The Sudbury Valley School

The Sudbury Valley School The Sudbury Valley School is a place where children are free.

Their natural curiosity is the starting point for everything that happens at the school.

Here, students initiate all their own activities. The staff, the plant, the equipment are there to answer their needs. Learning takes place in formal and informal settings, in large and small groups, or individually.

All ages are free to mix at all times. The dynamics among students of different ages, helping each other learn about everything from human relations to math, is one of the greatest strengths of the school.

Students share responsibility for their own environment, and for the quality of life at school. The school is managed by the weekly School Meeting, where every student and staff member has a vote: an education at Sudbury Valley is also an education in hands-on democracy.

The Sudbury Valley School

Books by the SVS press are available at http://www.sudval.org/books.html, by calling (508)8773030, or by fax to (508)788-0674. You can write to the Sudbury Valley School press at The Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701. You can email the school at office@sudval.org.

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 available electronically, check http://www.sudval.org Sudbury Valley 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.

2

The Sudbury Valley School

Sudbury Valley School is a place where people decide for themselves how to spend their days.

Here, students of all ages determine what they will do, as well as when, how, and where they will do it. This freedom is at the heart of the school; it belongs to the students as their right, not to be violated.

The fundamental premises of the school are simple: that all people are curious by nature; that the most efficient, long-lasting, and profound learning takes place when started and pursued by the learner; that all people are creative if they are allowed to develop their unique talents; that agemixing among students promotes growth in all members of the group; and that freedom is essential to the development of personal responsibility.

In practice this means that students initiate all their own activities and create their own environments. The physical plant, the staff, and the equipment are there for the students to use as the need arises.

The school provides a setting in which students are independent, are trusted, and are treated as responsible people; and a community in which students are exposed to the complexities of life in the framework of a participatory democracy.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968. Located on the mid-nineteenth century Bowditch estate, the ten acre campus adjoins extensive conservation lands of the Sudbury Valley Trustees and Callahan State Park. A millpond offers opportunities for fishing and ice skating. The old stone mansion and barn are furnished, for the most part, like a home. The atmosphere at school is relaxed and informal.

3

The Sudbury Valley School

The Day at Sudbury Valley Whatever the time of day, and whatever their age, students in the school are all doing what they want to do, with great intensity and concentration. Most often students are not concerned about whether "learning" is taking place. Doing what they choose to do is the common theme; learning is the by-product.

The school teems with activity. Adults and students of all ages mix freely. People can be found everywhere talking, reading and playing. Some may be in the photolab developing or printing pictures. Some may be in a dance class or building a bookshelf in the woodshop. There are almost always people making music of one kind or another, usually in several places. You might see someone studying French, biology, or algebra. People may be at computers, doing administrative work in the office, playing chess, rehearsing a show, or participating in role-playing games. People will be trading stickers and trading lunches. A group may be selling pizza that they made to raise money for new equipment. In the art room, people will be drawing; they might also be sewing, or painting, or working with clay, either on the wheel or by hand.

Always there are people playing happily and busily, indoors and outdoors, in all seasons and all weather. Always there are groups talking, and always there are individuals quietly reading here and there.

4

The Sudbury Valley School

A Graduate Says: "I didn't really think about getting an education. I didn't understand the idea of having to artificially 'get' an education. I thought that you lived in the world and you got smarter because every day you were learning. I thought that there was no way you could get dumber unless you were erasing stuff out of your brain. It seemed to me that one day you were talking to someone about one subject and another day you were talking to someone about another, and eventually you'd get around to all of them.

"Outsiders would ask, 'What classes do you do? And you'd think, 'Classes? We don't do classes, you know. Look around. There are no classrooms here.' They'd say, 'What did you learn today?' and we'd think, 'What did we learn today? What are you talking about?' Because it wasn't as if you went into the library and learned your facts for the day. You had a dozen conversations with people. We weren't learning subject by subject. We were learning in a much more organic manner.

You would be doing a lot of different things and you would learn them in little bits and pieces that would start adding up to much bigger pictures. You wouldn't really know where it came from a lot of the time. By the time you were done learning about something, information was coming from so many different sources, from books and from people you were talking to, and from a long drawn out experience, that you had no idea how you learned it."

5

The Sudbury Valley School

One of the things most adults notice first about Sudbury Valley is the ease of communication.

People, no matter what their age, treat each other with easy respect. There is a comfortable air of self-confidence, the confidence typical of individuals pursuing the goals they set for themselves.

Things are almost never quiet, and the atmosphere is electric with enthusiasm, but not chaotic or frenetic. Visitors speak of feeling a certain order, even though it is clearly a place full of intense activity.

The students at Sudbury Valley are doing what they want, but they are not necessarily choosing what comes easily. A closer look reveals that they are always challenging themselves; that they are acutely aware of their own weaknesses and strengths, and likely to be working hardest on their weaknesses. Along with their ebullient good spirits, there is an underlying seriousness -- even the six-year-olds know that they, and only they, are responsible for their education. They have been given the gift of tremendous trust, and they understand that this gift is as big a responsibility as it is a delight. They are acutely aware that it is very unusual for young people to be given this much freedom or this much responsibility. Growing up shouldering this responsibility gives them confidence in their own abilities -- they get a "track record." Self-motivation is never a question; that's all there is.

Although the school has no curriculum, the reality is that most students develop many valuable tools that will be useful to them as adults. They learn how to concentrate. They learn to ponder ethical questions. They learn to ask for what they want, and strive to get it. They learn how to try something and relish success, and they learn how to try something and fail at it -- and try again.

They learn to know themselves.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------Beyond the description lies the reality of the school: a place where freedom is cherished, where mutual respect is the norm, where children and adults are comfortable with each other, where learning is integrated into life. Our bright, open, lively students are the best evidence of the school's success.

6

The Sudbury Valley School

The School as a Democratic Community The school is governed on the model of a traditional New England Town Meeting. The daily affairs of the school are managed by the weekly School Meeting, at which each student and staff member has one vote. Rules of behavior, use of facilities, expenditures, staff hiring, and all the routines of running an institution are determined by debate and vote at the School Meeting. At Sudbury Valley, students share fully the responsibility for effective operation of the school and for the quality of life at school.

Infractions of the rules are dealt with through the School Meeting's judicial system, in which all members of the school community participate. The fair administration of justice is a key feature of Sudbury Valley and contributes much to the students' confidence in the school.

Parents have a major role in setting school policies. Legally, the school is a non-profit corporation, and every parent becomes a full voting member of the Assembly, as the corporate membership is called. The Assembly also includes students, staff, and other elected members. It meets at least once a year to decide all questions of broad operational and fiscal policy.

7

The Sudbury Valley School

Admissions Sudbury Valley has a policy of open admissions, accepting all applicants four years old and up, through and past high school age, who have the capacity for full participation in the school's program as self-directed, autonomous members of the school's community. The school does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, or national or ethnic origin. An admissions interview gives applicants and their families an opportunity to learn more about the school. Everyone interested in pursuing enrollment must first spend a week at school as a visiting student. Enrollment may take place at any time during the school year, as long as there are openings available, and is for a full year from the date of entry.

The environment of freedom and support at Sudbury Valley has been sought out by people from a wide area. In order to attend, students commute daily, sometimes from great distances. The diversity of their backgrounds is a microcosm of the larger community; what they share is a commitment to the school's educational goals.

Graduation Sudbury Valley School offers a high school diploma to students who have, in the judgment of the school community, adequately defended the thesis that they have taken responsibility for preparing themselves to be effective adults in the larger community. In order to initiate the graduation procedure, a student must have attended the school at least the minimum number of years designated by the Assembly.

Graduates have gone on to colleges and universities all over the country, and abroad. Most are admitted to their schools of first choice. Other graduates have entered directly into the worlds of business, trade, arts, crafts, and technical vocations.

8

The Sudbury Valley School

Quotes from Alumni "We were so busy. We picked hard things to do most of the time. Everything was always, 'You have got to get one step further.' It was never stagnant. Everything was a challenge."

"School was something I looked forward to every day."

"The bulk of what you learn at Sudbury Valley is life. You learn how to deal with people and how to get things done and how to organize all the things you learn. Some of it you learn by seeing adults do it, or participating with adults. But most of what you learn, you learn from the other kids, and it has to do with life -- how you live and how things happen. We learned it together. Most of it comes from sitting around talking; an idea comes up and it sort of evolves."

