It’s Important to Know How to Fail

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At Hudson Valley Sudbury School, our “learning standards” are categorically different from the standards used at other schools; our goal is that students learn whatever is most salient for them to live a fulfilling life. Sometimes, what is most salient is a “life skill” like tying their shoes or remembering to eat lunch. Often, it is an interpersonal skill, like how to set a boundary in a relationship. Occasionally, it is an “academic skill” like performing the arithmetic needed to make change, or the more advanced math needed to do well on the SAT. Ultimately, for many students, it isn’t really a skill at all – it’s wisdom about how to be human, as exemplified in this reflection by one of our nine-year-olds who has grown up at the school. This is the kind of learning people tend to do when they are free, safe, and ensconced in a supportive community – the kind of learning we are fortunate enough to witness routinely at our school. 

“My flute teacher said that one thing he struggled with when learning the flute was trusting himself. But he learned that the more you persevere the more you trust yourself. 

I never even thought of that – trusting yourself. I only thought of it as something that you do to someone else, or someone else does to you. You can actually skip that whole factor – if you just don’t think about trusting yourself and you just do it. But when you fail I guess some people lose a lot of trust. 

Persevere – gain trust – persevere- gain trust – fail – lose trust – try again – persevere- gain trust. It’s an infinite loop. 

I am so used to failing in certain things, like in some games, that I know exactly what I need to do, I try again. And I don’t care if I fail, it’s normal, and I can always try again. Failure to me…instead of a little bit of sadness and anger…for me, it’s motivational. To help me move forward. Instead of holding me back.

Did you know that if you never lose you will never truly win? You have to take multiple attempts at at least one thing in order truly win – at anything. What happens is that..in all of it…there’s no…no way to win without losing. If you win every single time then it doesn’t feel good to win. It feels like a normal thing. And then when you don’t win you get extremely mad. 

It’s important to fail, and it’s important to know how to fail. And it’s important to not get mad at someone else when YOU fail. Because it’s not your fault, or their fault, or a game’s fault, it’s just life. If you blame someone else for your failure then nothing is gained, only stuff is lost, and you lose trust in yourself. If you look at failure as helping you, and healing you, instead of destroying you, then that is the key to actually winning. 

And this doesn’t just apply to games. It applies to everything, so many things: painting, building, reading, writing, sewing, acrobatics, friendship, crocheting, so, so, so many things.”

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!

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.

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.

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. 

Happy, Healthy, Strong

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HVSS does not have an official mission statement; the closest we get is the text of our graduation process, which states that, in order to earn a Certificate of Graduation, a student must prove to a committee that s/he has gained the problem solving skills, adaptability, and abilities necessary to succeed in whatever they are going onto next. This is an imminently sensible goal, honoring as it does the natural richness of humanity by acknowledging that different people will want to live different kinds of lives, and they’ll have to do different things to prepare for it.

In this post, though, I would like to float another possibility for a mission statement (not for serious consideration, just to offer another way of thinking about HVSS): HVSS’ mission is to safeguard our students’ right to be happy, healthy, and strong, however they define those preeminent states of being in and for themselves. This might make more sense as a mission statement than the language in the Cert/Grad process, because the school’s role is to maintain the environment and manage resources; we don’t actually teach our students skill sets, problem-solving, or how to adapt to new circumstances. Acquiring those kinds of things is just what happy, healthy, strong people do.

This new mission statement occurred to me recently when I was looking around school and noticing just how — well, happy, healthy, and strong everybody looked. We often talk about how capable our students become, but usually in reference to the intangible skills they build while managing the responsibility of being a student here. We don’t talk much about how our school’s program actually supports our students’ health; maybe we just take it for granted.

