make a life, and, in the rapidly advancing future, that means a living, too.

Through the Looking Glass

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Through the Looking Glass is the adventurous tale of a young girl named Alice who is exploring another part of Wonderland. On her journey to become a queen she meets many of our favorite characters including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, The White Knight, Humpty Dumpty and many others. The HVSS Theater Co-op brings new life to this classic book through live music, shadow puppetry, dance and more. Don’t miss this show; it makes you rethink what is and isn’t possible and will help you believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Show Dates and Times:

  • Friday, January 27th 7pm
  • Saturday, January 28th 7pm
  • Sunday, January 29th 3pm

Tickets** $10 each

Advance tickets available for sale in The Hudson Valley Sudbury School office or via Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2753114 (service fee applied)

**Please note, reservations will not be taken for this event. We highly suggest you purchase advanced tickets!

School Meeting Dispatch: Sleeping at School

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Last week a motion to ban sleeping at school(!) came before our School Meeting.  Although sleeping isn’t a widespread practice here, it is common to see one or two students sawing logs at some point on any given day, and occasionally certain of the cozier nooks in the building become de-facto napping spots; it’s the “flipped classroom” concept taken swiftly to its apocalyptic  conclusion.  Anyway, there’s a feeling, at least amongst a few of the staff members, myself included, that there is something just a little weird about it.  While it’s true that our students have full responsibility for deciding how to spend their time, sleeping is unique among human activities because the sleeper is unconscious (and can therefore hardly be responsible for themselves).  Besides, sleeping is generally a private act, not a social one, and it comes wrapped in an aura of intimacy – and blankets, and all those blankets and limbs strewn about willy-nilly look sloppy; it’s a little hard on the eyes and it’s probably pretty bad PR.

But when the motion hit the floor the student body was wide awake and ready to go, and in the ensuing discussion they developed examples of classic argumentation without necessarily knowing it.  This is one of the more beautiful aspects of school meeting: students develop the skills they need to operate effectively in a democracy by participating in one (rather than by merely studying one), and by actually defending their rights, writing legislation, and creatively working through the implications of the decisions they have to make.

 

Here’s a rundown of how it went:

The very first student to speak on this issue hit on the old “slippery slope argument,” saying, “First, you ban sleeping, but then what’s next – a ban against sitting around ‘doing nothing’?”  This drew excited murmuring from the assembled, a sort of parliamentary tittering.

The next speaker paraphrased scientific research to support the argument: “If this is about being idle or something like that, I’d like to point out how important sleep is to proper functioning.  It’s all over the news.  The more you sleep the more you can learn, really.”

Another student pointed out that the very same day he had taken a 20 minute nap because he wasn’t feeling well and woke up feeling refreshed.  Several more students piled on, adding arguments about how much sleep teenagers need and how difficult it is to get enough during the night.  School districts across the country are grappling with sleep research which shows that the hours their schools keep are harmful to teenage biology, but we’ve already solved this problem by…well, letting sleepy people sleep, so why recreate the problem?  And besides – sleeping is one of our basic biological needs!  What could be more natural than sleeping?

But what about people who might take advantage of their freedom at school and choose not to sleep at home because they can “just sleep at school?”   Well, it doesn’t seem fair to punish the whole population because a few people might take advantage of the rule.  Well perhaps we should just ban bedding. Or maybe it would work to limit the amount of sleeping someone can do at school?  Or to deduct the time spent asleep from the attendance requirement?  Eh, not a bad idea, but probably too difficult to enforce, and besides, there’s something ridiculous and even Orwellian about it.

Another option is to place restrictions on the locations sleep is permitted, maybe it should only be permitted in side rooms, or in the quiet area.  This was received with nodding and various other barely discernible signs of approval from among the assembled,  and with that, the motion was withdrawn to be reconsidered and perhaps amended and resubmitted by the mover.  Most usually, our School Meeting works like this to find consensus rather than a mere majority.