"The school gave me the gift of time to let my own interests rise to the surface. When you sit down to paint, you don't just sit and paint. You have to think about what you're doing and why. Any creative effort, perhaps any effort at all, requires a great deal of thought, even reading a book. You don't just read a book. You think about what you read. Otherwise you're doing it for nothing. The school gave us the gift of time to relax, to have those things come to the surface that were there; it gave us the time for reflection, for the introspection that you need to really develop your own creativity."

"We had our own world. We were solid in our own world. It was a world of children."

"The atmosphere was a mixture of everything. You could walk around the school and find somebody baking cakes, or having a heated argument, or talking about Hinduism, or making modifications on the barn. You could go sit in the sun or you could go sit in the sewing room."

"The school made me self-sufficient."

"I believe that everything you do helps everything else you do, because if you're doing one hard thing, it's not that different from doing another hard thing. It may take different physical skills, or maybe different mental habits, but it takes the same kind of concentration and requires the same kind of thinking."

9

The Sudbury Valley School

A Few Words on SVS Scott David Gray

The Sudbury Valley School has been in operation for more than 30 years now, and several other schools around and outside our country (the United States) see our school's success and are modeling their schools on ours.

The school accepts students from ages four and up, and awards a high school diploma. It is a private school, which relies upon tuition and does not engage in fundraising. Studies of our alumni show them to be "successful" by any criteria; most have gone on to their first choice career or college, most have a comfortable income, and (the best definition of success, in my mind) most are happy people.

The physical plant is a beautiful Victorian mansion on a ten-acre campus. It is furnished like a home, with couches, easy chairs, books everywhere (rather than hidden in a library), etc. The grounds are excellent for sport and games, and the school has several facilities; music rooms, an art room, a high speed Internet connection, a darkroom, a piano, a stereo, a pond great for fishing, several computers, etc.

Students (from age four on up) are free to do as they wish during the day, as long as they follow the school rules (more on school rules later). The campus is "open" and most students come and go as they please, without having to check with an office or other such nonsense. No one is required to attend classes and, indeed, classes are rare and bear little resemblance to the usual notion of a "class." There are no tests or grades of any kind. Students and staff (teachers) are equal in every regard. The students and staff refer to each other by first name, and the relationships between students and staff can't easily be distinguished from the relations between students.

The school is governed democratically, by the School Meeting. The School Meeting meets weekly, and is made up of students and staff (one vote to a person, following Robert's Rules of Order). It decides all matters of consequence; electing administrative officers from among its own members (yes, no distinction is made between students and staff as far as eligibility for an office), deciding school rules (enforced by the Judicial committee, see later), making expenditures, submitting the annual budget to the Assembly (see later) for approval, hiring, firing and re-hiring staff (there is no tenure, all staff are up for re-election each year), etc.

The school Assembly meets annually, and is made up of students, staff, and parents of students (as most parents pay tuition, it is considered only reasonable to give them some voice in the use of their money). It must approve the budget (submitted by the School Meeting) which includes tuition rates, staff salaries, etc. It also votes on whether or not to award a diploma to any students that have requested one. The Assembly is the broad policy-making body of the school.

Within the school, the rules are enforced by a judicial system which has been re-defined by the School Meeting several times over the last 30 years. Its most current incarnation revolves around a Judicial Committee (JC) made up of two officers elected every two months (always students, ever since the positions first opened), five students selected randomly every month, and a staff member

10

The Sudbury Valley School

chosen daily. The JC investigates complaints of school rules being broken, and sometimes presses charges. If the JC presses charges against someone, and (s)he pleads innocent, there will be a trial. If a person pleads guilty or is found guilty by the trial, that person will be sentenced by the Judicial Committee. Verdicts and sentences deemed unfair by the accused (or others, for that matter) may be brought before the School Meeting.

All School Meeting members are equal before the law. In fact, the first guilty verdict ever was against staff members. Typical sentences are things like "can't go outside for two days," "can't enter the upstairs for a week," etc.

Democracy alone is not enough to create a stable happy community. The revolution-torn democratic city-states of ancient Greece are testimony to this. It is also important that personal freedoms and rights be respected. As such, the school grants the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to its students; normally in American society students are not given freedom of thought or religion (a parent may force his/her child into Sunday school), free assembly (they're not even allowed to leave their seats to go to the bathroom in traditional school, without permission from a teacher), etc.

It is understood that the "purpose" of schools is to educate. So let me put forward the reasons why persons in Sudbury Model Schools believe that freedom and democracy is the best environment for children to learn.

People are born with an amazing capacity for knowledge -- the brain. It makes little sense to assume that such a thing could have evolved (or been created, or whatever) without the means of using it also being natural to human beings. Let me list some of the more obvious "natural" mechanisms by which children (and adults) encode information about their world. Curiosity (crushed in a classroom where you must study what others wish, rather than that subject which you are burning to know), role-modeling (not easy when the only person older than you is a teacher whom you probably dislike and is almost certainly not practicing the profession you would choose) and spontaneous play (that's right out the window, for children are so restrained by school that even "recess" becomes a time for working off violent energy rather than exploring one's world).

People sometimes ask how Sudbury Valley students are "exposed" to different things. I find this a very odd question, for in reality how can a person keep from being exposed to things? We are in an age of endless information, and it takes a cell (like a traditional school) to keep a curious person from finding out anything and everything (s)he wants to know.

People naturally learn to deal with the environment in which they are placed. In a place with grades, where knowledge is spoon-fed to them and they never have any reason to make use of it apart from passing a test, students will learn to get good grades (whether that means learning to cheat, or learning how to "cram" for a test). In a place where people do what they want, they find the intrinsic value of knowledge. In a place where people are treated as adult human beings they learn that they must live up to certain community standards, but when they are treated as prisoners (read: traditional schools) they learn only that they are untrusted, and they learn to wait for the instructions and orders of others. It is testimony to the strength of the human spirit that there are so few apathetic and helpless people that come out of the public school system. (Sudbury Valley alumni, by the way, often become quite politically active in later life, and often go into helping professions.)

11

The Sudbury Valley School

Back to Basics 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.

12

The Sudbury Valley School

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

13

The Sudbury Valley School

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.

14

The Sudbury Valley School

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

15

The Sudbury Valley School

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 wold, 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

16

The Sudbury Valley School

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, 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,

17

The Sudbury Valley School

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.

18

The Sudbury Valley School

Free at Last Daniel Greenberg

And 'Rithmetic Sitting before me were a dozen boys and girls, aged nine to twelve. A week earlier, they had asked me to teach them arithmetic. They wanted to learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and all the rest.

"You don't really want to do this," I said, when they first approached me.

"We do, we are sure we do," was their answer.

"You don't really," I persisted. "Your neighborhood friends, your parents, your relatives probably want you to, but you yourselves would much rather be playing or doing something else."

"We know what we want, and we want to learn arithmetic. Teach us, and we'll prove it. We'll do all the homework, and work as hard as we can."

I had to yield then, skeptically. I knew that arithmetic took six years to teach in regular schools, and I was sure their interest would flag after a few months. But I had no choice. They had pressed hard, and I was cornered.

I was in for a surprise.

My biggest problem was a textbook to use as a guide. I had been involved in developing the "new math," and I had come to hate it. Back then when we were working on it -- young academicians of the Kennedy post-sputnik era -- we had few doubts. We were filled with the beauty of abstract logic, set theory, number theory, and all the other exotic games mathematicians had played for millenia. I think that if we had set out to design an agricultural course for working farmers, we would have begun with organic chemistry, genetics, and microbiology. Lucky for the world's hungry people that we weren't asked.

I had come to hate the pretensions and abstruseness of the "new math." Not one in a hundred math teachers knew what it was about, not one in a thousand pupils. People need arithmetic for reckoning; they want to know how to use the tools. That's what my students wanted now.

I found a book in our library, perfectly suited to the job at hand. It was a math primer written in 1898. Small and thick, it was brimming with thousands of exercises, meant to train young minds to perform the basic tasks accurately and swiftly.

Class began -- on time. That was part of the deal. "You say you are serious?" I had asked, challenging them; "then I expect to see you in the room on time -- 11:00AM sharp, every Tuesday and Thursday. If you are five minutes late, no class. If you blow two classes -- no more teaching."

"It's a deal," they had said, with a glint of pleasure in their eyes.

Basic addition took two classes. They learned to add everything -- long thin columns, short fat columns, long fat columns. They did dozens of exercises. Subtraction took another two classes. It might have taken one, but "borrowing" needed some extra explanation.