So it was this beautiful, sunny, warm day, and nearly everyone was outside, where people should be, especially when it’s sunny and warm. I was thinking about how I needed to produce a blog post sometime soon or risk disappointing Vanessa, and I was witnessing an amazing variety of movement while I strolled around trying to come up with something new to point out to show what an amazing place this is. I saw students slacklining, using our obstacle course, working out with the gymnastic rings, brachiating on the swingset, dancing on our outdoor stage, stalking across the front lawn like animals (big cats?), playing basketball, sword-fighting, and riding bikes – all in the course of maybe three minutes. Our students, freed from the confines of rigid desks and boring playgrounds, and with unlimited access to the outdoors, move in incredible ways all the time, building their strength, developing balance and agility, and engaging their bodies in the ways they were meant to be engaged. A group of about ten younger students is also making regular trip to The Jungle, where they practice parkour and circus arts. There’s usually a rich layer of social context heaped on top of the movement here, too, whether it’s narrative, team dynamics, or artistic statement, and we usually focus on that layer when we talk about the benefits of all the action, but I’m more and more interested in what the movement itself is doing for our students. Even when they sit down here, they’re able to ditch the typical chair/table arrangement and opt for more natural positions. And this isn’t merely about being physically fit or even free and happy either: the human brain has actually developed to engage and control complex movement. Over 50% of the brain is dedicated to movement capacity. The changes in our postural style, and the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of some sectors of the population over the last 10,000 years has led to diminished emotional and imaginative capacities – it’s actually changed our feelings and thoughts. So by limiting the opportunity for movement in our educational system, we’re not doing kids any favors, and we’re not making anyone any smarter. Because we learn new movement via “mirror” neurons, it’s even true that the less movement we see in our environment, the less our brain is stimulated. Dr. John Ratey of Harvard Medical School says that body movement stimulation is also responsible for the maintenance of executive functions like sequencing, recalling memory, prioritization, and sustaining and inhibiting attention. It’s the twenty-first century; the brain and the body are one.

When some people come to our campus and find our building basically empty and our outdoor spaces bustling with activity, what they think they see is kids wasting their time. When I look around, what I see are young apes stimulating ancient patterns programed into their brains and becoming the robust, well-rounded organisms they were meant to be. So next time someone asks you if you’re worried that your kid isn’t learning their lessons as in a typical classroom, tell them, “no, they’re too busy becoming happy, healthy, and strong for that stuff.” And then go ask your kid to take you to the park and show you a move.

Apprentice Learning

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Apprentice Style Learning at HVSS

One of the most effective ways of learning a new skill is through an apprenticeship.  This style of learning is essential to a Sudbury model school and is practiced naturally all day, every day.  This blog entry gives a couple examples of this style of learning in action.

In love with The Law

This year our Law Clerk is Eli, a 14 year old lifelong Sudburian.  “I’m interested in the whole field of law,” Eli says, “but mostly in criminal defense.  I want to see systems work… I like it when there are well defined processes to follow.”

A couple weeks ago Eli shadowed a Public Defender in New Paltz.  “Andy explained that defense attorneys don’t defend people; they defend people’s rights, which is a good way to think about it,” Eli says.  He was invited to sit in the witness chair while plea bargains were worked out, and he was allowed to attend private meetings with clients.  “It was very interesting because it’s a thing that normally you don’t get to see if you’re anyone other than the defender.  I also got to watch them test out a new device they have for people on probation.  It’s a little hand-held device the probationer breathes into once a day, and it has facial recognition software so it will catch it if it’s not the right person doing the test.  They also have one that straps onto an ankle and the second you consume any alcohol it sends a signal to the courthouse…The courthouse was full.  Most of the cases were DUIs and drug use.”  As Law Clerk, Eli has been working on clarifying the procedures of JC and the trial process; it’s been stressful, but rewarding.  He’s looking forward to setting up a schedule to shadow Andy regularly.

]It Takes a Lot to Run a Store

We have a small school store at HVSS which sells snacks and other sundries.  Last week two of our youngest students – Mae, age 5, and Macey, also 5, decided to begin the difficult process of becoming certified to run the store.  They took to the task eagerly, mentored by Shelley and Vanessa.  They have been working on looking up prices, counting money, and carefully filling out the store ledger.  They have practice sheets, and have been asking students and staff to pretend to buy things so they can fill them out.  How long will it take to gain full certification? “Probably a long, long time,” says Mae, “we have to learn more about money and writing first…and we really need to work on drawing our ‘2s.’”  What does Macey think the pair need to focus on next? “Practicing money, and doing the numbers.”  And where does their motivation come from?  Macey says,”it’s fun,” and Mae adds,  “we don’t want to bother people to open the store for us – we want to do it ourselves,” 

Commencement Speech 2015

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[Ed. Kiran specifically requested to be “roasted” by Matthew.]

