Child Rearing (excerpts)

Written by

The following is an extract from the book Child Rearing by Daniel Greenberg.  The book is available at the Sudbury Valley School Press online store at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/child-rearing

Chapter 9 – Ages Four and Up

By age four or thereabouts, human beings have a fully developed communication system which, for all intents and purposes, makes them mature persons. They are capable of expressing themselves, of understanding what’s said to them, and of structuring continuous thought; and they are capable of doing things with their environment. You could ask whether a person age four and up belongs at all in a book on childrearing, because I don’t consider someone over that age to be a child. To a certain extent the subject doesn’t belong here, and yet society considers people to be children until a much older age than four, and so we have to discuss this largely because society forces it on us.

I want to explain what I mean by a person over four being mature. The key element of maturity is judgment. At around four, people have at their disposal a fully developed sense of how to go about solving problems and how to go about making decisions; they have a sense of what they know and what they don’t know, what kind of information they need to solve problems, and when they are out of their depth. This is very hard for people in our culture to believe about children. For some reason, most people think that judgment is developed much later. They aren’t able to pinpoint exactly when –some say 13, others 16, others 18, or 21. I do not see any significant change that takes place after age four or so. When I look at a four or five or six year old making decisions, I see all the components of the judgment process that I see in a person aged forty. The process is the same, acompletely mature one, weighing the questions and the available information and the previous life experience. What does change with age is that a person gains knowledge and learning and life experience that can be called upon in making judgments. But I think you have to remember that this is a very qualitative process which goes on at all ages. A person aged fifty can have just as many difficulties solving a problem as a person aged five. A person aged fifty confronted with a new situation can feel just as helpless as a child. We have phrases for this in our language; we talk about older people confronted with difficult situations and refer to them as being “like children.” Actually, the language reflects society’s prejudices. What we really mean is that this is something common to any age when people are confronted with new situations, recognize their limitations, and don’t have the adequate data at hand. Our prejudice is that we expect a fifty year old, confronted with the need to make hard decisions, to go about making these decisions in a certain way, and what we don’t recognize adequately about four year olds is that they do exactly the same thing. There are doubtless a greater number of areas in which four or five or six year olds are inexperienced, and so they may need more help. But even that’s an argument you have to be very careful about, because there is a kind of feedback mechanism here. Four and five and six year olds don’t get into all that many situations which they find to be over their heads. As they grow older, they get into more and more complex situations, usually refraining from going in too deep. It’s something you see at all levels of maturity. People always meet with new challenges, but they generally recognize their limitations and try not to go in over their heads. So when all is said and done, the decision-making processes of a five year old and a fifty year old are quite similar. In both cases the people involved in the process can be faced with the need for new data, realize their limitations, and be stuck. It isn’t just children who are stuck and inexperienced; anybody can be, when confronted with a situation that is strange to them.

Another characteristic, other than judgment, which is often used to distinguish five year olds from fifty year olds, is learning. We often hear it said that “children still have a lot to learn.” On the other hand, we have the opposite attitude toward older people, who are held to be virtually incapable of learning; “you can’t teach an old horse new tricks.” Actually, the human being is a learning animal throughout life, from the moment of birth until the moment of death; indeed, when a human being has stopped learning, he is essentially dead. As long as there is any brain activity, learning is possible — which is probably true of lower animals as well. So to say that having a lot to learn is something that distinguishes younger people from older people just isn’t founded on any reasonable view of human nature that I can think of.

Another distinction that people try to draw between young people and older people is that between dependence and independence. People tell their young children that they are terribly dependent, and you often hear a parent say, “As long as I have to take care of this and that, you’re going to have to do what I ask, and when you’re older and independent, you can do what you please.” Whereas our picture of adults is that they are independent people. Again, I find this to be a very misleading distinction. If we think about it, we realize that adults too can be very dependent, for example, on their spouses or close friends. They depend on other persons for help, or to come through in times of crisis. We have ways of expressing this, such as “It’s good to have friends you can count on.” What we’re really saying is, that for all our independence, a large part of us is still dependent upon friendship. In a much deeper sense, modern society is particularly interdependent in a lot of ways –economically, socially, ecologically. Even the people who advocate a return to nature often find themselves in an ironic dependency upon the rest of civilization to bail them out in a pinch. You can think of any number of examples. It’s almost impossible to be in a position in which you are independent from the rest of society. So I think that people like to fool themselves a bit as far as this is concerned, especially when they talk to children. When adults talk among themselves, they fully realize that they are dependent upon each other and the rest of society, but the big stress on independence usually shows when they are talking to children. You can even compare the way parents talk to their children with the way they talk with each other. It’s rare that a husband and wife will invoke their dependence in arguments. It’s just not a usual adult frame of reference, even though they may be terribly dependent upon each other. But when children and parents argue about their differences, time and again, one of the first things that comes into the argument is “so long as you’re dependent upon me, you’ve got to do it my way.” I think it is interesting to see this double standard invoked to keep children in line.

The other part of what I want to say is that children four, five and six years old — let alone older children — are a lot more independent than we give them credit for. They are quite capable of thinking for themselves and understanding what is going on. In every sense, they have minds of their own. To me it is amazing how often adults do not consider children to be real people. The weirdest things happen. Adults often act in the presence of children as if they were not there, like non-entities. Things are often said and done in front of them as if they were part of the furniture. For example, there are many classic stories of doctors discussing cases in front of children who are patients as if the children were not lying there in full view, something the same doctors would not dream of doing in front of adults.

Another category that is often used to distinguish children from adults is play. People say, “children prefer to play a lot, and are not serious about life.” Whereas adults supposedly do serious things. Indeed, adults are careful to label their play, so that when they decide to play, they can announce the fact, in order to separate the occasion from the rest of the time when they are being very serious. I think that there’s a lot to be said on this subject. Perhaps the best place to begin is with the observation that, in less inhibited surroundings (i.e., non-starched-shirt surroundings), frolic and play is something that people engage in at all ages. For example, anthropologists frequently comment on the play they observe in so-called “primitive” tribes among adults. Of course, this is always called “child-like play” — another instance of our language clearly reflecting our preconceived notions — but the fact remains that mature people like to play. And the main reason for this is that play is a creative, natural kind of activity for an associative, curious, probing mind.

