In the late 1960s, about 40 years after the founding of Summerhill, and about ten years after Neill’s book was published in the United States, while the foment in American education which Fromm described in his Forward continued, some people in Massachusetts started to think about schooling from the ground up and from a distinctly American perspective.

In the mid to late 1960s, Daniel and Hannah Greenberg, Mimsy Sodofsky, and some others were concerned about the prospects for their children’s education. These founders of Sudbury Valley School had been involved in traditional education at various levels. Both Danny and Hannah had taught college level courses. Danny had also been involved in some curriculum development projects for public schools. The insights gained from these experiences, coupled with their memories of their own unsatisfactory experiences with education as children made the prospect of sending their children to conventional schools unattractive. They looked around at various schools, including some alternative schools which were modeled on Summerhill, and found that none addressed the issues which concerned them.

Back to Basics, by Daniel Greenberg, provides is a synopsis of the concerns and thinking which formed the Sudbury Valley School.  

These observations make it clear that Sudbury Valley represents a separate tradition from Summerhill. It might even seem coincidental that both schools adopted student freedom as their central practice. Freedom was adopted for its psychological and therapeutic value at Summerhill. With equal commitment, freedom was adopted by the founders of Sudbury Valley School, in order to embody the American ideals of individual rights, self-government, and the rule of law, which the school sought to convey and embody. Both Summerhill and Sudbury Valley hold that children should be free. The two schools reached this common conclusion, however, from strikingly different starting points.

At Summerhill the question was, ‘what can be done to make children happy and to foster their growth into psychologically healthy and well-developed people?’ The answer: make them free.

At Sudbury Valley the question was, ‘what should be done to foster children who will grow into optimal citizens of a free and democratic republic?’ The answer: make them free.

The emphasis is different in each of the two traditions. At Summerhill freedom serves the goal of psychological happiness. At Sudbury Valley, freedom, as experienced in a democratic community, is an end in itself. The two separate traditions are in practice complimentary of one another. Freedom yields psychological health at Sudbury Valley as well as at Summerhill. Life in freedom provides practice and skill in living in a democratic society as well at Summerhill as it does at Sudbury Valley. Each tradition enjoys the benefits of the other, even though their derivations have very different historical and theoretical roots.

There are differences in practice implied in the differences in approach in the two traditions. Summerhill’s emphasis on the psychological experience of freedom, leads it to favor fairness and communitarian consideration among its members. This has the apparent effect of turning Summerhill into a closely knit, family-like community. The feelings and subjective experiences of members are given overall precedence.

Sudbury Valley, in contrast, emphasizes the political aspect of freedom. This leads to a focus on due process and the rule of law, in contrast to the rule of feelings and the subjective perception of individuals. At Sudbury Valley, the emphasis is on rights rather than feelings. To some extent feelings are obliged to give way to legal considerations when weighing the rights of the members of the school. As Mimsy Sodofsky, one of the Sudbury Valley School founders, recently said in an email: "Also, the therapeutic role is, of course (and I know you must know that from the literature) not one the school looks for or accepts. It allows us to hold people responsible for their actions without us being responsible for their psyches. Which seems to be what you object to! But not I. What anyone wants to get to be, or is, can be up to them. They just have to be able to be reasonable citizens, and the rest can be totally their own invention. Certainly Sudbury schools make no claims to shape the people who attend them. Only to require a certain level of social responsibility from them, a level that the community insists on. Mimsy"

There is some contradiction between making "no claims to shape the people who attend" and the obvious effects on character formation which life in such an environment would have. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the social and political experience of freedom, and its concomitant responsibilities, is clear. The freedom of Sudbury Valley has a different locus and offers a different subjective experience to its students than the inner freedom of Summerhill. Freedom at Sudbury Valley School can be thought of as political freedom.

In addition to its emphasis on political freedom, Sudbury Valley’s design introduced a significant innovation beyond Summerhill’s practice. As has been discussed above, the design of Summerhill is partly the result of continuing certain traditions of boarding schools, without revision, while adopting freedom as a central element of the school. Sudbury Valley, however, resulted from a radical re-thinking of school design from the ground up, in the context of the usual corporate structure of an American private school. One of the most striking aspects of this reassessment was the decision not to offer classes or pre-defined subjects of study.

Sudbury Valley has replaced teachers with staff. In furtherance of the interests of student freedom, Sudbury Valley determined that the progressive education practice of cajoling or seducing students to perform desired tasks was as offensive to true respect and freedom as was the old authoritarian practice of commanding obedience to the schoolmaster’s wishes. In this sense, Sudbury Valley specifically addressed the concerns about "anonymous authority" which Fromm had discussed in his Forward to Summerhill.