On to multiplication, and the tables. Everyone had to memorize the tables. Each person was

19

The Sudbury Valley School

quizzed again and again in class. Then the rules. Then the practice.

They were high, all of them. Sailing along, mastering all the techniques and algorithms, they could feel the material entering their bones. Hundreds and hundreds of exercises, class quizzes, oral tests, pounded the material into their heads.

Still they continued to come, all of them. They helped each other when they had to, to keep the class moving. The twelve year olds and the nine year olds, the lions and the lambs, sat peacefully together in harmonious cooperation -- no teasing, no shame.

Division -- long division. Fractions. Decimals. Percentages. Square roots.

They came at 11:00 sharp, stayed half an hour, and left with homework. They came back next time with all the homework done. All of them.

In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. Six years' worth. Every one of them knew the material cold.

We celebrated the end of the classes with a rousing party. It wasn't the first time, and wasn't to be the last, that I was amazed at the success of our own cherished theories. They had worked here, with a vengeance.

Perhaps I should have been prepared for what happened, for what seemed to me to be a miracle.

A week after it was all over, I talked to Alan White, who had been an elementary math specialist for years in the public schools and knew all the latest and best pedagogical methods.

I told him the story of my class.

He was not surprised.

"Why not?" I asked, amazed at his response. I was still reeling from the pace and thoroughness with which my "dirty dozen" had learned.

"Because everyone knows," he answered, "that the subject matter itself isn't that hard. What's hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff -- well, twenty hours or so makes sense."

I guess it does. It's never taken much more than that ever since.

20

The Sudbury Valley School

Classes We have to be careful with words. It's a miracle they ever mean the same thing to any two people. Often, they don't. Words like "love," "peace," "trust," "democracy" -- everyone brings to these words a lifetime of experiences, a world view, and we know how rarely we have these in common with anyone else.

Take the word "class." I don't know what it means in cultures that don't have schools. Maybe they don't even have the word. To most people reading this, the word conveys a wealth of images: a room with a "teacher" and "students" in it, the students sitting at desks and receiving "instruction" from the teacher, who sits or stands before them. It also conveys much more: a "class period," the fixed time when the class takes place; homework; a textbook, which is the subject matter of the class clearly laid out for all the students.

And it conveys more: boredom, frustration, humiliation, achievement, failure, competition.

At Sudbury Valley the word means something quite different.

At Sudbury Valley, a class is an arrangement between two parties. It starts with someone, or several persons, who decide they want to learn something specific -- say, algebra, or French, or physics, or spelling, or pottery. A lot of times, they figure out how to do it on their own. They find a book, or a computer program, or they watch someone else. When that happens, it isn't a class. It's just plain learning.

Then there are the times they can't do it alone. They look for someone to help them, someone who will agree to give them exactly what they want to make the learning happen. When they find that someone, they strike a deal: "We'll do this and that, and you'll do this and that -- OK?" If it's OK with all the parties, they have just formed a class.

Those who initiate the deal are called "students." If they don't start it up, there is no class. Most of the time, kids at school figure out what they want to learn and how to learn it all on their own.

They don't use classes all that much.

The someone who strikes the deal with the students is called a "teacher." Teachers can be other students at the school. Usually, they are people hired to do the job.

Teachers at Sudbury Valley have to be ready to make deals, deals that satisfy the students' needs.

We get a lot of people writing the school asking to be hired as teachers. Many of them tell us at length how much they have to "give" to children. People like that don't do too well at the school.

What's important to us is what the students want to take, not what the teachers want to give. That's hard for a lot of professional teachers to grasp.

The class deals have all sorts of terms: subject matter, times, obligations of each party. For example, to make the deal, the teacher has to agree to be available to meet the students at certain times. These times may be fixed periods: a half hour every Tuesday at 11:00AM. Or they may be flexible: "whenever we have questions, we'll get together on Monday mornings at 10:00AM to work them out. If we have no questions, we'll skip till next week." Sometimes, a book is chosen to serve as a reference point. The students have their end of the deal to meet. They agree to be on time, for instance.

21

The Sudbury Valley School

Classes end when either side has had enough of the deal. If the teachers find out they can't deliver, they can back out -- and the students have to find a new teacher if they still want a class. If the students discover they don't want to go on, the teachers have to find some other way to occupy themselves at the appointed hour.

There is another kind of class at school, from time to time. It happens when people feel they have something new and unique to say that can't be found in books, and they think others may be interested. They post a notice: "Anyone interested in X can meet me in the Seminar Room at 10:30AM on Thursdays." Then they wait. If people show up, they go on. If not, that's life. People can show up the first time and, if there is a second time, decide not to come back.

I've done this kind of thing several times. The first session, I usually get a crowd: "Let's see what he's up to." The second session, fewer come. By the end, I have a small band who are truly curious about what I have to say on the subject at hand. It's a form of entertainment for them, and a way for me (and others) to let people know how we think.

22

The Sudbury Valley School

Persistence It's a problem with words again. The way I just described it, learning sounds casual, loose, laid back. Easy come, easy go. Random. Chaotic. Undisciplined.

Often I wish that were true.

When school first opened, thirteen year old Richard enrolled and quickly found himself absorbed in classical music -- and in the trumpet. Richard soon was sure he had found his life interest. With Jan, a trombonist, available on the staff to help him, Richard threw himself into his studies.

Richard practiced the trumpet four hours every day. We could hardly believe it. We suggested other activities, to no avail. Whatever Richard did -- and he did a lot at school -- he always found four hours to play.

He came from Boston, 1-1/4 hours each way every day, often 1/2 hour or more on foot from the Framingham bus station. Like the proverbial postman, "in rain or shine, hail or sleet" Richard made it to school, and to our eardrums.

It was not long before we discovered the virtues of the old mill house by the pond. Built of granite, roofed with slate, nestled in a distant corner of the campus, the old neglected building took on sudden beauty in our eyes. And in Richard's. In no time at all it was turned into a music studio, where Richard could practice to his heart's content.

He practiced.

Four or more hours a day, for four years.

Not long after graduating from school, after completing further studies at a conservatory, Richard became first horn of a major symphony orchestra.

Richard was followed soon by Fred, whose love was drums. Drums in the morning, drums in the afternoon, drums at night. Emergency action was in order. We fixed up a drum room for him in the basement, and gave him the key to the school so he could play early, late, and on weekends.

We discovered that the basement wasn't all that isolated acoustically from the rest of the building.

It was often like living near a jungle village, with the constant beat of drums in the background.

Fred moved on at the age of eighteen after two years. We loved him, but many of us wished him godspeed.

It isn't only music that brings out the stubborn persistence we all have inside us. Every child soon finds an area, or two, or more, to pursue relentlessly.

Sometimes, it isn't even material they enjoy. Year after year, older students with their hearts set on college drive themselves steadily through the SAT's, the infamous "aptitude" tests which measure children's ability to take SAT tests -- and which colleges everywhere seize upon to help them make their hard admissions decisions. Usually, the kids find a staff member to help them over rough spots. But the work is their own. Thick review books are dragged from room to room, pored over, worked through page by page. The process is always intense. Rarely does it take more than four or five months from beginning to end, though for many this is their first look at the material.

There are writers who sit and write hours every day. There are painters who paint, potters who throw pots, chefs who cook, athletes who play.

There are people with common everyday interests. And there are others with exotic interests.

23

The Sudbury Valley School

Luke wanted to be a mortician. Not your most common ambition in a fifteen year old. He had his reasons. In his mind's eye, he could clearly see his funeral home ministering to the needs of the community, and himself comforting the grieving relatives.

Luke threw himself into his studies with a passion: science, chemistry, biology, zoology. By sixteen, he was ready for serious work. We took him out into the real world. The chief pathologist at one of the regional hospitals welcomed the eager, hard-working student into his lab. Day by day, Luke learned more procedures, and mastered them, to the delight of his boss. Within a year, he was performing autopsies at the hospital, unassisted, under his mentor's supervision. It was a first for the hospital.

Within five years, Luke was a mortician. Now, years later, his funeral home has become a reality.

Then there was Bob. One day, Bob came to me and said, "Will you teach me physics?" There was no reason for me to be skeptical. Bob had already done so many things so well that we all knew how he could see things through to the end. He had run the school press. He had written a thoroughly researched (published) book on the school's judicial system. He had devoted untold hours to studying the piano.