Sad to say, our society reveals itself in this area too. We are so hung up on programming adults into well-defined, set activities and fixed routines that we tend to squelch play in grown-ups. It’s not because of their age, but because of the roles they have to assume in Western industrial culture. Often, you hear a person say about someone else he has known professionally for years, and he has happened to be with on a vacation: “I didn’t realize that this person was so much fun, that he had such a light side to him.” We are always amazed to observe in others what is really a natural characteristic of people of all ages, but is repressed in the daily lives of most people in our society.

In summary, many of the differences which society claims to exist between children and adults don’t really exist. People aged four or so and up all have judgment, they all learn, they are all both dependent and independent in various ways, they all play, etc. I don’t see any grounds for distinguishing in a qualitative manner between a person age four, five, or six and a person aged twenty or thirty. At about four, a person’s body and mind have reached functional maturity, and from then on they accumulate a storehouse of experience and knowledge as they proceed along their unique path in life. Which all boils down to saying a very simple thing: that as far as we are concerned, as soon as children have reached four or so, they have to be treated like you treat any other person whom you consider an adult.

Now, you have to be careful not to draw the wrong implications from this conclusion. Thus, it would be catastrophic to deny children what is due them. All people, regardless of age, have needs which should not be overlooked. For example, all people have the need for affection. It’s not the case that you have to give a lot of affection to a four or five year old, but when a person turns twenty, you can turn cold. Affection is necessary for human being all through life. So are love, warmth, and physical contact. We accept these needs in an infant, but we sort of tail off later on in life, although they are as vital to an adult as to a child aged four. The question we have to address at this point is, “How did this differentiation between ages happen in Western culture?” This question turns out to be related to another, namely, “Why do we consider adolescence to occur at such a late age in Western culture, at puberty?” The answer in both cases lies in the nature of Western civilization and its industrialized technological society.

There are many aspects to the answer and I just want to highlight a few of them in order to present the gist of the argument. One thing that has happened is that the average human life span has increased fantastically so that people live almost three times as long as they used to live up to a relatively short time ago. The resulting population explosion has led to enormously complex problems in simply providing for all these people. One technique for managing the situation is reducing job competition by lopping off both ends of the manpower spectrum. On the one hand you introduce a retirement age to get rid of older workers (although it is inherently ridiculous to associate a chronological age with the need to stop working). This has endowed us with a society full of people who are in their sixties, seventies, and older, who are capable of doing productive work and deriving satisfaction from it, but who are forced to retire and face the tedium of enforced idleness. That is how we lop off one end of the spectrum. Then we say further that a person can’t enter the job market until at least fourteen years of age, preferably eighteen or older, with the preferred age of entry going up as the population increases. A hundred years ago people in large numbers began work at age eight or nine. It is often said that the age was pushed upward out of compassion for children. While this undoubtedly was a factor, I think the major reason children were removed from the job market was to keep them from competing with grownups. There just weren’t enough jobs to go around, and one way to handle it was to pass child labor laws.

The end result of getting the old and the young out of the job competition has been to introduce monumental problems of old age and of youth in our society because of the large numbers of able persons who have been deprived of a productive function in their lives.

Another aspect of late adolescence stems from the fact that an industrialized society, of the kind that we have had over the last century, needs highly trained robot-like people to fit into certain places in the economy. This takes time and effort. To take a human being and turn him into a robot is something that you can’t do overnight, and it is very different from training a person to a responsible role. In the old days, children started apprenticing themselves when they were still quite young; it was fairly common to see four and five year olds standing around a smithy or a weaving shop or whatever and learning the intricate tricks of the trade. Indeed, even toddlers are capable of absorbing minute details of the procedures taking place in the home – even intricate ones like how to cook, how to clean, etc. It is a mistake (that I have already discussed) to think that little children cannot be useful in complex situations. They can be. It is not the complexity that we are talking about at all. From the dawn of man little children found ways to ease themselves into complex situations gradually. Even in the most complex industrial society children aged four and up can have a vital role, can find a place of interest where they can observe and slowly master all the intricacies. It is the need to turn them into robots that takes time. It takes years to do that. There is a strong correlation between the degree of technological advancement and the length of time it takes. For example, consider science. Today, the average Ph.D in science is an uncreative robot drone who still has to go out and become a post-doctoral appointee for several years under somebody else’s guidance. Usually, he doesn’t begin to do his own work until he is in his thirties. That’s the norm in science, a highly advanced field. Why is this the case, when a generation or two ago the norm was that people in their early twenties were doing creative work? The answer is that in earlier times there were fewer scientists. There was a small group, so everyone could relax, and there was no pressure to force scientists into a mold. Today there is a tremendous amount of competition, and a highly routinized set of tasks for scientists to perform. It is necessary nowadays to prepare them for this and for that – to prepare so many solid state physicists to service industries, and to prepare so many biologists to fight disease, etc. Science is a completely different enterprise than it used to be, and if you just let everybody do what they want, if you would give them the same freedom that they used to enjoy, most of them would be doing things that society didn’t particularly want them to do. So society puts tremendous pressure on developing scientists to keep them in line, and the longer they are kept in line, the less likelihood there is that at the end of their long training they will still be independent and creative enough to break out of their pre-set mold, and the more society will be able to rely on them to stay in a rut the rest of their lives. What I have said about science holds in general: the more complex the society gets, and the more options that are open, the harder it is to mold young people into set patterns, and hence the longer it is necessary to keep them as robots, even up to an age that is way beyond what anybody considers childhood.

The question that I had set out to answer was, “Why do we have adolescence in our society through puberty and beyond?” In brief, the answer is that over the years society has required more and more time to break people in for robot-like roles, and therefore there is a delay in the period when the kinds of things associated with adolescence take place – the kinds of phenomena discussed in the last chapter, having to do with the transition from a state of dependence to a state of independence. A science post-doc goes through a period of adolescence at age thirty. Most people in our society go through their major adolescence in their late teens (rather than between one and four, when it would be normal), but they go through it again whenever they make a transition from a state of total dependence to a state of semi-independence, with all the attendant break-downs and rebellions and resentments. I think that in the kind of society that I have been advocating there won’t be the phenomenon of teenage adolescence at all. Rather, all there will be is the kind of adolescence that I talked about earlier, between ages one and four, where the really significant life changes take place on the road to personal independence. But this can only happen in a society which has no need for the kind of robot-like training that now takes place.