But the most powerful argument of the day, and the most basic, was that the liberty of the students must be jealously protected.  Student freedom – the responsibility for choosing what to do – is the essential fact of our school, and that’s pretty cool.  Any incursions into this responsibility are so not cool; they represent existential threats, and everyone here knows that instinctively.  Sleep, after all, was not the issue.  The students here know well what they have, and they’re willing – and very able – to protect it.

In this election season, discussions like these seem all the more relevant.  Our students are preparing to be responsible citizens of The Republic, while students elsewhere are clamoring for more information about democratic process.

So, after the motion was rejected and the meeting ended, we turned out the lights and took a celebratory nap on the spot.  Just kidding.  But anyone who wanted to could have made the choice to actually do that, which, I think, is pretty cool.

This one tip from Sudbury could save American democracy

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[Ed: We, as a school, do not take any position on the candidates in any election.]

The 2016 presidential election has delivered us many novelties and peculiarities, and its outcome will likewise be historically notable, whatever it is, and will surely deserve prime real estate in all of Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not museums.  Many political scientists believe the candidates for the two major parties are, as a pair, the most disliked by the American citizenry in any presidential election to date.  This aspect of the election, however, is not novel, and people have been griping loudly about it for several decades already.  Take this 1987 quotation from Hedley Donovan, then editor in chief of Time magazine, for example:

How did the machinery for identifying potential presidents, nominating candidates, and choosing winners come to be so seriously out of sync with what the electorate itself sees as the modern requirements of the office. From this literate democratic society of 236 million people, compare the political leadership we are now producing with …the leadership of the 13 colonies in the late 18th century.  For all its familiarity, the point is still a painful one – from 3 million people living on the edge of a wilderness, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, the Adamses.

The only difference these days is that it’s been going on for quite a bit longer, and therefore it’s gotten worse.  There is some good news, though, which is that it would be really simple to make it a whole lot better all at once (the bad news, of course, is that simple does not mean “easy”).  The Republic would be well served to take a page from the representative democracy practiced at Sudbury schools and implement a version of one of our basic electoral procedures.

One of the basic rights students at HVSS have is that of choosing the school’s staff members – and what other adults get to visit on a regular basis for any reason.  This is foundational to ensuring that the school belong ultimately to the students.  The process of “electing” staff is reenacted every spring, and all candidates, whether new or returning, go through it each time.  After vetting and evaluation, the first step is called the “YES/NO Vote,” in which school meeting members vote “yes” or “no” for each candidate.  Receiving more “yeses” than “nos” does not guarantee a job; rather, it certifies that the candidate is qualified and approved by the School Meeting to be on staff.  This step represents ultimate veto authority, because theoretically it’s possible that none of the candidates are elected, and the school would be compelled to recruit a fresh batch.  In other words, it’s not possible for our students to be stuck with a “lesser of two evils” situation – they have the authority to elect only candidates they actually approve.  

If our presidential ballots this November included a “None of the Above” option, there’s a chance a wide cross-section of Americans could get behind it, effectively hitting a “reset” button on this election and forcing party machinery to produce more desirable candidates.  That would be simple, and it would go a long way to ensuring that the Republic belongs, after all, to us.

School Meeting Dispatch: Bathroom Rules

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And we’re off, almost into October, and Sudbury education is under full sail here at HVSS. I think of learning at our school as happening in three basic ways: formally – with instruction and structure, informally – with conversation, play, and individual pursuit, and communally – with collaborative problem solving in our Judicial Committee and School Meeting. Personally, I am most excited by the communal learning, and I think it’s a unique facet of the school. Here’s an example from September: last week, a motion to reserve one of the school’s bathrooms for the exclusive use of those aged 12 and up was brought before the school meeting, and a fascinating discussion ensued. Incidentally, I have a toddler, so potty humor is so hot right now at my house, has been for a while, and in fact I’m giggling this very moment, but I promise I’ll spare you, sophisticated readers, any ill-formed jokes in this post, although I will admit that the meeting was not similarly spared.