So I readily agreed. Our deal was simple.

I gave him a college textbook, thick and heavy, on introductory physics. I had taught from it often in the past, even used an earlier version when I was a beginner. I knew the pitfalls. "Go through the book page by page, exercise by exercise," I told Bob, "and come to me as soon as you have the slightest problem. Better to catch them early than to let them grow into major blocks." I thought I knew exactly where Bob would stumble first.

Weeks passed. Months.

No Bob. It wasn't like him to drop something before -- or after -- he had gotten into it. I wondered whether he had lost interest. I kept my mouth shut and waited.

Five months after he had started, Bob asked to see me. "I have a problem on page 252," he said. I tried not to look surprised. It took five minutes to clear up what turned out to be a minor difficulty.

I never saw Bob again about physics. He finished the whole book by himself. He did algebra and calculus without even asking if I would help him. I guess he knew I would.

Bob is a mathematician today.

24

The Sudbury Valley School

How The School is Governed "The thing that I really like about it was that all the rules were spelled out...so when I came to Sudbury Valley, the first thing I did was read... the Law Book and all the school's rules."

The school as a legal entity is a Massachusetts Corporation, The Sudbury Valley School, Inc. Because it is a non-profit corporation, there are no shareholders. Instead, the Corporation consists of the school's Assembly which, under the by-laws, is made up of students, staff, parents, trustees, and specially elected public members. The Assembly meets regularly once a year, in the late Spring, and determines all the school's basic policies, the annual budget, salary scales, tuition, and the Officers and Trustees. The agenda of the Assembly is published in advance and mailed to all members. Any Assembly member can put an item on the agenda by mailing it to the Secretary of the Corporation, c/o the office; items (with a few exceptions) can also be brought up on the floor of the meeting for discussion and vote. Every spring there is a Special Assembly Meeting for the award of diplomas.

The Officers of the Corporation are a President, who presides at meetings of the Assembly and Trustees, and whose most important power is that of calling special meetings when he sees fit; a Treasurer and a Secretary, both of whose functions are the standard ones implied by their titles.

Every year the Assembly also elects a Board of Trustees. The Board is our advisory panel, studying as best it can the various questions referred to it by the Assembly or the School Meeting and reporting back when it is ready to do so. As a matter of tradition, Trustees meetings are open to all Assembly members to attend and, where possible, advance notice is given of the topic under discussion.

The day-to-day life of the school is governed by the School Meeting, both directly and through its various agents.

The School Meeting consists of all the people at school on a day-to-day basis -- namely, all students and staff, each of whom has a vote. The School Meeting meets every Thursday at 1:00 PM. The meetings are run efficiently and formally according to strict rules of order. The agenda is always published in advance and is called the School Meeting Record.

The School Meeting has full operational authority to run the school, subject only to the policies set forth by the Assembly. The School Meeting does it all: it spends the money, hires (and fires) the staff, passes all the school rules (the permanent rules are codified in the School Meeting Law Book), oversees discipline, and sets up all sorts of administrative entities to keep things running smoothly.

It is presided over by the School Meeting Chairman who is effectively the school's Chief Executive Officer. The School Meeting also elects a Secretary to keep records.

To keep all the myriad activities of the school running smoothly, the School Meeting creates Clerks,

25

The Sudbury Valley School

Committees, and School Corporations. (These are all spelled out in detail in the Law Book and in a Management Manual kept in the office.)

Clerks are basically administrative officers. For example, there is an Attendance Clerk who supervises attendance records, after-hours use of the building, etc.; there is an Office Clerk who takes care of the office; and so on. When the School Meeting creates a Clerkship, it spells out the officer's exact powers and duties and confers its authority on the Clerk within the domain it has defined.

Committees take care of broader tasks. For example, the Aesthetics Committee takes care of all matters relating to the school's appearance, interior and exterior design, furnishings, exhibits/art work.

School Corporations are formal interest groups. They are Sudbury Valley's equivalent of Departments at other schools. They are formed and disbanded according to the needs and interests of the students. For example, there is a Woodworking Corporation which takes care of all woodworking activities; a Photolab Corporation; and so forth. Corporations are chartered for a specific set of purposes by the School Meeting and given certain powers. Funds are channeled through the Corporations to support various educational activities.

The school's disciplinary problems are taken care of in the context of the Judicial System established by the School Meeting. The details of the system are spelled out in the Law Book.

26

The Sudbury Valley School

The Judicial System "The judicial system was really important because it was so obviously justice that you were involved in... You knew how difficult it was. You were on both sides, or all sides, because you might be... a witness, or a complainant, or the alleged violator, or a member of the judicial committee."

The judicial system at Sudbury Valley is one of the keystones of the school's structure, and has long been our pride and joy. We have always felt, based on the values of the American experience, that due process of law is an essential element in a school embodying the principles of personal liberty, mutual respect, and political democracy. Early in the first year of the school's existence, the School Meeting devoted long hours to establishing the legal principles and juridical structure of the school, with results that quickly produced a stable social order and a prevailing feeling among students, staff, and parents that here everyone got a fair shake when brought before the bar of justice.

Before proceeding to the particular, some discussion is in order about the general. There are five distinct stages to the judicial process. These are, in serial order: Allegation -- A person is alleged by someone to have committed a misdeed. In the world at large, this allegation can be brought by private individuals (by which I include groups, partnerships, corporations, committees, or other privately organized entities) or by governmental agents.

Investigation -- If the allegation is considered to merit further action, an investigation is made of the circumstances surrounding the allegation. In the outside world, the investigation can be carried out by the police, by members of the justice division of the government, or by private individuals.

Charge -- If the investigation is deemed to have yielded sufficient cause for further action, a charge is made that a specific law has been violated, and the alleged violator is brought to trial. The laws concerned may or may not be written (statutes vs. common law) and the alleged wrongdoings may lead to criminal trials or civil suits. In the outside community, the charges can be brought by individuals or by government officials, in the latter case usually by agents of one or another department of justice.

Trial -- Once a charge is made, the case comes to trial. The trial must follow prescribed rules of procedure that are known and considered fair. In the community at large, the trial can be held before a judge, with or without a jury, or before an arbitration panel, with or without right of appeal, depending on circumstances; usually, however, there is some mechanism for appealing a decision against a defendant. The trial delivers as its culmination a verdict or decision. In our system, there is no double jeopardy, which means that a person found innocent of a particular charge of wrongdoing may not again be brought to trial on the same charge.

Sentence -- If a person is found through the trial process to have done wrong, that person is sentenced (by which I include, for purposes of this discussion, civil decisions assessing damages,

27

The Sudbury Valley School

penalties, etc.). In the world at large, sentencing is usually carried out by a judge, most often the trial judge, but occasionally by the jury in certain types of jury trial. There is always an opportunity to appeal a sentence on certain specified grounds.

The entire five stage process outlined ever so briefly above constitutes the generally accepted juridical system in most societies. Where societies differ radically from one another is in the way these steps are carried out the "rules of the game." In this country, we have laid great stress on having the whole process take place according to "due process of the law," a phrase which over the years has come to be laden with meaning for all Americans. Generally speaking, "due process" assures each and every one of us that we are to be given a fair shake at every one of the five stages of the juridical process. "Fair shake" is not, of course, any more specific or enlightening than "due process" in and of itself, but a great deal of legal history has given rich content to these words, and most citizens of this country, from all walks of life, have a rather good idea of what they mean.

Let's put it this way. We do not expect to be subject to frivolous or trumped-up allegations. We expect investigations to be thorough and complete, not whitewashed and not such as fabricate "facts" or suppress truths. We expect charges to be specific, relevant, and not ex post facto. We expect trials to be open, fair, not biased, and such as give full rights and opportunities to the accused to be adequately defended. And we expect sentences to be fair, and to reflect in a balanced manner society's need for rehabilitation, retribution, and prevention. Any society that does not fulfill these expectations in its legal system is considered by us to be severely, fundamentally, flawed.

Let's take a close look, step by step, at how the judicial system works. The school appears by now to have a well established tradition that all allegations of misdeeds be made by individuals, without the need for any school officials to supplement this course. This is as it has been from the beginning, and as long as there is a full complement of socially responsible people at school which, in effect, is as long as the school will continue to function according to its basic principles there does not seem to be a reason to modify this approach. For the sake of a clear record, all complaints are written, and there are plenty of people around who are glad to help the illiterate put into writing their oral complaints, by serving as scribes and assistants.