I want to say a few final words about the role of a person age four and up in the family. I’ve assumed that a child up to age four is the object of care and attention, as is due to a developing member of the family. It seems to me fairly obvious that once children have reached the age of four or five they become adults to all intents and purposes and can take a full role in the family, a full share of the family responsibilities. Now what their share will be depends on any given family, but they have every right and expectation to be treated just like everybody else. That means, on the one hand, they have got to carry their weight and find ways to contribute to doing the family chores, and on the other hand they have got to be given all the consideration that all the other members of the family are given in serious decision making. The part about carrying their weight is not really very difficult to conceive, because in rural families and in other cultures this takes place all the time. It is fairly common that youths age five or six draw the water and feed the animals and milk the cows. There is absolutely no reason why they can’t do normal things about the house; it doesn’t mean they have to be able to do everything. It doesn’t mean they have to be able to cook, for example, – after all, in most families not all the adults can cook. Nobody says that all members of a family have to be interchangeable parts. But it is clear to me that once children have reached the age of judgment, there has to be some way for them to carry their weight. The other side of that coin is something that is harder to conceive in our society – namely, that the same child has to have a full voice in the decision making in the family. That is extremely difficult to carry out in our male-dominated patriarchal society where usually the only person who really makes decisions in the family is the father, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred he doesn’t even consider the opinion of his wife, let alone his children. Even in families where both spouses share decision making, it is very rare to find the children consulted on major decisions. I find this state of affairs to be a complete anachronism and I do not see how it can maintain itself much longer.

Another consequence of this view is that children in principle ought to have the same mobility that the adult members of the family have. We restrict the mobility of children all the time in our society. The idea that children can regulate their time and their mobility like adults is one that we are going to have to learn to accept. I think that the realization that children are full-fledged members of the family is going to come soon after the realization that the woman is a full-fledged member of the family. In this respect, women are going to do a lot of the work for children. The major thing to break is the adult male dominance in the home. To be sure, once you break that, it doesn’t automatically follow that children are going to get a full share, but at least it is going to be a lot easier for other legitimate contenders to stake their claims. I think we will see more and more families in which the adults have equal voices in decision making, and we will see many such families accommodate themselves in giving the children a full voice in family affairs more frequently than families in which the male is supreme.

In a sense this has been an anomalous chapter in a book on childrearing, with the message that from about age four and up you have simply got to treat children as adults and stop treating them as “children.” There should be no distinction between your fundamental attitude toward a family member five years old and toward one thirty five years old.

Books by the Sudbury Valley Press ® are available from bookstore.sudburyvalley.org, by calling (508) 877-3030, or by sending a fax to (508) 788-0674. You may write to the Sudbury Valley School Press ® at The Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701. You can contact the school here

Permission to freely copy and distribute this document is given, provided that the text is not modified or abridged and this notice is included. For more information about SVS titles available electronically, check this web site periodically.

The Sudbury Valley School ® is a democratic school run by a School Meeting. Students and staff each get one vote on all matters of substance; including the school rules and hiring/firing of staff. The school has no grades, tests, or scores.

“OK, So You’re Sort of Like…”

Written by

After hearing a short explanation of our school’s philosophy, many people understandably try to link it with something already familiar to them. The most frequently mentioned “so-you’re-sort-of-likes” are listed below. We have tried to be fair, but clear, in distinguishing ourselves from other philosophies. However, all the subtleties of these educational models are not laid out and comparisons are not made from every angle. We hope that the explanations below serve to clarify what the Sudbury model is really about, and what it is not.

. . . A MONTESSORI SCHOOL? There are some ways in which the Sudbury model is similar to the Montessori approach. Children in both settings are allowed more freedom to make decisions about what interests them and how to pace themselves than in most other schools. Both models also hold the basic assumption that children are naturally curious and don’t need to be forced to learn. But Montessori children may choose only between the specific options presented by the teacher, not from the full array of activities which life itself presents. Montessori educators believe that all children learn according to specific patterns and sequences. They base classroom activities on the model’s assumptions about what is “developmentally appropriate” for each age group, and restrict access to certain activities if earlier activities in the preplanned sequence have not been completed. The Sudbury model makes no assumptions about how individual children will learn at any age. There is no expectation that one learn multiplication before negative numbers or how to draw a circle before a square. Interest is the only criterion for engaging in any activity, and satisfaction the only evaluation of success.

. . .A WALDORF SCHOOL? Like Waldorf schools, Sudbury schools care about the whole child. We are not only interested in academic success, but in the happiness and full human potential of each individual. Like Waldorf schools, we do not push children to read early, as traditional schools do. We both value play, “deep” (intensely involved) play, in particular, as crucial to the development of children’s mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual selves, indeed as the fundamental “work” of children. We both respect the intuitive wisdom of children, and take their world views and interests quite seriously. But the Sudbury model espouses no particular path of spiritual or emotional growth. Rather than listening to children in order to better guide them, we listen to them to respond to their self-determined needs. Unlike Waldorf education, we have no predetermined curriculum. We trust children to make their own mistakes, work through their own problems, and come to their own solutions, with help, when it’s needed, but without the assumption that we know the best outcome. Waldorf educators endeavor to move children, and society in general, in a particular direction, and seek to set up an environment which fosters such social transformation. By contrast, Sudbury schools seek to create an environment where children can recognize and pursue their own agenda. Children and adults together assess and modify the culture of the school through the School Meeting. The democratic process in a Sudbury school can be loud and contentious; it involves special interest groups politicking, voters making judgments, defendants being sentenced. It is “real” and not necessarily “enlightened” (although always respectful). The Sudbury model simply aims to give children access to the full complexity of life, and the curiosity, confidence, and competence to participate in — and perhaps to change — society according to their own interests, experience, knowledge, and goals.