The raison d’etre of the motion was a claim that some school meeting members, in particular some of the younger ones, leave messes in the bathrooms, creating unpleasant circumstances for the more mature, considerate, and thoroughly trained members of the community. However, in this community any standard imposed by age immediately raises red flags, because we know that age is used in regulation primarily as a proxy for competency, even though it’s an unremarkable observation that each is actually independent from the other. One mechanism the school often employs to bypass this issue and ensure competence is the “certification,” whereby any user of potentially dangerous or messy equipment is trained, tested, and cleared to use. So, right away, the idea of a “bathroom certification” was floated. In this case, though, certification was considered inadequate and ultimately unenforceable. After all, everyone already knows what they’re supposed to do, and bathrooms are used privately behind locked doors. Therefore, the movers asserted, a more draconian measure was required. Still, most members of the meeting chafed at the idea of an age-based regulation, and several of them proposed alternatives: for instance, one bathroom could be locked, and the key kept in the office as it is at many coffee shops. Presumably, anyone who would bother to fetch the key would be likely to use the bathroom considerately. Or, one bathroom could be reserved for use by any member of a group which agreed to take turns cleaning it. Or, one bathroom could be reserved exclusively for those willing to “pay to play,” so to speak; even if the fee were very small, the assumption again was that only considerate users would go to the trouble. There were some less practical ideas too, like bathroom monitors and sign-in sheets. One staff member offered the opinion that the staff take turns cleaning bathrooms throughout the day, which was met with giggles from the students and icy stares from the rest of the staff. Eventually, the movers elected to withdraw their original motion to consider the alternatives they had been offered.

It was the kind of conversation I love witnessing here, or anywhere else for that matter: people identifying a problem and presenting a solution to the community, which carefully considers it and collaborates to find the best way forward. I’m fond of saying that our curriculum is responsibility and our method is freedom. Our students take responsibility not only for directing their own lives at school, but for figuring out how to share our resources and make the community work. We don’t cook up simulations of problems for them to solve, we just safeguard their right to self-governance, and they do the rest. If you attended our recent open house, I think you got a really good sense of the amazing things that happen here. It always strikes me, though, that the school doesn’t deserve much credit for any of it, because what you see here is just people, who we call “students,” taking ownership of their lives and their community, becoming themselves, and doing what people do when they are free and safe, which, simply put, is thrive.

Know Thyself – Know Thy Fun

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Early excuses. Toys and schools.

Looking through children’s toy catalogs I’m always struck by the language. Scattered throughout the pictures of all sorts of toys, plastic or wood, bright colors or neutral colors, puzzles, trucks, dolls or whatever, there are special snippets of language designed to tell me something important. But what are they telling me? Phrases like “kickstart your child’s play,” “support your child’s development,” and “piano keys that play music and encourage creativity.” They make me suspicious. The first sounds violent, the next obvious, and the last sounds absurd. Since when did piano keys not play music or discourage creativity? Phrases like “helps your baby develop from a crawler to a walker through adaptive technology” are possibly reassuring to those concerned their children might instead develop from a crawler to a swimmer, or perhaps an orthodontist. Phrases like “differentiate among colors and sizes” make me imagine my toddler sorting white and brown eggs into large, extra large and jumbo sizes in an egg factory. 

Looking through pamphlets for preschools I see more language that reminds me of the toy catalogs. I’m assured by more than one institution that sensory tables and their messy play “provide endless ways to develop and learn”. They stress that “play based learning” is a powerful method to absorb and process information and they hasten to add they also have formal instruction. As the children in question get older the language shifts more toward instruction. Similarly, the toy catalogs for older children focus more on the instruction and less on the play – and less on the fun.

But – toys are fun. People like to have fun. That’s sort of what fun is. And when someone tries to sell me toys with a long list of explanations and justifications for why these toys have value above and beyond being fun, well, I recognize these as excuses. The implication is that the fun is not the value and has to be excused with some other value, e.g., the lesson, the content, the learning, you know… the important stuff. “Yes, we made the toy fun but that was just to lure the child in. Please trust us that it’s really about important stuff.” I like the word “excuse” because it’s less polite than “justification” and it highlights, for me, the discomfort I have when I read the language and feel I’m being sold something. I especially like the word “excuse” because it’s uncomfortable enough to highlight some of my own excuses to myself.

Later excuses. My kids’ play.

