It Feels Good

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

Know Thyself – Know Thy Fun

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. 

Learning to Unplug from the Cultural Grid

A Fragment of a Sudbury Parent’s Journey

The day we offered the option to homeschool to our children will be etched in my mind forever. Not because it felt so radical (which it did), not because it scared the pants off me to think of the responsibility (which it did), and not because they were excited to “get out of school” (though they were), but because of this surprise experience: an actual felt sense of wholeness and enormous love came like a substantive wind of God through the living room where we were talking with our children. It was so startling and palpable, that I nearly gasped at the “third” entity that had graced the group of us so suddenly. Later, and in private, I asked my husband if he had felt this sensation as I had. He nodded and agreed he felt something like a delivery of love and wholeness as well. And suddenly, we were a family again. No longer were we squashed and pushed around by always trying to meet the demands of the system.

Having rarely been set free from this in my life, I was completely amazed at the feeling of connection that came back to our family, reminding me of the earlier years when both my children were still un-indoctrinated with a “have-to-now,” life style.

When my eldest daughter, then nearly eleven, was given the option (which she took wholeheartedly) to homeschool, she stopped giving me her forehead (face tilted down) as her kiss goodnight. Instead she started turning her full face to me with outstretched arms and kissing me right back! Whoa. That was a big shift. It appeared to me that previously, like a prisoner, she had to keep her feelings of release at bay each evening because I, her prison guard, would be insisting she return to the same grim environment the following Monday. She could not allow herself real relaxation, because then she would have to go through the painful experience of re-detaching and dissociating each morning and each Sunday to return to the environment imprisoning her. I believe that this generation has consciousness that makes participation in social structures where people “lord over” them very difficult. Perhaps there is a “new human” evolving, for whom attachments must include a respect for them as whole, intelligent, and integrated beings.

Upon entering the doors at the Sudbury School for the open house, I noticed that there was no one available to engage my expectations for the usual handshakes and prepared introductions. Instead, warm but non-intrusive faces said hello, spaciously waiting for a hint of what we needed as visitors. It also felt like no one owned the building, space, or school, but instead expected that you should fill it as you like, not with “egoic mentalizations” that reflect the proscribed culture and conditioning we are accustomed to. At once I felt that I had to allow myself more space. A short while later, I had the recognition that all that hand shaking and greeting I am accustomed to is actually a kind of “sell.” “Sell” is the norm of the culture I was brought up in. In my family and community and schooling, you sell yourself by becoming articulate, learning how and who to hang with and when to drop names and by adorning proper handshaking. This way you will let people know you belong to the “right” club, or are cut from a certain cloth. Hence, it was an old and recognized structure in me that felt the respectful peace and non-pressured atmosphere at Sudbury as a discord. But as I challenged my usual internal frame, I also experienced it as hugely relaxing and pleasurable. Here there was no one imposing their will on another. After a while of exploring the physical space and finding their own way around, the group assembled to answer questions for the visitors. Again there was a deep peaceful space that was palpable as I calmed my “ready to step-up and fill the void self” back down again. Instead, I was able to notice what I can only describe as the roominess to be.

I was silent on the way home. My husband had that knowing look on his face. A look that said, “Ah. I get this and it is right!” (Sometimes I hate the certitude my husband’s radar for “right,” holds for him. It meant a new challenge to my poor over-socialized self.) Not long after, when both kids had been at Sudbury for a few weeks, he articulated what he felt so strongly was fundamentally “right” about Sudbury versus the experience of public schooling as we had experienced it: “They are getting to be themselves, and find themselves BEFORE they have to edit themselves.” What a beautifully simple way to say this. To become a self, before editing a self.

Editing the self is most evident in the nature of how the psyche develops. When we are asked to evaluate and reflect on every minute detail of everything we do, we are in fact fragmenting our children’s sense of self, and overdeveloping the super-ego interfering with states of flow, integrity, happiness and pleasure. It interferes with our wholeness and ease of being. I believe that compulsory schooling has become synonymous with ‘disempowerment,” “being kept down,” (perhaps “being kept,” period) and more poignantly, with disembodiment, dissociation and dispiritedness.

More than any other setting I can think of, schools in the 21st century are places that reify the concept of not accepting children as they are. Instead, the entire process is designed to get children to become what is pre-conceived/pre-imaged for them. To become the paper-doll who will wear the social fabric that was pre-cut for them, before they were born: this is the antithesis of the Buddhist proscription, “show me your face before your mother was born.” In other words, the less you are imposed upon, the greater the true-self development. The greater the true-self, the greater the embodiment, the wholeness and ultimately the moral integrity, that informs intelligence.

Today, I am elated by the turnaround I see in my children. They have become loving, non-fighting, brightened, engaged, natural, creative, relaxed beings. They are talking about their decisions, and how they make them. Their self-reflection is now a natural, rather than contrived, outcome of being respected and trusted. They, and we, are now living in a cohesive family flow that is in deep contrast to what we lived for 8 years as we dutifully repeated our own upbringing: we went to work, they went to school and in that process we became detached, to keep them marching with the “machine.” During our public school experience, all the pieces seemed to fit together, yet neither the beings nor the family felt whole: love and attunement degraded to depression. This depression was, I believe, a result of not activating our own autonomy and instead allowing ourselves to be identified with the role of the aggressor. We had become like the school and like the Gestapo; a top-down structure. In our role as gatekeepers for our children’s activities from dawn to dusk, I had to detach from my own natural flow and so did our children. It is well documented that relaxed attachments with one’s significant others (“teachers,” too), is critical to psychological wellness, self-regulation and to generating an authentic self, capable of passionate engagement from the inside out.

We must consider de-institutionalizing systems so our people and our planet can stop being a self-destructive force. Let each man thrive in unity, so all fragmentation and duality of mind and being, can recede to the annals of history. Sudbury does truly offer a ray of hope not only for an education for the “new human,” but also for a new humanity at large.

Ah! Unplugged and self-respected, at last!