. . . A PROGRESSIVE SCHOOL? Sudbury schools believe, as progressive school reformers do, that traditional schooling is not working. Both identify authoritarian teaching and administration as problems, and seek to reduce the stresses students experience in being coerced into learning and evaluated by “objective” testing. But the Sudbury model also rejects the notion that the alternative to authoritarianism is permissiveness — kind teachers giving kids second and third chances to shape up, trying to prevent any unhappiness, and bending over backwards to “make learning fun,” getting children to learn without them noticing they are learning. When kids are treated permissively they do not learn personal responsibility for their actions. Adults in progressive schools are still retaining the authority to grant or deny that second chance, to step in to resolve disputes, to establish the rules of conduct in their schools. There can be an illusion of freedom or democratic decision-making in progressive school, but if kids make poor decisions, adults always retain the power to step in and solve the problem for them. In the context of learning, progressive schools often try to have the curriculum follow students’ interests. But the effect of teaching to a child’s interests is, as Daniel Greenberg has argued, like a parent waiting for a child to open her mouth to speak before popping in the medicine the parent wants to give her. Children who show an interest playing Cowboys and Indians for a few hours, might be subject to six weeks worth of projects about Native Americans, regardless of whether their interest is sustained or not. The child administered medicine in such a manner may learn never to open her mouth around a parent with a spoon; the student administered education in such a manner may learn not to show interest, at least in school. Learning something new can be hard work, and children are quite capable of hard work — when they are working on something they want to do. When a student has a serious interest, there is no stopping her, and “making it fun” is often an intolerable distraction. When a student has an interest, we believe she should be allowed to pursue it only as far as she feels necessary. She may return to an important idea later, to deepen her interest, but forcing or manipulating her to deepen it will only serve to lessen her curiosity and sense of self-determination. Some progressive schools offer an array of courses, but do not require attendance. Sudbury schools do not have standard offerings, because learning to pursue one’s own agenda can be challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes boring. We think boredom is a valuable opportunity to make discoveries about one’s self. It is often easier to sit in classes, be entertained (maybe not as well as TV entertains, but still better than nothing), and avoid parental pressure, than it is to schedule one’s own life, wrestle with one’s own questions, learn how to seek the answers, and master one’s own destiny.

. . . HOMESCHOOLING? There is a particular philosophy of homeschooling, often referred to as “unschooling,” which shares many similarities with the Sudbury model. John Holt was its best known proponent, and his writings have been invaluable to us in helping to explain just how learning can happen without teaching, and why on earth a child might choose to learn arithmetic or some other supposedly dreadful subject. Unschoolers believe, as we do, that children are born curious about the world and eager to succeed in life and that kids learn best through experience and experimentation rather than by being told how and what to think. In the words of John Holt: “Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. . . They include time, freedom, and a lack of pressure.” But unschoolers, for the most part, see the family environment as the best place for children to grow, while the Sudbury model believes that, as the African proverb states, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Children and parents have complex relationships and interdependencies which make it harder for children to discover true independence within the family. In the environment of a Sudbury school, children face direct personal responsibility for their actions, without the emotional baggage that family-based accountability can sometimes carry. In addition, children are more able to develop some important social skills in a democratic school — the ability to tolerate diversity of opinion, to speak out against inappropriate behavior, and to develop and carry out group projects, for example. In most homeschooling families, the parent sees him or herself as ultimately responsible for the child’s education, while at Sudbury schools, that responsibility rests squarely with the child.

. . .STUDENT GOVERNMENTS IN TRADITIONAL SCHOOLS? Sudbury School Meetings are similar to student governments only in that they are composed of students. But the School Meeting is a participatory democracy, where every student and staff member has the option of a direct vote in every decision made. Student governments are representative — students are chosen to represent the larger student body. More importantly, student governments are hardly ever given real power over substantive issues. Elected positions serve primarily as symbols of status, popularity, and “leadership potential” for college admissions purposes. The School Meeting decides who will be staff each year, how tuition will be spent, what each and every rule of the school will be, and who will be suspended or expelled for violation of those rules. Staff members are involved on an equal footing, arguing their positions with gusto. But they are also equally bound to the rules of the school. As a free majority, students experience real control over their lives at school, and real consequences if they fail to meet the responsibilities such control requires of them. That kind of government brings a community identity and sense of individual empowerment no token school government could hope to achieve.

The Public School Nightmare

Written by

John Taylor Gatto has been named the New York City Teacher of the Year on 3 occasions. In 1991 he was named the New York State Teacher of the Year. His books include: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992); The Exhausted School (1993); A Different Kind of Teacher (2000); and The Underground History Of American Education (2001).

Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?

I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up–and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children’s lives and away from their homes and families and neighbourhoods and private explorations–gets in the way of education.

That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. And yet last year in St. Louis, I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy. Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do with that.

Then what do you make of the fact that you can’t go to school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and seconds grades here is that they don’t want to pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers at home too early.

It just isn’t worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can’t be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn’t 12 years, either–it’s nine. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the US would be $75-100 billion, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek an education.

Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbour with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from you?

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we’re in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. That’s because school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned–as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once-brilliant teachers found out.

The guild reality cannot be broken without returning primary decision-making to parents, letting them buy what they want to buy in schooling, and encouraging the entrepreneurial reality that existed until 1852. That is why I urge any business to think twice before entering a cooperative relationship with the schools we currently have. Cooperating with these places will only make them worse.

The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous “Address to the German Nation” which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

  1. Obedient soldiers to the army;
  2. Obedient workers to the mines;
  3. Well subordinated civil servants to government;
  4. Well subordinated clerks to industry
  5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.

Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.

Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty-six years after this form of schooling began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, as the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own.

You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose–which was to create a form of state socialism–gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.

In Prussia the purpose of the Volksshule, which educated 92 percent of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8 percent of the kids participated. But for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles.

Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.

There were many more techniques of training, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. “Lesser” men would be unable to interfere with policy makers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively.

One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic “All Quiet on the Wester Front” tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling.

It’s important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically–schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the moral will as well as the intellect. It’s true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped.

We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, and fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shores. If Prussia’s ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence.

In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato’s “Republic”, a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous “Know-Nothing” legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as “The Order of the Star Spangled Banner,” whose password was the simple sentence, “I know nothing”–hence the popular label attached to the secret society’s political arm, “The American Party.”

Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this–the children who could afford to be privately educated.

It’s important to note that the underlying premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children–the State is sovereign over the family. At the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted.

How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in American schools? Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th century and brought home the Ph. D. degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins.

Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann’s famous “7th Report” of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these.

By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. It that year the US Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were “scientifically designed” to prevent “over-education” from happening. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role.

In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations–not by their own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don’t know by themselves, without consulting experts.

Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers were produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams.

Dewey’s former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, “Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading.” Hall was one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.

Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word “reform” takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point.

Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that this has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling.

When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a “garden for children” in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their children. I note with interest the growth of daycare in the US and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds. The movement toward state socialism is not some historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children’s lives, and even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that this control requires.

A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.

While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defence Department. Both of these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies. This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School people are in a position to outlast any storm and to keep short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.

An overview of the short history of this institution reveals a pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case.

After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good, some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. It relentlessly marginalizes all significant change. There are no incentives for the “owners” of the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition.

What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favourable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast.

But the future is not so clear. Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness…all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood, can be called to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people.

Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a generation.

In Praise of Yu Gi Oh

Written by

Oh, how I like Yu-Gi-Oh. I am not a seven-year-old boy, but a 36-year-old mother. Since September my five-year-old son has begun his formal education at the Hudson Valley Sudbury School. One of the biggest learning tools he has embraced is that of Yu-Gi-Oh and I cannot sing its praises enough.

For those of you who do not know what Yu-Gi-Oh is let me give a brief overview. Yu-Gi-Oh is a playing/trading card system in which people duel each other based on the cards in their decks. It is similar to Magic Cards, but it is based on Japanese Anime. The cards have different values, actions and purposes. Alas, I will not try to explain how the game is played with my limited understanding. Instead, I suggest you get some hands-on dueling lessons from someone under twelve.

There are tons of Yu-Gi-Oh spin-off consumer items including everything from a television program to toothbrushes. The television show is a series in which duelers duel each other. And while most parents try to limit television time, the Yu-Gi-Oh show does teach those watching the powers of each card. New card packs come out every few months, of course, necessitating a significant monetary outlay. However, we have found that desire for new “booster decks” can create inspiration to earn and save money.

I will begin with explaining the noneducational benefits of Yu-Gi-Oh. One of the things I love about Yu-Gi-Oh is that it doesn’t require batteries. Unlike Game Boys or remote control cars, Yu-Gi-Oh can be played while camping and without recharging. I also appreciate the portability or Yu-Gi-Oh. You can bring it anywhere, especially if you have a way to contain your current deck so that it doesn’t slip out of your hand and into a mud puddle. Even if a Yu-Gi-Oh player does not wish to duel him or herself (an act apparently possible for hours at a time), a player can plan and plot various future strategies.

Now, for the educational benefits of Yu-Gi-Oh: namely reading and math. Yu-Gi-Oh dueling is based on a mathematical system of attack and defense points which ultimately impact a player’s life points. This system requires adding and subtracting numbers in the thousands on a regular basis. Playing Yu-Gi-Oh has inspired my five-year-old son Eli to learn how to add and subtract numbers in the thousands with carrying. Now, granted, the more complicated adding and subtracting he does on paper, but dueling requires quick access to calculations and thus encourages making calculations in a player’s head. This encourages duelers to develop short cuts (such as memorizing 5 plus 5 always equals 10).

Yu-Gi-Oh also encourages reading. The names of the cards have very complicated words such as Winged Dragon of Ra and Obelisk the Tormentor and each card has a picture, assisting recognition of certain words. Thus, some words become recognizable (dragon) and can be used to read the name of a new, unknown card (Slifer the Sky Dragon). In addition to the name of the card, each card has a section on the bottom that describes the powers of the card. While a dueler may not be able to read this section, he or she is inspired to do so in order to perfect the game.

An easily overlooked educational benefit of Yu-Gi-Oh is that of memorizing a complex system of rules. Let me explain. Several hundred years ago a “complete” education in the Western World would require memorization of ranks of angels. This was a very complex set of rules, names and powers to memorize. While memorization of Yu-Gi-Oh card powers, or those of Angels, may not be directly useful for running a business or learning a skill, memorization and attention to this kind of detail is what is required in test preparation (think SATs and learner’s permits) and other activities (think inventory management and anatomy).

Finally, Yu-Gi-Oh dueling has a certain etiquette. Bowing before a duel, or shaking hands after a duel may not teach the etiquette of our modern world, it does teach that different “niceties” are required in different systems; thus preparing duelers for future business luncheons. And, duelers who cannot maintain their decorum during a rough and tumble match will not be sought out for future duels.

No, Yu Gi Oh isn’t perfect. There aren’t enough female characters, the dueling is based on characters fighting, and it encourages consumerism. But the benefits far outweigh the costs. There you have it. What may seem to some adults like a waste of time, money and energy better spent on other educational pursuits, Yu-Gi-Oh can help kids to learn. So, go ahead, put that starter or booster deck under the pillow the next time the tooth fairy visits.

Learning to Trust Oneself

Written by

The following article appears in the book The Sudbury Valley School Experience, Edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg.  The article is written by Alan White.  The Sudbury Valley School Experience can be purchased online from the Sudbury Valley School Press at: http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/sudbury-valley-school-experience

Life is a journey and upon reflection I realize that, in my journey, I have been trying to recapture what was mine as a young child.

The accomplishments of young children up to the age of five are remarkable and have been acknowledged by many before me. They learn to sit up, to crawl, to stand up, to walk, to gain command of spoken language (even several languages), among other things and since almost all babies accomplish these enormously difficult tasks, we are not as awed by their accomplishments as we should be. Rather than recognizing how successful they have been at teaching themselves tasks that would be very difficult for any adult, we have gotten the idea that when they are four or five we can now take over their education and really teach them all the “important” things that they will need to know to be a successful and productive adult. We want to share what we know, offering them short cuts to our hard earned knowledge, and save them from making mistakes. Even if I were to concede that our intentions were good, which is not at all a foregone conclusion, I would argue that we have never been able to come close to doing as well for our children as they have been able to do for themselves.

In 1967 a group came together to begin an experiment in education, the Sudbury Valley School, that recognized the remarkable achievements of early childhood and created a setting that would allow children to continue learning about the world without interfering. Having had the opportunity to watch the progress made by children in this unusual school, I have once again come to appreciate a lesson that I have had to learn over and over again.

Since life is extremely complex, even the most gifted of observers can notice only a facet of reality. Even then, some of the observations stand the test of time, some are modified, and some are replaced by observations made by gifted observers who follow them. This is true for all aspects of knowledge. It is in recognition of this awareness that I have come to reject all religions and schools of thought that codify original observations and will not allow them to change.