I have a bunch of kids, my kids have a bunch of varied things they like to do, and I’ve noticed some consistent language used when others discuss some of those things. And some consistent excuses. 

One child showed an early love of art and a talent for it as well. She spent endless hours not “practicing” or “studying” or “learning” but just “arting” or doing whatever she felt like doing in the way of art. Most people would react to her and her art with questions about long term goals for her art, about “growing up to do art”, about “doing art to make money”, about a career as an artist, and especially about displaying her art, her skill, and herself to others. Art is a fairly respectable thing, but not like being a doctor you know, so it needs some excuses. “What are you going to do with your art?” That is, “since you clearly have this skill, how do you intend to make this a focus of the person you need to grow up to be?” Because knowing what you want to be when you grow up is one of the great excuses. This same person also is an insatiable reader, consuming written material and retaining it, faster than almost anyone I ever met. I have heard few people – but there have been a few – ask her to what greater purpose she was going to apply her reading. Reading is pretty darn respectable. It doesn’t need as many excuses.

Another child showed real enthusiasm and talent for chess. Chess is a game that gets a lot of respect. The strategy, analysis and problem solving skills required to master it are not questioned. Chess doesn’t need excuses. However, when his appetite for chess was sated and his hard focus on it waned then some minor excuses were needed to excuse the lack of interest. Tricky things these excuses. He also showed a lot of interest in some complicated card games, in particular Yu-Gi-Oh and later Magic The Gathering. These aren’t as respectable and need more excuses. Yu-Gi-Oh is a game that requires a lot of basic arithmetic and reading skills for the typical player age range, and I found myself mentioning these excuses often when describing this game. Math and reading are strong excuses and you get a lot of points if you can refer to them. The age range of Magic is older, so math and reading don’t cut it any more, but you can compete with others and talk about your performance and you can actually win money in some cases. And money is a great excuse. If you can tell grandparents that an activity involves math or reading or winning money then it makes everybody happy. And we quickly pick up the importance of making these excuses. On a trip to a surgeon, the surgeon asked him, “So, how’s school?” “Fine,” he responded. The surgeon followed up, “What are your plans?” and he replied, “Oh, real estate and law.” The surgeon nodded with a smile. I didn’t laugh. I knew he was interested in these areas, but plans? So, later I asked him how he had exactly those answers ready to say so smoothly. He replied, “That’s what they like to hear.” Real estate and law are great excuses.

And then there are some pernicious excuses, like The Great Play Excuse. This is a fairly enlightened excuse. It happens when someone is challenging a particular play activity, probably one that doesn’t have especially strong excuses in the opinion of the challenger, and you feel compelled to defend the play by saying something like, “It’s not that this particular activity is worthy, or that he or she will keep doing this forever, but they are practicing skills that will be applicable to other more worthy tasks in the future.” Everyone nods because this sounds very reasonable. And it is. And it’s also an excuse. Or The Talent Excuse, which I’ve used several times in my examples here without mentioning it explicitly, whereby you justify doing something just because you’re good at it. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that people are allowed to do things they’re lousy at. 

I want to stress that I don’t think these excuses are bad things. This is how we express value and justify our choices. And that’s great. I’m using this label “excuse” to sensitize myself to a whole class of language I use to imply what’s valuable without being explicit; to highlight my own conscious and unconscious actions that communicate to everyone else what my values are, but most especially to my children. Especially because it was the word “excuse” that triggered an epiphany for me about what I expect from my children and from Hudson Valley Sudbury School.

A big excuse. My kids’ school.

I’ve had, and have, a bunch of children in the Hudson Valley Sudbury School for some time now. And I’ve gone through multiple variations of how I talk to others about the school. I’ve worked through lots of thoughts about what I want from the school myself. I’m not one of the Sudbury parents who spends a lot of time doubting if Sudbury is a good choice. I’m straight up blunt that I’m a huge fan. 