In a sense, this practice of Sudbury Valley is an extension and improvement of Summerhill’s work on the psychological experience of freedom. At Summerhill, the child is free to choose whether to attend class or no. However, once he decides to attend, the form of the class is a modified and more engaging version of the "traditional" progressive classroom. The experience is guided and informed by the teacher. The content of the material is largely determined by standard course design or by the teacher’s course plan. These facts leave open the possibility, though they by no means prove, that subtle influences and projected expectations can exert a significant influence on the process of learning for the children of Summerhill.

By making the students fully responsible not only for whether they study, but for the form and content of their explorations, Sudbury Valley extends significant safeguards against the anonymous authority which might otherwise play a covert role in the intellectual life of a free school.

Significantly for The New School, this innovation also allows great latitude in the intellectual freedom of the members of Sudbury Valley. This is natural since intellectual freedom is an explicit component of the political freedoms on which Sudbury Valley focuses, but is less directly related to the inner freedom of Summerhill.

Sudbury Valley serves the purpose of political freedom in a model of participatory democracy. An essential idea of Sudbury Valley is that the skills of living in an American style democracy will be gained by living in a participatory democracy which has real and direct effect on one's daily life. Hence, it is an essentially political freedom and not inner freedom which is the goal of Sudbury's approach. Note that this is a difference in focus but not an absolute separation of the two traditions. In fact Sudbury Schools recognize the benefits to the child's inner freedom which living in democracy and having a voice in decisions afford. This is certainly one of the benefits recognized by the Sudbury approach. Similarly, though Summerhill's focus is on inner freedom, its approach also generates benefits in terms of political freedom and the skills of living in a democratic society. These flow naturally from the inner freedom approach and are not disapproved or unwelcome.

The genesis of Sudbury Valley's design was similar to Summerhill's. However, instead of innovating within the structure of an English boarding school, the founders of Sudbury Valley imported concepts of parent and student participation into the corporate structure of a traditional American private school. The daily management usually entrusted to an executive team made up of principal, vice-principal, etc., was entrusted to a democratic body similar to Summerhill's general meeting. The ownership and therefore ultimate policy discretion of the corporation was vested in a group called the Assembly, made up of parents, staff, and students. The principles of student participation were introduced into the corporate structure of the school, by allowing student membership with equal vote in both the School Meeting and in the School Assembly. Hence, Sudbury Schools represent a mix of corporate concepts and designs with student participatory elements.

The effect of this design, is a corporate governance of the school, in which students have a significant voice. The student gains practice in participatory democracy, in the sense that the child is governed by the School Meeting, but has a voice in what the School Meeting does. This principle of governance by the School Meeting is limited to some extent by a tradition of honoring the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution as tempering the scope of authority exercised by the School Meeting. Essentially, the focus of the school is not the development of inner freedom in the child, but rather the provision of a free environment in the democratic sense. The child can then seek inner freedom or any other benefit which he wishes, within the limitations of the democratic governance.

The Sudbury Valley tradition can then be seen as a complement to and extension of the Summerhill tradition. The inner freedom of Summerhill is available to those who seek it at Sudbury Valley. In addition to this inner freedom, however, the Sudbury Valley student will unavoidably be exposed to the rigors and rights afforded by the environment of a participatory democracy, tempered by individual rights and the rule of law. The pressures of this environment are to a limited extent contrary to the Summerhill goal of freedom from coercion or fear. Hence, the community of Sudbury Valley is less family-like than that of Summerhill. Since it is political rights and not personal feelings which are formally served by the Sudbury approach, Sudbury Valley is more like a closely knit small town than like a family. In deed, Sudbury Valley has been compared to the participatory democracy of a New England Town Meeting.

Though Sudbury Valley explicitly addresses itself to the issue of "learning," it does so in a practical and experiential way which is, in practice, similar to the approach of Summerhill. The non-intervention of Sudbury Valley leaves students to structure their own studies and to reach their own conclusions about the subjects they consider. This approach honors political freedom completely. However, it might be challenged as disregarding the traditions of rigor and intellectual effort which have grown up in the Western world simultaneously with the ideas of democracy and freedom to which Sudbury Valley is dedicated.

In short, though its refusal to offer classes and to structure study are consonant with intellectual freedom, still Sudbury Valley remains as focused on the day to day life of the student as does Summerhill. In essence, the challenges offered to the students at both schools are those of living day to day in the environment of the school. At Summerhill the expectations of the community might encourage a student to address and resolve certain psychological or communal issues. At Sudbury Valley the demands of the participatory democracy might oblige a student to address and resolve certain issues of responsibility to the community or duty. However, in the end, both schools are subject to the concern voiced by Erich Fromm in his Forward to Summerhill: "I feel that [they] somewhat underestimate the importance, pleasure, and authenticity of an intellectual . . . grasp of the world."

The New School seeks to answer this criticism by its embodiment of the spirit of inquiry and careful articulation which comes from the New Program of St. John’s College.

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