Perhaps the most important disservice adults make in attempting to help children learn is to try to substitute the adult’s knowledge for the child’s own feedback system which was so successful in the earliest years. It takes away self-reliance and replaces it with “expert” opinion. The child often becomes passive, confused and even angry. From earliest infancy, children develop their own criteria about what works and what does not. They constantly test new input against the feedback provided by their nervous system in order to correct and transform their criteria until they feel they have things right, at least for a time, at their particular stage of development. For example, their use of language in a family setting may need to be transformed when they try to communicate to others as their circle of contacts expands into the larger community, and the feedback they receive as the circle expands helps them transform the language.

Take something as basic as eating. Even the youngest of babies know when they are hungry and will drink their mother’s milk until they have satisfied their hunger. In experiments conducted over forty years ago to find out what kind of diet young toddlers would choose for themselves, a smorgasbord of dishes were provided. This research concluded that, although children would often eat bizarre meals at any one occasion, over a month’s time their food intake was well balanced. An adult population that is grossly overweight, that has to resort to bypass surgery to try to compensate for clogged arteries later in life; a population where heart attacks are one of the leading causes of early death, and where mobility is seriously curtailed by deteriorating muscles, is hardly in a position to substitute their knowledge of what is good for anyone to eat or how to care for oneself. Even for that minority of parents who are health conscious, it is a mistake to rob children of the ability to develop their own criteria for good eating and caring for themselves. Normal, healthy children are not self-destructive. They do not walk over cliffs or expose themselves to known danger. Now it is true that they may, in their inexperience, expose themselves to an unknown danger and we can not let them experiment by eating poison or walking out in front of an oncoming car, but it is the rule and not the exception that should be followed. We should allow children to develop their own criteria for what is right for them whenever possible.

Like many of my contemporaries I have been struggling with an overeating problem over the years, and I have become increasingly aware of the roots of my dilemma. I am tempted to eat when I am anxious or when I am restless. I feel compelled to finish whatever is served. I also feel “starved” when my customary time of eating approaches. I have had a sense for some time now that all of these feelings about food are only partly related to any real need for nourishment. I also know that people can fast for days, or even weeks, without losing energy or feeling starved. It is only recently that I have begun to focus in on the problem. I began by fasting for three days, paying particular attention to my feelings of hunger and how my body was responding. Once I had made up my mind that I was going to start a fast I did not feel particularly hungry at meal times, so I think that, like Pavlov’s dogs, I have been conditioned to eat at certain hours of the day. Parents tell us that eating at scheduled times is for our own good, but it turns out it is for their convenience. The one who has to prepare food should be considered, but it should be stated that way and not passed off as something that is good for the child. When people we trust and depend on deceive us, it teaches us to discredit the messages we are receiving from our nervous system. Now that I am paying careful attention to when I am hungry, I am finding out that I am much more relaxed, eat more slowly, I am eating much less, and I am not eating just because I am anxious or nervous.

Up until the age of fourteen, I, along with many of my cousins, spent every summer with my grandparents who lived on a farm. There were horses, cows, pigs, chickens, cats and dogs, among other farm animals. The birth of new animals was always an exciting event in our young lives. These young animals became our favorites and we would clean and pet them. It was a very traumatic event when these pets were butchered and presented to us as part of our meals. My grandfather’s response was that it was necessary to our own survival. Had I been given the choice I would never have killed my pets, but I trusted my grandfather’s wisdom and learned to enjoy the taste of meat. Later in life I became aware that there were people who did not eat meat and who seemed to survive just fine, in good health. Moreover, there were many warnings coming from the medical profession about adverse side effects that came from eating meat. I am now a vegetarian by choice and have been for the past twenty years. I find that I am perfectly healthy, I have plenty of energy, I have lost the taste for meat, and I do not need to live with the idea that I am taking the lives of animals for my own use. Had I had the confidence in my own feelings I would have avoided part of a serious trauma when I was young and I may not have had to struggle with eating problems throughout my life.

Once you begin to question the experts you realize that there are no areas that you are willing to leave unchallenged. We all know from personal experience or from stories we have been told about the mistakes that doctors make. I have come to look at them as sources of information but to rely on my own intuition and insights as well. A number of years ago I had a severe rash on my leg that was very itchy. The more I scratched the more inflamed it became and the more it spread. I went to a dermatologist for help. He prescribed an ointment which he said would alleviate the problem but would not cure it. He told me I would have to be on medication for the rest of my life. That thought was a very difficult one for me and I was unwilling to accept it without looking for an alternative. Since I was aware that scratching only exacerbated the problem, I made up my mind that I would not scratch no matter how much my skin itched. After about a week of not scratching, the irritation and inflammation subsided and eventually disappeared. After several months went by, I scratched at my leg when I was nervous to see if the reaction would re-occur and it did, so that I was aware of the connection between my anxiety and the inflammation to skin of my leg. But I have never used the medication that the doctor prescribed and that was over ten years ago. This lesson taught me that a doctor is only a consultant and not an all knowing sage.

It has been a great effort to try to undo the education that was provided for my own good. Some of it has stood the test of time, yet there are many instances where the observations that were presented to me as truth have not stood the test of time. When it comes to my own body, I am trying to rely on the feedback that I am getting from my heart, lungs, and other organs. When it comes to information about the world, I am much more skeptical about expert opinion and always ask if these ideas really make sense based upon my own experience.

Books by the Sudbury Valley Press ® are available from bookstore.sudburyvalley.org, by calling (508) 877-3030, or by sending a fax to (508) 788-0674. You may write to the Sudbury Valley School Press ® at The Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701. You can contact the school here

Permission to freely copy and distribute this document is given, provided that the text is not modified or abridged and this notice is included. For more information about SVS titles available electronically, check this web site periodically.

The Sudbury Valley School ® is a democratic school run by a School Meeting. Students and staff each get one vote on all matters of substance; including the school rules and hiring/firing of staff. The school has no grades, tests, or scores.

Back to Basics

Written by

Why go to school?

For people who like to think through the important questions in life for themselves, Sudbury Valley stands as a challenge to the accepted answers.