I am really honored and flattered to be asked to speak again this year.  It’s always a pleasure for me to fabricate heady rhetoric. So, thanks guys.  But actually, you know, after they asked me to speak, I went to them – maybe it was just Kiran, and I asked him who he would really like to speak, and he said Steve Buscemi, of course.  I found Mr. Buscemi on americanspeakers.com and there was a form to request him as a speaker – the lowest fee you could offer was $5,000, so I offered that and added a note that really I was really only offering $250.  We didn’t get a response.  So you’re stuck with me.  

So, when I was working on this yesterday at school one of our youngest students approached me and asked if he could help, and I accepted the offer, and I’m going to begin with his contribution:

“Here ye, here ye, I am a pirate.  You will be missed.  Maybe see you on a visiting week.”

Alright.  Here we are: you’re about to graduate.  Though, it’s a little weird to even call it “graduation” here, isn’t it?  Because – as we all know – at this school the curriculum is responsibility and the method is freedom, and so the content of what a student actually does here – what they “work on” – is different for each one; and ultimately, the curriculum is just their own person, their own genius.  

So – what does it mean to graduate here?  The transcripts we give you say that really only you can tell us.  When I was thinking about this I was reminded of a passage from the prologue to East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which I read over and over again in high school.  (I have done some slight editing to bring Mr. Steinbeck up to date politically.)  Goes like this:  A [person], after [they] have brushed off the dust and chips of [their] life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”

This event is not quite as dramatic as end-of-life reflection, but here too, we are really only left with hard, clean questions, and you are the only ones who can really answer them: Did you complete the tasks you needed to? Are you satisfied with what you have done?  To what degree, in what arenas, did you do well–or ill?

So of course, at the majority of schools, the most important element on  this day is receiving a credential which shows that the recipient is capable and willing to meet sets of standards and complete set upon set of nested tasks – I’m not saying that’s bad.  Or good.  But this ceremony, I am happy to say, really has nothing to do with any credential.  We are going to perform the traditional ritual after I’m done droning on and on – you will walk across the stage, and I will speak your name and hand you something.  But there was nothing in particular you had to do to earn this experience, and therefore it’s not really a credential, which is good, because really, how much sense can we make of awarding one here? At this school that takes life itself as its curriculum?  Where we know very well that ultimately there is no credential; everyone is qualified to lead a beautiful life.  We are all qualified from birth to live a life that is good for us.

You’re already doing it.  You know that.  And you’ll keep doing it.  You’ll do better and better at it.  If you take my advice.  But – I want you to know something: there is no point in life when “you have made it.”  There is no perfected person; there is no finished product. I mean, you probably already know that, too, right – you guys all have parents.  But it is a relief to realize: the field is wide open, and you are allowed to make mistakes, because there is hardly anything else you can make on this strange planet.  And also, realizing this, you can laugh at yourself as you journey through life deeper and deeper into your own idiocy.  Try to get at least one really good laugh at your expense every year. 

But somehow, despite our absurd limitations, we all have it in us to live the life we need to live.  What I want to say about it is that – if we’re actually going to do it – we each need do it for ourselves, but it’s something we do together.  We each need to figure out how we want to live, but we figure that out through contact, connection, friction, and, intimacy with other people.  Each of us has a unique way of being in the world, and being called into it, what I would like to call a “genius,” but our genius flourishes in relationship with other people.  

We all have our own tiny lives, and our own extremely limited perspective on ourselves and the world.  We need each other to see and experience more broadly and deeply; to get where we need to go.  So I encourage you, as you go forth from here to explore our strange world, to invest your time and energy and love in people.  Find people you admire – the ones you think really look like they know what they’re doing, and follow them around.  Get with them.  Find the ones who challenge you to think differently, the ones who are brave enough to be honest with you and call you out on your shit.  We all have shit, ok?  Pardon me for swearing.  These people are out there and – they could look or sound like anything – they could be from any demographic – so please be alert and don’t let yourself think, “I associate with this kind of person, but not this kind;” find the people.  Keep finding them.  Value them.  Take good, good care of them.  Do stuff with them.  And for heaven’s sake, ask them for help.  Don’t hesitate asking – we all need help or one sort or another, all the time.  We need to ask each other.  

