The following is a synopsis of the concerns and thinking which formed the
basis for Sudbury Valley School:
by Daniel Greenberg
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
child rearing 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 þ 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
-- or their child's -- 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 -- 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 -- nay, insist (one would think) -- 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.