Intellectual basics

The first phrase that pops into everyone’s mind is: “We go to school to learn.” That’s the intellectual goal. It comes before all the others. So much so, that “getting an education” has come to mean “learning” — a bit narrow, to be sure, but it gets the priorities clear.

Then why don’t people learn more in schools today? Why all the complaints? Why the seemingly limitless expenditures just to tread water, let alone to progress?

The answer is embarrassingly simple. Schools today are institutions in which “learning” is taken to mean “being taught.” You want people to learn? Teach them! You want them to learn more? Teach them more! And more! Work them harder. Drill them longer.

But learning is a process you do, not a process that is done to you! That is true of everyone. It’s basic.

What makes people learn? Funny anyone should ask. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle started his most important book with the universally accepted answer: “Human beings are naturally curious.” Descartes put it slightly differently, also at the beginning of his major work: “I think, therefore I am.” Learning, thinking, actively using your mind: it’s the essence of being human. It’s natural.

More so even than the great drives — hunger, thirst, sex. When you’re engrossed in something — the key word is “engrossed” — you forget about all the other drives until they overwhelm you. Even rats do that, as was shown a long time ago.

Who would think of forcing people to eat, or drink, or have sex? (Of course, I’m not talking about people who have a specific disability that affects their drives; nor is anything I am writing here about education meant to apply to people who have specific mental impairments, which may need to be dealt with in special, clinical ways.) No one sticks people’s faces in bowls of food, every hour on the hour, to be sure they’ll eat; no one closets people with mates, eight periods a day, to make sure they’ll couple.

Does that sound ridiculous? How much more ridiculous is it, then, to try to force people to do that which above all else comes most naturally to them! And everyone knows just how widespread this overpowering curiosity is. All books on childrearing go to great lengths to instruct parents on how to keep their little children out of things — especially once they are mobile. We don’t stand around pushing our one year olds to explore. On the contrary, we tear our hair out as they tear our house apart, we seek ways to harness them, imprison them in play pens. And the older they get, the more “mischief” they get into. Did you ever deal with a ten year old? A teenager?

People go to school to learn. To learn, they must be left alone and given time. When they need help, it should be given, if we want the learning to proceed at its own natural pace. But make no mistake: if a person is determined to learn, they will overcome every obstacle and learn in spite of everything. So you don’t have to help; help just makes the process a little quicker. Overcoming obstacles is one of the main activities of learning. It does no harm to leave a few.

But if you bother the person, if you insist the person stop his or her own natural learning and do instead what you want, between 9:00 AM and 9:50, and between 10:00 AM and 10:50 and so forth, not only won’t the person learn what s/he has a passion to learn, but s/he will also hate you, hate what you are forcing upon them, and lose all taste for learning, at least temporarily.

Every time you think of a class in one of those schools out there, just imagine the teacher was forcing spinach and milk and carrots and sprouts (all those good things) down each student’s throat with a giant ramrod.

Sudbury Valley leaves its students be. Period. No maybes. No exceptions. We help if we can when we are asked. We never get in the way. People come here primarily to learn. And that’s what they all do, every day, all day.

Vocational basics

The nitty-gritty of going to school always comes up next, after “learning.” When it comes right down to it, most people don’t really give a damn what or how much they or their children learn at school, as long as they are able to have a successful career; to get a good job. That means money, status, advancement. The better the job you get, the better was the school you went to.

That’s why Phillips Andover, or Harvard, rank so highly. Harvard grads start out way up the ladder in every profession. They are grateful, and when they grow up, they perpetuate this by bestowing the best they have to offer on the new Harvard grads they hire; and by giving big donations to Harvard. So it goes for Yale, Dartmouth and all the others.

So what kind of a school is most likely today, at the end of the twentieth century, to prepare a student best for a good career?

We don’t really have to struggle with the answer. Everyone is writing about it. This is the post industrial age. The age of information. The age of services. The age of imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurialism. The future belongs to people who can stretch their minds to handle, mold, shape, organize, play with new material, old material, new ideas, old ideas, new facts, old facts.

These kind of activities don’t take place in the average school even on an extra-curricular basis. Let alone all day.

At Sudbury Valley, these activities are, in a sense, the whole curriculum.

Does it sound far-fetched? Perhaps to an untrained ear. But history and experience are on our side. How else to explain that fact that all our graduates, barring none, who wish to go on to college and graduate school, always get in, usually to the schools of first choice? With no transcripts, no records, no reports, no oral or written school recommendations. What do college admissions officers see in these students? Why do they accept them; often, grab them? Why do these trained administrators, wallowing in ‘A’ averages, glowing letters from teachers, high SAT scores; why do they take Sudbury Valley grads?

Of course you know the answer, even if it is hard to admit; it runs so against the grain. These trained professionals saw in our students bright, alert, confident, creative spirits. The dream of every advanced school.

The record speaks for itself. Our students are in a huge array of professions (or schools, in the case of more recent graduates) and vocations. They are doctors, dancers, musicians, businessmen, artists, scientists, writers, auto mechanics, carpenters . . . No need to go on. You can meet them if you wish.

If a person came to me today and said, simply: “To what school should I send my child if I want to be assured that she will get the best opportunity for career advancement in the field of her choice?” I would answer without the least hesitation, “The best in the country for that purpose is Sudbury Valley.” Alas, at present it is the only type of school in the country that does the job, with an eye to the future.

As far as vocations are concerned, Sudbury Valley has encountered Future Shock head on and overcome it. No longer is there any need to be mired in the past.

Moral basics

Now we come to a touchy subject. Schools should produce good people. That’s as broad a platitude as mother and apple pie. Obviously, we don’t want schools to produce bad people.

How to produce good people? There’s the rub. I dare say no one really knows the answer, at least from what I see around me. But at least we know something about the subject. We know, and have (once again) known from ancient times, the absolutely essential ingredient for moral action; the ingredient without which action is at best amoral, at worst, immoral.

The ingredient is personal responsibility.

All ethical behavior presupposes it. To be ethical you must be capable of choosing a path and accepting full responsibility for the choice, and for the consequences. You cannot claim to be a passive instrument of fate, of God, of other men, of force majeure; such a claim instantly renders all distinctions between good and evil pointless and empty. The clay that has been fashioned into the most beautiful pot in the world can lay no claim to virtue.

Ethics begins from the proposition that a human being is responsible for his or her acts. This is a given. Schools cannot change this, or diminish it. Schools can, however, either acknowledge it or deny it.