The next step is the crucial one. At the time the complaint is presented, no one knows whether it is serious or frivolous, whether it does or does not involve a breach of the rules, whether the alleged accused was or was not involved and, if so, whether alone or with others. These uncertainties are the reason an investigation is needed, and the Judicial Committee carries out such an investigation (as its mandate expressly requires). But the important point is that at this stage what we want is a report on the facts; there is yet no concrete charge, no trial, no plea.

Only when the JC has completed its investigation (and only if it has succeeded in finding out something of substance) is a charge entertained, by the JC itself. It is in the best possible position to zero in on the exact violation that appears to have been committed, and on the exact parties involved. In a very real sense, the JC is properly the school's grand jury, collecting all the evidence, and then preparing charges for trial where there is sufficient reason to proceed. And the very constitution of the JC, being a cross section of the school, assures everyone of fair treatment by

28

The Sudbury Valley School

their peers.

Once a charge has been made by the JC against someone, the wheels of due process can turn, and nothing is to stop them from turning smoothly and promptly. The JC clerk notifies the person charged, and a plea is entered. If "guilty," a trial is not needed, and sentence can be imposed.

If the plea is "not guilty," a trial must be held. The trial is scheduled by the presiding officer, the School Meeting Chairman, within a day or two of the time when the defendant was notified and pleaded "not guilty;" six disinterested School Meeting members serve as jurors; the JC, as bringer of the charge, arranges for a prosecutor; the accused can defend himself or enlist assistance in the defense; and the trial is open to all School Meeting members, as it should be.

Sentencing is in the hands of the JC. In most cases, the investigation, charge, guilty plea and sentence take place in one continuous sequence, since the overwhelming number of infractions are of a nature where this can take place with no violence to justice. In the few complex cases, a little more time is needed; but the JC's involvement from beginning to end gives it a unique vantage point from which to come up with a fair sentence, and again its constitution as a cross-section of peers is a critical reassurance of fairness to all who come before it.

When all is said and done, the above analysis reaffirms the essential soundness of the existing juridical process. By clearly separating investigation, charge, and trial, we make everyone aware of the need for clearly drawn charges, based on clearly promulgated rules; for full notification of each defendant as to precisely what they are accused of doing; for an impartial trial; for an opportunity to prepare the best defense available. In this way, due process is joined to fairness in the uniquely constituted judicial system of the school.

29

The Sudbury Valley School

Kingdom of Childhood Edited by Daniel Greenberg and Mimsy Sadofsky, from Interviews done by Hanna Greenberg

11 I came to Sudbury Valley the first summer we were open. I was seven. I was really surprised when I saw the school. The picture I had before I came was nothing like what it turned out to be! I had imagined it to be a place with rooms that had labels according to what you did inside the rooms a room that said "Science," and a room that said "Reading," and I don't know what else. My picture didn't look like the public school I went to, but it also didn't look like a house; it looked institutional.

The school is such a great looking building to a little kid, big and old and kind of mysterious.

It was exciting to go there and find out that it looked like some old mansion, where you can get lost or hide from people if you want to and not be found, and things like that. I remember just feeling joy at being at this place where I could do what I wanted where I wanted. The school was physically beautiful, and to be around this beautiful place and not be constrained was wonderful.

The grounds were also incredible, and walking around on the rocks the rocks were really frightening!

They were big. They were several times higher than I was, and people were jumping around on them. It amazed me that people were just going up there to this far away, scary place and nobody was attempting to make them not do that.

I had gone to public school the year before. I had ambivalent feelings about it. I liked learning how to read. That was fun, and the teacher I had was a nice woman. When fall came and I was at Sudbury Valley instead of in public school, I started to get worried about whether I was going to be learning enough, and whether I was going to be missing things; so I went back to public school at the beginning of second grade, for maybe a week. That was long enough for me to realize that I had made a mistake. Second grade in public school was horrible, boring, and incredibly tedious. So I came back and re- enrolled at Sudbury Valley.

The whole time I was enrolled, I wasn't concerned about my education. I never felt I needed to create a "program of studies" for myself; I didn't ever again feel that was an important thing to do. I knew enough people outside of school to feel like I wasn't any worse educated than they were!

I never asked myself, "Am I satisfied with the way I'm being educated?" I usually just came to school and tried to figure out what was going on, and if there was something going on that I was interested in, then I would do it. If there wasn't, I would go read. In general, I don't remember thinking, "Is what this person is doing ok?" I had the idea that it wasn't really my business what someone was doing. He was doing what he was doing and that was sort of the beginning and the end of it.

The first thing I remember clearly spending lots of time doing was the Plasticene Village, a table in the art room taken over for full-time use for plasticene. On some days, I would do it from the moment I got there to the moment I left. I don't know how long it lasted, but it seems like it went on forever! We made houses and people; those were pretty basic. The more complicated

30

The Sudbury Valley School

things were machinery and stuff like that. You had to convince people your machinery worked, so you needed some superficial knowledge of how it ought to work, and you had to be able to point to where the different parts were. It was wonderful fun.

All of us graduated many years ago, and it turns out that it wasn't a bad thing at all to be doing plasticene all day for a year or so! But I don't know how I would have dealt with that if I was a staff member then, and a parent said to me, "I can't believe it. My kid is playing with plasticene for a whole year. This is terrible." It's hard. I'd have to tell the parent, "Look, what's wrong with your kid doing this? He's having fun, he's probably learning stuff, although who knows what." I don't know how the staff dealt with it.

Until I was thirteen or fourteen, I read a lot of science fiction and not much of anything else.

At thirteen or so, I started reading other things, like Russian literature; that was because everybody was interested in Solzhenitsin. His books had just been coming out in the West and people were reading them and talking about them. That was the first Russian literature that I read. I read The Gulag Archipelago, Part I and I think I may have read Part II sometime, but I was much more interested in his novels: The Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life. Then I started reading a lot of other Russian literature too, because in his novels there are references to other things and that always made me curious to know what the other things were. I was always reading at school, sometimes a lot. Just like there were days when I would play with plasticene all day, there were days when I would come in and read all day.

Outside, I played a lot of soccer. The soccer games were really great, mostly because of Mitch. Everybody would play, people of all different sizes. Mitch always made sure that all the little kids got treated fairly and that nobody got left out. He was gentle, and I think he held the other big kids who may not have been so gentle in check. I thought of him as sort of a role model; he was the only older kid who I looked up to.

The other thing I did outside a lot was play war. We used to go off either to the area around the barn and stables or behind Dennis' house [no longer there ed.]. It was always an all day thing.

You would go out mid-morning and you wouldn't come back until it was time to go home. This was a problem because people weren't ever sure when they were going home and parents would come looking for them and they just wouldn't be there; and their mothers would have no way of finding them.

The game involved dividing the group into two teams, and then everybody would have a stick and you would kind of tramp around hiding in the jungle and in the forest and trying to shoot people on the other team with your stick. If you got shot you had to walk, usually to the parking lot, and then come back, and then you could be alive again. This was a big incentive to stay alive, because that's a long walk!

People always argued about whether they got shot. Somebody would be running from one tree to another and say, "You couldn't have hit me," or "What kind of a gun do you have?" and things like that. We played that mostly in the spring or fall, because in the winter it's just too cold to sit still behind a tree for hours and hours.

During the winter sledding was the thing. We used to sled down to the millhouse, which was kind of bad because the millhouse was at the bottom! If the ice was frozen, we used to sled down the hill toward the pond instead, which was much more fun because we'd go sliding across the pond.

You could go from one end of the pond to the other on the speed you picked up on the hill.

At one time, there was a fort that some kids built, that I used to go to. It was a secret for a

31

The Sudbury Valley School

while. Frank hit me once when I tried to follow him there, but somehow I ended up going anyway.

It was kind of neat because it was made out of tree limbs, draped over a frame, with pine branches on top of the tree limbs. If you were inside of this thing, I doubt that you would stay dry in the rain, but you felt pretty sheltered. There was also a "well" there. It was this big hole that they had dug, and it wasn't really a well. It was just a deep hole that would fill up with rain water all the time.

My favorite room in the school was the sewing room, and the place that I particularly liked sitting was near the solarium. I can read in a noisy room, but conversations sometimes bothered me, and then I'd go to a quieter place; or if I was in a quiet room, I would try to get people to be quiet, which was sometimes not so easy.