And approach people, to whatever degree you are able at any given moment, without prejudice.   There’s an aphorism I like: “Not-knowing is most intimate.” “Not-knowing” here does not mean mindlessness or blankness or darkness – it doesn’t mean, like, forgetting people’s names or not knowing your own address (like Kiran) or anything like that. It means openness, curiosity, awareness, and attention.  It actually means knowing that life, and people, are dynamic.  As soon as you label people in any way you have made them static – it’s almost a form of violence – and when we do it we have become, in a profound sense, dishonest.  Adrienne Rich has said a lot of great things about this.  Like,  

The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.

Don’t be a liar; you won’t get what you need.  Stay open to the possibilities. Respect people by allowing them to always be new.  I promise you very good things will happen (I’m only doing solid guarantees this year).  Or Nina will refund your tuition (our counsel wanted me to be sure to say that that isn’t a legally binding statement, just to be clear – it’s only rhetoric).

Let yourself be new, too.  Kiran, if you do this, you really might make something of yourself someday (there’s at least a chance).  Take this posture of unknowing into the rest of your life.  Always be ready for new truth, and be willing to change accordingly. That’s called humility, and it is the secret of alchemy.  Get intimate with it.  You won’t regret it.  I promise.

“Not-knowing is most intimate,” and, really, there’s nothing better than intimacy.  It is the source of all our nourishment.

There’s something else I don’t want you to know, either.  I’m going to tell a little story to illustrate – just one story and then I’ll…give up, ok?  This one is from China, and it’s an oldie.

Mrs. Sei’s horse

Mrs. Sei had a tiny farm in a small, poor village in China.  She owned a horse and was therefore one of the wealthiest members of the village.  Her neighbors used to come to her and tell her how lucky she was to have that horse because could plow much more field and have a larger crop and take better care of her family than most people in the village.  Mrs. Sei was a very wise woman so she would never say anything back.  She’d just nod her head or shrug her shoulders.  One day, the horse ran away.  All the neighbors came and told Mrs. Sei how unlucky she was, and Mrs. Sei shrugged her shoulders and nodded her head.  But – the next week, the horse returned, and a second horse was following.  Now Mrs. Sei had two horses! And-the second horse was bigger and stronger than the first!  You can guess how the neighbors reacted – so lucky! Mr.s Sei nodded.  The next week Mrs. Sei’s son was plowing the field with the second horse.  The second horse kicked Mrs. Sei’s son in the knee and broke it badly.  The neighbors rushed over and said, “how unlucky Mrs. Sei was to have that second horse – her son would never have been injured if she hadn’t have got it! Mrs. Sei shrugged her shoulders.  War erupted in the province and the lords began conscripting all the young men to fight.  Since Mrs. Sei’s son had a broken knee, he didn’t have to go into battle.  The neighbors came again and told Mrs. Sei how lucky she was.  This story has no end – it continues to this day.

So – I’m going to swear again: shit happens.  Forest Gump said that, for heaven’s sake.  There’s all kinds of spot-on spiffy sayings about this: life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.  That’s John Lennon.  “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. That’s Woody Allen.  It goes on and on.  What I don’t want you to “know” is what’s necessarily good or bad. Your life is an unfolding.  Don’t get too caught up on the particulars of circumstance.  The truth is we will never know how things will turn out.  It’s certainly appropriate and good to have emotional responses to life.  Just don’t cling to that.  Find a way to move through it.  Stay as present, and as open as you can, and in that intimacy you’ll find what you need to.

I’ve borrowed a lot from the far east for this talk, so I figured I might as well conclude with just a little more plagiarism. At the ceremony in which a novice Zen monk becomes a priest, the monk gives a little talk and then at the end says something like, “may there be enough rain in the heavens to wash my words from your ears.”

So.  I’m done.  Wash your ears out, guys, and keep them as clean and fresh as you can.

OK, congratulations, let’s do the dance.

Learning to Unplug from the Cultural Grid

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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!