Why We Are Not a “School with No Rules”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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