Unfortunately, virtually all schools today choose in fact to deny that students are personally responsible for their acts, even while the leaders of these schools pay lip service to the concept. The denial is threefold: schools do not permit students to choose their course of action fully; they do not permit students to embark on the course, once chosen; and they do not permit students to suffer the consequences of the course, once taken. Freedom of choice, freedom of action, freedom to bear the results of action — these are the three great freedoms that constitute personal responsibility.

It is no news that schools restrict, as a matter of fundamental policy, the freedoms of choice and action. But does it surprise you that schools restrict freedom to bear the consequences of one’s actions? It shouldn’t. It has become a tenet of modern education that the psyche of a student suffers harm to the extent that it is buffeted by the twin evils of adversity and failure. “Success breeds success” is the password today; encouragement, letting a person down easy, avoiding disappointing setbacks, the list goes on.

Small wonder that our schools are not noted for their ethical training. They excuse their failure by saying that moral education belongs in the home. To be sure, it does. But does that exclude it from school?

Back to basics. At Sudbury Valley, the three freedoms flourish. The buck stops with each person. Responsibility is universal, ever present, real. If you have any doubts, come and look at the school. Watch the students in action. Study the judicial system. Attend a graduation, where a student must convince an assemblage of peers that s/he is ready to be responsible for himself or herself in the community at large, just as the person has been at school.

Does Sudbury Valley produce good people? I think it does. And bad people too. But the good and the bad have exercised personal responsibility for their actions at all times, and they realize that they are fully accountable for their deeds. That’s what sets Sudbury Valley apart.

Social basics

Some time ago it became fashionable to ask our schools to look after the social acclimatization of students. Teach them to get along. Rid our society of social misfits by nipping the problem in the bud, at school. Ambitious? Perhaps. But oh, how many people have struggled with reports from school about their own þ or their child’s þ social adaptations, or lack of them! Strange, isn’t it, how badly people sometimes screw up what they do? I mean, trying to socialize people is hard enough; but the schools seem almost methodically to have created ways of defeating this goal.

Take age segregation, for starters. What genius looked around and got the idea that it was meaningful to divide people sharply by age? Does such division take place naturally anywhere? In industry, do all twenty-one year old laborers work separately from twenty years olds or twenty-three year olds? In business, are there separate rooms for thirty year old executives and thirty-one year old executives? Do two year olds stay apart from one year olds and three year olds in the playgrounds? Where, where on earth was this idea conceived? Is anything more socially damaging than segregating children by year for fourteen — often eighteen — years.

Or take frequent segregation by sex, even in coed schools, for varieties of activities.

Or the vast chasm between children and adults, have you ever observed how universal it is for children not to look adults in the eye?

And now let’s peek into the social situation created for children within their own age group. If the schools make it almost impossible for a twelve year old to relate in a normal human fashion to eleven year olds, thirteen year olds, adults, etc., what about other twelve year olds?

No such luck. The primary, almost exclusive mode of relationship fostered by schools among children in the same class is competition! Cut-throat competition. The pecking order is the all-in-all. Who is better than whom, who smarter, faster, taller, handsomer and, of course, who is worse, stupider, slower, shorter, uglier.

If ever a system was designed effectively to produce competitive, obnoxious, insecure, paranoid, social misfits, the prevailing schools have managed it.

Back to basics

In the real world, the most important social attribute for a stable, healthy society is cooperation. In the real world, the most important form of competition is against oneself, against goals set for and by a person for that person’s own achievement. In the real world, interpersonal competition for its own sake is widely recognized as pointless and destructive þ yes, even in large corporations and in sports.

In the real world, and in Sudbury Valley, which is a school for the real world.

Political basics

We take it for granted that schools should foster good citizenship. Universal education in this country in particular always kept one eye sharply focused on the goal of making good Americans out of us all.

We all know what America stands for. The guiding principles were clearly laid down by our founding fathers, and steadily elaborated ever since.

This country is a democratic republic. No king, no royalty, no nobility, no inherent hierarchy, no dictator. A government of the people, by the people, for the people. In matters political, majority rule. No taxation without representation.

This country is a nation of laws. No arbitrary authority, no capricious government now giving, now taking. Due process.

This country is a people with rights. Inherent rights. Rights so dear to us that our forefathers refused to ratify the constitution without a Bill of Rights added in writing, immediately.

Knowing all this, we would expect þ nay, insist (one would think) þ that the schools, in training their students to contribute productively to the political stability and growth of America, would

  • be democratic and non-autocratic;
  • be governed by clear rules and due process;
  • be guardians of individual rights of students.

A student growing up in schools having these features would be ready to move right into society at large.

But the schools, in fact, are distinguished by the total absence of each of the three cardinal American values listed.

They are autocratic — all of them, even “progressive” schools.

They are lacking in clear guidelines and totally innocent of due process as it applies to alleged disrupters.

They do not recognize the rights of minors.

All except Sudbury Valley, which was founded on these three principles.

I think it is safe to say that the individual liberties so cherished by our ancestors and by each succeeding generation will never be really secure until our youth, throughout the crucial formative years of their minds and spirits, are nurtured in a school environment that embodies these basic American truths.

Back to basics

So you see, Sudbury Valley was started in 1968 by people who thought very hard about schools, about what schools should be and should do, about what education is all about in America today.

We went back to basics. And we stayed there. And we jealously guarded these basics against any attempts to compromise them. As we and our successors shall surely continue to stand guard.

Intellectual creativity, professional excellence, personal responsibility, social toleration, political liberty all these are the finest creations of the human spirit. They are delicate blossoms that require constant care.

All of us who are associated with Sudbury Valley are proud to contribute to this care.

Books by the Sudbury Valley Press ® are available from bookstore.sudburyvalley.org, by calling (508) 877-3030, or by sending a fax to (508) 788-0674. You may write to the Sudbury Valley School Press ® at The Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701. You can contact the school here

Permission to freely copy and distribute this document is given, provided that the text is not modified or abridged and this notice is included. For more information about SVS titles available electronically, check this web site periodically.

The Sudbury Valley School ® is a democratic school run by a School Meeting. Students and staff each get one vote on all matters of substance; including the school rules and hiring/firing of staff. The school has no grades, tests, or scores.