When I first got to the school we all had the idea that the school was going to be a raving success and that pretty soon we were going to have 1,000 students and lots of buildings and things.

This sounded great, and it was something I thought would happen. Later on, when the school wasn't that big I was conscious of there not being many people around, and I would really have liked to have a lot more people to talk to. There wasn't anybody else interested in things like algebra and I felt it would have been fun to talk to somebody else who was interested, not to get help, but just to talk about it.

While I was there, I desperately wanted the school to be bigger. I think for me as a student there, it would have been much better if it was bigger. Most of the time I was there, the only friends I had my age were Gabriel, Judy, and Rudy, and that wasn't because I wasn't friendly. That was because there wasn't anybody else my age. The people who were my friends were really intelligent and interesting, but it would have been great to have more. I have to add that I don't remember feeling that individual friendships were that important. What was important was being able to join a group of people that I liked.

I did math sometimes during those years not generally at school, but usually at home with a mathematics book written for adults to learn elementary mathematics. Everything that I learned before I started to learn algebra I learned out of that book, or by asking one of my parents to show me.

After I had sort of figured out all the elementary things to do, I wasn't very interested in it.

Then, at some point, I became interested in understanding why and how nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors work. So I would go and pick up books that I couldn't understand. The first thing that was identifiable as being incomprehensible was the mathematics in the books. It was easy to see that one of the reasons I couldn't understand anything was because the mathematics made no sense to me whatsoever, because it was algebra and I had never thought about algebra at all. There were other things too, but that was the first problem. So I decided to learn algebra so I'd be able to figure out things more easily. I looked at the algebra textbooks in the library until I found one that seemed OK and I just read it and did all the problems. It was something I did on my own. I didn't need any help with it. When something puzzled me I just worked at it until I figured it out. There were people I could have turned to, but there was nobody that I did turn to.

The algebra took me something less than a year. There were two books, Algebra I and Algebra II. The thing that was really stupid was that I did all the problems in the book. I didn't realize until a long time later that this was not the way anybody ever learns anything out of a textbook! It just takes too long. Then I found that I still couldn't understand the things I wanted to read. I figured, well, the thing I should do now is try to understand more elementary physics, and so I asked Danny

32

The Sudbury Valley School

to help me with that. I had a physics textbook, and I just started at the beginning and read it and tried to work out problems. When I would get confused, I would go find Danny and make an appointment to talk to him sometime and ask him questions. I enjoyed it until I got to studying something that I couldn't make any sort of sense out of, the part about how gyroscopes work, which was somewhere in the first quarter of the book that I had, and I just couldn't get that to make sense to me, because the way gyroscopes work doesn't make any intuitive sense. So I stopped doing it because I was frustrated, and I was tired of trying to think about it and not having it make sense.

My learning algebra was more or less goal oriented, although I never reached the goal I was aiming for, which was to be able to read papers and books about nuclear physics and understand them; but it was still goal oriented. It's just that it was for a goal that I wanted instead of a goal that somebody else told me I should aim for. I think this is how people make themselves miserable: instead of living their lives according to what they want to do, they try to use some other standards to live their lives. I think people are supposed to be happy. They're not supposed to be unhappy.

It's selfish, but I also think it's right.

I didn't think about math and physics very much after I stopped learning physics. Actually I didn't think about math much until I started teaching some people at school. When I was twelve, I probably would have said I wanted to be a zoologist when I grew up because I was interested in animals.

I started taking piano lessons when I was thirteen. I just wanted to be able to play some songs I liked. After a few weeks, my piano teacher tried to get me to play classical music and I soon found that I really liked a lot of the things she was getting me to play short, easy pieces by Haydn or Beethoven, people like that. Also, I started to listen to a lot of music after I started taking piano lessons. Before, I didn't listen to much music at all.

I practiced mostly at home for a couple of years, and then after that I practiced some of the time at school. There were days when I would practice a lot more and days when I would practice a lot less. I kept it up for ten years, practicing progressively more and more hours a day. I would have a vision of wanting to be able to play certain pieces, and then I'd get to the point where I could play those pieces and I'd want to be able to play other pieces that were harder. I didn't think about what it would do for me. I just thought it was something I wanted to do. I believe that everything you do helps everything else you do, because if you're doing one hard thing, it's not that different from doing another hard thing. It may take different physical skills, or maybe different mental habits, but it takes the same kind of concentration and requires the same kind of thinking.

For some reason, I fell in love with the way a harpsichord sounded and I really wanted one. It seemed like it would be fun to build one, and it wasn't that expensive. I had been working part time so I had enough money to buy a kit. I made it in school, and I got a lot of advice from Sam at various stages. The directions were reasonably explicit. A lot of it was tedious and time consuming, but there were only a few things that were hard. The beginning was especially fun; what you're doing is putting the case together, gluing big pieces together and trying to get joints to come out right and stuff like that. Then later on, there's a lot more stuff that it's easy to mess up on and you have to do over again a bunch of times so you get it right.

During the years that I was doing music, I still played outside. Maybe less, but the things I did outside were a little bit different. I still played soccer a lot. I played Capture the Flag some, but

33

The Sudbury Valley School

the problem was that by then I was too much bigger than everybody else. It's no fun unless you're more or less the average size. Everybody's too scared of you and you can't be invisible. If you're small you can slip behind the line and nobody notices you. I also went cross country skiing and walking and digging in the woods for bottles and riding my bicycle around the area, usually with a friend.

In my teens, I became interested in the administration of the school. I don't know why, really.

I remember thinking that it was fun to be involved with certain things, like the judicial stuff and the trials. I also thought that the more people that were involved with administration, the better. I felt some sort of civic duty to be involved with it to a certain extent. Everybody felt loyal to the school, but people did different things about it. I don't think I felt more loyal to the school than my friends who were not interested in administration.

I was Building Supplies Clerk for a while. That was just somebody who went around and kept the toilet paper and the paper towels and the soap in stock. I had to get somebody to take me to the store to buy cases of paper towels and toilet paper occasionally. The soap we had then was terrible, a powdered soap that was so abrasive you could hardly use it. If you had to wash your hands more than three or four times in a day, you'd have running sores.

I was Building Maintenance Clerk one year. I really wanted to know about these things and I wanted to do them and see what they were like. But I never felt I was doing a good enough job at it.

It wasn't as big a job the year I did it as it is most of the time, because there wasn't anything major going on. There wasn't any money to spend anyway. All the little things that came up, I could easily fix, like if a doorknob fell off someplace, or a window pane got broken or something like that.

Also, I liked fooling around with electrical and electronic things that the Audio Visual Corp. had, so I would keep them going.

I was Law Clerk when I was thirteen. The work was awesome. The judicial system is streamlined now compared to the way it was then. We kept track of everything by hand then. There was a listing of each trial by trial number, and there was a listing by charge, and there were listings for each individual too. So there were all these records to be kept, and the first time I had to do it I was overwhelmed; it took getting used to so I wouldn't forget to put something down some place. I remember sitting at the table with all this stuff and just trying to figure out what to do with it all and where to find what I needed and where to put everything.

I can remember the first time I had to go around and notify people of trials. The scary thing was talking to a little kid who didn't already understand what was going on. Lots of times complaints could go through, testimony could be taken, and School Meeting could vote a trial for some kid who was new to the school and still didn't really understand what was happening.

I also ran the mimeograph machine for years and years, and collated whenever we had something long to do, like a long newsletter or when somebody would publish a long article. I can remember collating with Gabriel. We'd put down long planks on a table so you'd get more pages on them. We had a lot of fun doing that. We would just walk up and down talking to each other and collating these long things. It would sometimes take hours to do. It's funny, I don't think of myself as being talkative, but I guess I talked a lot, to a lot of people. I talked to Gabriel probably more than anybody else, and I talked to Margaret Parra a fair amount when I was older.

For years there were water fights and nobody ever made a fuss about them because they were always done covertly, and nobody was aware of them or nobody knew exactly who had done them.

34

The Sudbury Valley School

The best ones were with paper towels which we would soak in water "gloppies" and throw at each other. The best times were at night in the winter, when it's dark at 4:30. The staff members would all be up in the office and there wasn't anybody working in the kitchen, so the downstairs of the school didn't have that many people in it, particularly the art room, the main lounge, the library workroom and then down the stairs into the basement. The basement was the main area for the water fights. You had to be careful running from the art room (where you usually got the paper towels and water) to the basement, but once you were in the basement, there wasn't likely to be anybody there. It felt really neat to be in the building when there weren't very many people around and it was dark and mysterious. Actually, at the time, water fights weren't illegal. There was a special law made about them later.

