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’s Up to You

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I’m really honored to be invited by our five graduates to speak here at their ceremony.

I’ll begin with a quote from a science writer, Elizabeth Kolbert:

“Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.” (The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert)

Well. That puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?

The point, though, is not merely that everything people ever build will be crushed into dust, but, despite that, it will be obvious from looking at that dust that something extraordinary happened during the time it wasn’t dust.  The “something extraordinary” that the stratigrapher Zalasiewicz is referring to as happening today is not your graduation.  Sorry, I mean, congratulations and everything, but it’s something else – anyone want to guess?

According to the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the professional organization in charge of defining earth’s time scale, we are officially in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago following the last major ice age.

But many scientists of various disciplines say that label is outdated.  They argue for “Anthropocene” — from anthropo, for “man,” — because human civilization is causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluting the oceans and altering the atmosphere, among other indelible impacts.  In other words, the impact of civilization on the planet has been so profound that it warrants the declaration of a new geological epoch.

Zalasiewicz is referring specifically to a great extinction – affecting flora and fauna from all corners of the earth including in the lakes, rivers, and oceans.  Headed for extinction in the near future are 40% of all amphibians, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, a sixth of all birds, untold thousands of species of plant.”  There is a complex network of causality at work, and we are at its center.  What we do affects the world; we’re doing this.  Some examples: Frogs, one of the most ubiquitous creatures of the rainforests, are disappearing, victimized by a fungus spread by human beings.  Coral reefs, aside from being transcendently beautiful and the largest living structures on the planet, support thousands of species of flora and fauna; within 50 years every single reef on the planet will be dead or dying due to ocean acidification caused by the profligate burning of fossil fuels.  

Right here where we sit – the Hudson Valley – is the epicenter of a thoroughgoing dying off of bats.  Bats, whose position in the food chain is so crucial to so many ecosystems.  They’re also dying from a fungus brought to us by human travelers.  

There have been five other major extinction events in the last 430 million years.  The most famous of course is the last one, when an asteroid hit near the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and a lot else besides.  This time, though, as one scientist puts it, we are the asteroid.  And we’re imperiling ourselves, too.  But why am I talking about this right now?  

A couple weeks ago Chet was designing a new bumper sticker in the office.  A few staff and students were throwing around ideas for a catchy slogan that would entice people to look up the school on their smartphone while they swerved around the streets of Kingston.  Finally Garret suggested the phrase, “Kids Are People Too.”  Everyone was like, yeahhh, that’s it, that’s the one.  That’s awesome.  That’s what we’re about: Kids are people too.  That insight is the starting point of this school. Our structure, our ways of doing things, our reams of protocols and policies and procedures all attempt to follow out the implications of that insight;  kids (and teenagers) are full-blooded human beings, complete as they are, even if less experienced than adults.  And so they ought to be responsible for making decisions about how to spend their time, and they ought to be welcome to take part in legislating, interpreting, and enforcing the rules of their community.  If we want responsible adults,  we ought to refrain from denying kids responsibility.

Schools always have these buzzwords – you know, these lists of words – at the middle school I taught at in MS the second year the principal came up with a list I think it was “four Rs” – I think it was four of them, and responsibility was one of them, but what was meant by it was, “do what you’re told,” and we’ll call you responsible.   And that way of thinking about responsibility is common, and it’s given the word “responsibility” a kind of dour, soggy, burdensome weight.   I mean it’s just no fun, I have to be responsible;  I have to do what I’m told.  And it’s one of our buzzwords, too, but I think we have a better definition here – our definition is something more like, “it’s up to you.”

It’s up to you.

And that is very much not dour or soggy – it’s glorious.  Claiming responsibility for your own life, for your own community, for your world is glorious.  “I am responsible!” That’s heart; that’s love. Something extraordinary is happening today, and we need responsible people.

So I want to give you some advice too – I get to do that, right, as a speaker here today?  I get to tell you what I think you should do?  The first thing I want to tell you is be confident; it helps.  If you’re not confident, pretend.  It works.  Cultivate it.  Remind yourself – Look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I am a goddam hot-blooded human being and I am confident.”  Give it a try.  And, you know, confidence doesn’t mean arrogance, or yelling or in your face, or extroverted; you can be quiet and confident.  You also don’t have to be sure you’re going to succeed at whatever you’re doing to be confident; you just have to know that whatever happens, you’re going to keep going.

You will need moments of confidence to follow my second piece of advice, because it’s risky and dangerous: don’t do what other people tell you to do. Except for me. I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t a lot of good advice out there.  But my advice is to think for yourself. And when you’re thinking clearly and carefully, oftentimes you will do what you’ve been told to do, because you’ll understand it and choose it yourself.  Mindlessly doing something other than what you’re told is equally destructive as mindlessly doing what you’re told.   So what I mean is don’t just passively adopt the dominant narratives of society; don’t passively do what you’re told.  Thinking is not easy.  It’s hard, slow work, and there are powerful forces all around us trying to keep us from really doing it.  It’s easy to allow your mind to run on autopilot, isn’t it?  It’s easy to just be absorbed into your internal monologue, isn’t it?  It’s easy to be passive.  But you can choose to think deliberately, and you can choose what to think about; I encourage you to think about the world, think carefully about why it is the way it is.  And about why your life is like it is.  Read about it.   Ask lots of questions about it.  Investigate it.  Seek out the guidance and good thinking of others, especially that which contradicts and undermines your own opinions, beliefs, and ideas.  And talk about it, and don’t be afraid to speak with conviction.  If you’re wrong, you can correct yourself later (and you should).  

A man said, “Look. This is your world! You can’t not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited it; you inherited these eyes; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don’t hesitate – look! Open your eyes. Don’t blink, and look, look – look further.” (Chogyam Trugpa)

Is anyone familiar with Indra’s Net?  It’s an image from Indian culture of the world as a net, crafted by the god Indra.  At each knot in the net there is a multifaceted jewel, and each jewel represents one thing, and each thing throughout space and time, including people, and including ideas, including each datum that is true, is included.  When you inspect any of the jewels very, very carefully, what you find is the reflection of every other jewel in the web.  Each one implies every other; each one is composed of nothing else besides the others.  And that also means that if any jewel somehow might be changed, every other jewel changes too, even if imperceptibly.  

What you do is important; it changes the world.

Something extraordinary is happening today.  You are graduating; you have been “prepared gradually; arranged, tempered, modified to a certain degree” (definition of “graduate” from Websters 1913).  You’ve done this yourself, and with the help of many others.   And it’s important.  What you do -the decisions you make – matter, even if you’d rather that they didn’t.  That’s another lesson that spending time at a school like this – where we’re all in it together – makes easier to learn.

So.  A great extinction is underway; the world warms inexorably; the oceans acidify; Welcome to the Anthropocene.  Soon Homo Sapiens will be the last living species of great ape, and we will face unprecedented challenges.  But listen to the message that the French general Ferdinand Foch sent to his superior during the First Battle of the Marne in World War I, he wrote, “My centre is giving way, my right side is in retreat. Situation: excellent. J’attaque!” I am glad the five of you are graduating.  The world needs a great community of people who are liable to respond to the situations before them, to address what needs attention, and to find joy in the hard work of creation rather than in personal worlds of pleasure and comfort, and I believe the five of you are on that path. It is a good day to graduate; it is an exciting time to be alive.  You have lived differently here at this school; take it with you.  We need to find different ways of living.  We must.  So let’s do it; let’s keep doing it; let’s do it together.  

Congratulations, and feel free to call me if you ever need to make bail.