Without getting preachy about Sudbury, I have to lay a foundation for my language. I did fairly well in public school. I aced almost everything, and went on to do well in higher education. But my single biggest characterization of my public school school experience was that it just wasted so much of my time. I met a few good teachers, was exposed to a few interesting topics I might otherwise not have been, but almost all of my formal school experience sucked up almost all of the time I was trying to spend on my own activities. Without a doubt, those activities, the ones I followed my nose to, proved to be the basis of my college and professional career, but I had to slog thru the swamp of the rest of it anyway. At least that’s how I look at it. Thus while Sudbury has many advantages, one outstanding factor is simply that the institution will waste as little of my children’s time as possible, and leave it for them, individually and collectively to decide what to do with the limited time they have. 

Sometimes in a discussion of HVSS I’m pressed to defend this or that aspect – “How will they ever learn math? How will they learn to read? How can they get exposed to enough stuff? Who’s going to direct them? How can you trust them? It must be chaos! Etc. Ad nauseum.” You know the list. It’s possible to defend each of these questions robustly, but the most particular and pernicious challenge goes something like, “What do mean they just get to run around having fun all the time? How is having fun going to relate to The Real World? When are they going to get down to the really important stuff?” You know, the stuff other than having fun. And so there is another excellent answer I learned. I would often reply, “My kids have just one job at that school and that is to figure out what they want to do.” They have plenty of time. They really only have to do that one thing and I’d be thrilled. Just figure out what you want to do. I point out that I have professionally interviewed some high scoring college graduates who didn’t have any idea what they wanted to do, nor even knew that they were allowed to want anything at all. These very smart people would sit across from me and answer questions like they were taking a quiz and never turn on, never engage. Their education never left them the time to get so bored that they had to dig themselves out of the boredom with the only tools they could actually call their own: their own desire. And I never hired any of those people because I knew they weren’t going to help me solve many problems that wouldn’t get solved without them. Expressed this way, many people understand this concern. Most parents have this vague nagging cloud hanging over them: “What will my kid do? Like, eventually.” And you know what? Almost always people are really impressed with this answer; with this excuse: You have to figure out what you want to do.

And that was my epiphany. Even when I was doing my best to leave my kids as free as I could to take away what they would from their experience in school, I was still defining the standard for that experience. And that’s OK. I’m a parent. We communicate standards, among other things. This most excellent excuse was my best response for almost ten years. But then I had a moment of clarity of what i wanted even more that they take away from the experience. I wanted them to have fun. But why?

My Current Excuse. Know Thyself.

Student performing in music video shot at HVSSIt’s lovely to find a thing that you like, something you like to do, someone you like to be, or someone you like to be with. But one day you’re going to wake up and the world won’t look the same, and food won’t taste the same, and your passions will have shifted while you were busy fulfilling them; even making the big bucks, or winning the big awards, or accomplishing whatever you had set out to accomplish. A day may come, will come, when you don’t know what you want. Many such days may occur. And that’s OK. You may be ten, fifteen, thirty, forty-five or seventy years old. You may have just scored a major victory in your field or you may have been depressingly unproductive lately. And then, things change. So what do you do? Well, what did you do the first time? What is your previous experience falling into a passion?

What’s fun? What feels good? What do you want to do? How do you know what you want to do? Do you recognize passion in yourself? How do you recognize passion? Maybe these seem like simple questions. Maybe they seem silly. More and more I think these are the most important questions one can examine. And more and more I’m interested in my children having the opportunity to answer this question.This one question is central to your existential definition. 

So what do you do? Well, hopefully you have some practice at sniffing around looking for some passion. Hopefully you have multiple experiences of what it’s like to be looking for an interest and randomly or purposely walking into one so that you have some practice in recognizing an interest when it appears. Hopefully you had some time to be with yourself as yourself had some experiences of joy and fun and passion. But let me stress, I’m not primarily concerned with which experiences my kids have or which thing they’ve landed on right now. I want my kids to have a chance to become sensitive to what it feels like to fall in love, to fall in love with yourself, to recognize a passion and take hold of it. A particular passion itself is not my hope for them. I want them to have the chance to learn something about recognizing mutual passion between themselves and the world when it comes along. I want them to learn self-awareness of desirable opportunity knocking on their door, and have some practice answering.

That’s my current excuse and I’m sticking with it for now.