I liked the pot luck dinners at night a lot, but wasn't so crazy about the spring picnics because I liked to be in the school after dark, running around outside. That was fun and different, whereas when I was a little kid the picnic was always just a pain in the neck. You'd go to school and there would be your school, but you couldn't really do the things you wanted to because there was way too much stuff going on and there were too many people around and the only people you wanted to spend time with were your friends anyway, who'd be there, only it was harder to do things with them because you were at the picnic.

I think I always knew, as long as I can remember, what the School Meeting was: the place where things got done and decisions got made. Before I started going regularly, I did what most little kids do; they go when something germane to them comes up. At some point I can remember feeling maybe that wasn't right and maybe everybody should go all the time, and then at some other point I decided that, yes, it was ok, it was alright for me to let other people decide things that I wasn't interested in. The image I had was that somebody else was taking care of most things and I didn't have to worry about it very much where "somebody else" was staff members and older students, but mostly staff members. But the thing that went along with that image was that I felt I could complain if there was something I thought wasn't right or something I thought should be changed.

When I was older, I got really impatient at meetings. I remember thinking that it takes people so long to understand what other people are saying and people miss the point of what other people are saying, and then say things that are way off the point themselves. More recently I've learned that people do these things a lot less at School Meetings than they do in almost any other setting, and the School Meeting works as well as any democratic meeting that I've ever seen.

Once I started going to School Meetings, I went to Assembly meetings too. I never thought the Assembly had much role in what went on in school and I was usually perfectly happy with that. As a student I always felt a little bit resentful about the Assembly, as if it was the School Meeting that should be deciding these things and the Assembly was sort of beside the point. I'm not presenting that as the truth. I'm just telling you how I felt.

Everybody was on the judicial committee, so we were aware of the functioning of the judicial system in a much more intimate way than the other parts of the school. I think as a little kid, it's more a part of your life than the other functions of the school. Not only are you using it, but you're also taking part in running it at some point.

The judicial system was an interesting center of conflict in the school. Especially trials. All the time that I was involved, trials were very rare, so that having one was kind of a special occasion.

There would be a lot of buildup and people would talk about it, and then there would be people

35

The Sudbury Valley School

arguing their cases and trying to convince each other, and it would come down to what the jury thought at the end, so that was always really fascinating. I think the drama of it was very interesting to me. I mean, the justice of it was nice, but I don't think that was interesting in and of itself.

There was no way not to get fair treatment if you got brought up. The committee investigated and they made some kind of report, and if the report was wrong, then it was not that important because it could get cleared up in the trial. There were enough checks and balances. It was quite difficult to get convicted of something that you weren't guilty of.

This was important to me because I took advantage of it sometimes. I was a real stickler, and if people brought me up for things that I knew were wrong, but weren't against the rules, I wasn't about to let myself get convicted of breaking a rule that I know I hadn't broken. As a defendant, I wasn't scared, but I was nervous. It's more like the fear you experience when you're going to talk in front of a group of people, than the fear that you experience when you're afraid of bad things that are going to happen to you. I was always more afraid of being embarrassed than being convicted. In general, it was important for me to learn that I could defend myself and convince people that I was right.

The major interaction I had with the staff was talking to them. They meant something to me because of who they were. I grew to feel really emotionally attached to most of the staff members who were around the school a long time, because they were people I really liked and respected not necessarily because of things they did for me, and not just because of things they did for the school, although that was important too.

My relationship with them individually was always good. There were certainly times when I was really irritated with Danny, particularly, but I don't remember anything that was a long term irritation. It was just always about small things that were happening in school. And it didn't adversely affect the real relationship that we had. In general, I liked the staff to be friendly and I liked them to be there, but I didn't want them to come seek me out, particularly. I certainly didn't want them to try to get me to do things, but I didn't even particularly want them to talk to me unless they had something specific they needed to talk about. I was much happier being able to seek them out if I wanted to. It wasn't usually a matter of wanting to arrange to do something that was large scale and time consuming with them. It was mostly just getting help with individual things, or wanting to ask somebody a question about something. An example is woodworking, which I did for a while. When I wanted to make something out of wood, I wanted to be certified to use the tools and sometimes I'd want help doing a particular thing, but I wouldn't want somebody to do it with me the whole time.

If I was somebody who was less determined not to ask people for help about most things, then the staff might have had a larger role in doing things with me or teaching things to me, or trying to help me figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted to be left alone, and in retrospect nothing has made me think that I was wrong to have wanted it. I wasn't going to go start a class if I was peripherally interested in something; I would just go read a book instead.

I was always worried a little about staff elections. There have been periods when individual staff members were temporarily unpopular and there would be really bad election results which always seemed sad to me. Most of the staff had been there a long time and had put so much into the school that it always seemed horrible when they would get a rash of fifteen "no" votes one year; it must have felt horrible to them. The other thing was that crazy people would come and want to be staff members sometimes, but we were always too smart to elect them, so that wasn't really a

36

The Sudbury Valley School

problem. I think it's a good idea for children to choose their teachers. Everybody makes wrong decisions and I'm sure that we've occasionally elected people for staff who probably ought not to have been elected, though I don't know if we've done the reverse. But I think that chances are we've made better decisions than any other method. The problem is, who's going to make the decisions if we don't do it ourselves? Whoever is, they're probably not going to do as good a job. I don't know any good alternative. The alternative of the students not being the ones who decide who works at Sudbury Valley would undermine one of Sudbury Valley's main points, which is that the students decide what's good for them. To have everything the way it is and to change that one thing would be really two-faced.

That's one of the things that makes Sudbury Valley easy to talk about. In a lot of ways the school's hard to talk about because it's hard to get people to believe you when you start trying to describe it, but one of the things that makes it easier is that it's really honest, so that when you say something you can really mean it; and when you say that the school is controlled democratically and the students essentially have the power, there's no lie there. There's no lie like, "Well, they have the power except that there are certain decisions they can't make." I was saying this to somebody recently: "The students can do anything they want." She said, "Oh, it sounds like a Montessori school," and I said, "Well, not exactly, because if you want to go outside and play soccer all day in a Montessori school, that's sort of hard." And she said, "You mean, you could go outside and play soccer all day?" I said, "Yuh, the students can do anything they want." And she said, "Well, I heard you, but I didn't really believe that."

People would ask me about the school sometimes, but nobody ever tried to convince me that I shouldn't be going there. I was probably more obnoxious about it than the people who asked me about it, because I would try to convince them that everybody should be doing it. I thought that it was completely obvious that this is the kind of education everybody should get.

I think my parents worried about me a little bit. I'm not sure about my mother. My father said that he worried some about me, but he was also able to leave me alone, which was good. I imagine I would end up doing the same thing. I would probably worry about my children, but that's the way it is. One worries about one's kids. Everybody I know worries about their kids, no matter what, and no matter what their kids are doing, so I'd worry about it, but I hope I'd be able to leave them alone. If I can't do it, I don't know why anybody else should be able to do it, because I've got better reason than anybody else to leave them alone.

Recently somebody was asking me if I was well prepared for college. I was telling them about Sudbury Valley and they kept asking me, "Was this hard for you when you went to college?" and "Was that hard for you when you went to college?" and I finally said, "Look, nothing was hard for me when I went to college. I did some hard things there because I tried to learn things that were hard to learn, but college wasn't hard for me." Yes, I was well prepared. I think that people from Sudbury Valley are, in general; not necessarily because they have exactly the skills that are expected of them, but because they have the skill of knowing how to take care of themselves in a general way, so that when it comes time that they have to do certain things, they can do them. The people I knew in college who had problems were all people who weren't used to trying to figure out what to do with their day, what to do with their month or what to do with their life.

I was really nervous about defending my thesis. I was seventeen. People usually talked about their last several years of school, and what they were planning to do in the immediate future. I didn't

37

The Sudbury Valley School

really want to do that. This was a leftover from when I was a little kid. I had the idea that you should be somehow specifically defending the thesis that you are ready to be responsible for yourself, and I didn't want to do it by telling what I had been doing recently and what my plans were. So I decided to talk about what I felt responsibility meant and explain why I thought I was ready to live my life in accordance with that. I was a little bit nervous because I hadn't seen anybody do that before and there were weird questions people could ask me. As it turned out people did ask some weird questions. It was certainly meaningful emotionally, as a rite of passage, getting up in front of all these people who I'd known for a long and telling them that I was ready to leave and why.

I decided to leave the school when I did because I felt there wasn't anything I wanted from the school anymore. It didn't take any time at all to decide to leave. I suppose in a sense it took me eight years, but when I felt I was ready, it didn't take much time at all.

38

The Sudbury Valley School

12 The first memory I have of the school is that it was a community, a supportive community.

The people were invested in the community. People's attitude staff and students was not only warm, accepting, and sharing, but also a pointed commitment to the educational philosophy. It's good as a kid to see other people who are committed to something you believe in too. It gives a team camaraderie; it's kind of like a goal-oriented friendship.

I thought it was a funny kind of school. I had gone to a private school and a public school, and I thought there would be set up classes. I thought the administrators would tell us what to do, although from my interview I realized there were no tests, marks, quizzes, or that sort of thing. It was totally different from anything I'd participated in before, besides living on the street.

I was fifteen when I heard about the school. I had been having some trouble in public school that was "unexplainable." I was labeled an "underachiever," and the school administrators and teachers thought that if I was challenged some more I might do better; but that didn't work out. I went to a prep school for more challenge, I guess. While I was there, there was a lot of academic pressure and social pressure. I felt like I didn't fit in. I went to the famous rock concert at Woodstock in the summer of 1968, and when I came back to school that fall, my summer vacation went right through till Christmas! When I came back from the Christmas vacation, the administration asked me if I really wanted to be there, and I said, "No." So I went to a career counselling service and they mentioned Sudbury Valley to me. They said, "We've directed some kids there and it might be something for you to check out," which I did. My parents supported me in any decision I made.

When I enrolled at Sudbury Valley, most people were friendly. Some of the staff had kind of a "wait-and-see" attitude; more like "What is this kid about? Will he come to me?" The staff had the kind of mindset that said, "What does this individual need? What is their style and how do I respond to that?" And that was appropriate.

I settled into the school very quickly. I was oriented towards the smoking room. Later, in turn, I helped take in new kids. I saw myself as being a part of things, and felt that it was important for me to be hospitable and treat them the way I was treated. I was just passing along what was passed on to me, really.

It didn't take me long to understand the philosophy of the school. I had been in other types of participatory democracies. One was a Unitarian Church group for kids, and I had been on sports teams and those sorts of things. That aspect of the school was important to me as a kid who was kind of formulating where he was going. It allowed me to go in the directions I was interested in.

I come from a politically, socially, and religiously liberal family, so the school fit in with my life expectations. I don't mean to say that I expected that from schools; that's why it might have been hard for me at first to catch what Sudbury Valley was. I expected to sit in a chair for eight hours a day, and to have a certain time of day to run and play and a certain time of day to eat. When I went to my first School Meeting I started to see the difference. That was about the time that the blue and white paperback [The Crisis in American Education] was published so discussions of ideas about education were always flowing around.

For the first month or so, I spent a lot of time in the smoking room, getting to know people,

39

The Sudbury Valley School

listening to music. Then as time went on I got into photography. A student who had a camera showed me how to develop and enlarge. Later I became more involved in other activities, like baking bread. But even at the height of my involvement in organized activities, I was probably engaged less than half of the time. A great majority of my time was spent talking to kids my age, some a little younger or a lot younger, and some a little bit older. We talked about kid things, like who's in what band. Near the beginning of my enrollment a lot of the talk was ventilation about different school systems I'd been in. We'd also spend time planning activities outside of school. I don't think I was ever bored.

The school helped me go in a direction I was already going, but it really accelerated and helped focus it. For me, Sudbury Valley was a graduate school for community organizing. I look at my first organizing experience as taking place there. Another one shortly followed it, but a lot of the specific techniques and basic philosophy that I used later in community organizing were almost lock-step with a lot of the educational philosophy behind Sudbury Valley for example, the idea that selfmotivation is a key to learning. In organizing, self-motivation is a key to participation in the organizing effort, whether it be building a water tower in rural West Virginia or forming an alternative PTA for the Chicano population in California. Also, the "participatory democracy" idea in organizing is like Jeffersonian Democracy in that the issues come from the bottom and go up as opposed to a lot of other systems where community planners generate professional plans of what is needed for the citizens, what I call "talk down."

Let me tell you a specific practical outflow. About halfway through my experience at Sudbury Valley I had some friends in the public school system who were complaining about different things that were happening at their school. I guess I kind of brought some of Sudbury Valley with me and helped form what we called "the Progressive Student Party." The way it started was kids thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, sitting around, almost like a board of directors, at one of the kids' kitchen table talking about what was going on. One of the girls took notes. She said "I'll be the secretary," and then we generated these notes into a newspaper for which one of the churches donated a mimeograph machine, paper and ink; and we handed them out at their school. The school administration in that town was up in arms and called it "outside agitation." I was the only one involved who was not a student there, but they demanded we all get off the public school property.

So each week from then on we handed it out at the edge of the school property. People in that town still come to me and say, "Ah, I remember you: Progressive Student Party!"

I attended School Meeting and added two bits here and there. I saw it as the core of the school. This was how we ran our school and I wanted to be a part of that to learn about what was going on as well as have some input in directing which way it went. I can't say specific outcomes that I suggested came out the way I said, but I have a definite feeling that, in subjects that I talked about, my opinions were blended with others into acceptable outcomes.

Some of it was, to me back then, "high-brow" business. School Meeting talked about money and stuff, and I just said "Hey, I don't know how much a dollar is worth. People who have the skills or interests can take care of those issues." I'd leave if that issue came up and it was something I wasn't interested in. Money is dry and boring to me, even today. I realize it's important but...

Overall I really had the feeling of giving the best I could give.

The judicial committee was "the news." It was what was going on. Who made a mistake and who did they make it against and what were the consequences! Once I was involved in a little prank

40

The Sudbury Valley School

where three or four of us picked up and turned someone's Volkswagen "Bug" around in the parking lot. That was an infringement on the owner's rights which was brought before the judicial committee for punishment. I don't remember any big incidents, though.

Mrs. Parra was so much older than a lot of the rest of the staff. That was real good because that made it more of a complete community; also that was somebody I could look at and say "Hey, even people that age believe in the kind of things that are going on here." She was very giving. I look back at myself as kind of a punk, and having some punk come into the kitchen and try to learn how to make bread didn't scare her away. She would show me, and she was very gentle and understanding as she taught me.

In general, though, I wanted to be left alone by adults. My special interest while I was at school was making friends, building a support system, sharing, getting to know each other. I wasn't consciously thinking about these things. I was just being a kid, an outgoing kid.

I decided to do a thesis defense because I wanted to have a high school diploma, but also because I wanted to live the whole experience of Sudbury Valley. Everyone who comes there doesn't have to get a diploma, but that was one of the things that meant success to me. It wasn't something that I casually entered or planned in one day. I spent a lot of time by myself working on it, and some time with my advisor. It really pulled together and summarized my experience at school, and made it more clear in my mind.

The thesis defense gave me self-esteem. There was some real pressure put on, which there has to be. I made one little comment about God or religion or something and that opened the door.

"What's your belief in God?" and so forth, and it took direction, which was good. It was a challenge.

I think the school is a definite positive institution. One reason is because it's part and parcel of what it's trying to get across. In other words, it's sort of like the medium and the message. I don't know how else to put it. And I can tell you from my own experience that the kind of issues and philosophies that Sudbury Valley advocates are core to my life now.

41

The Sudbury Valley School

16 I grew up in an upper middle class community that was supposed to be "sheltered" from a lot of things, but it really wasn't. That was a hard time to grow up. The Vietnam War was raging on. I had a lot of exposure to what oppression was even before I was out of grammar school, specifically around racism and civil rights issues. My father was wrapped up in that. He was one of the freedom riders who went down to Selma. He was a public school teacher, and he went to the school department and said, "I'm going to go. I have to do this." They respected him for it, and they said, "Ok. If you have to do that, go ahead. Your job will be waiting for you when you come back." I had an awareness of injustices at a very early age.

I had some very early negative experiences in the public school system. I had a lot of trouble learning how to read when I was in the first grade and I obviously frustrated my teachers, but it was really sickening how they dealt with it. I can remember at the end of my first year my teacher saying to me in front of the entire class, "The only reason you're going to pass here is because your father is a teacher. He's going to tutor you all summer long to read." Then I remember a teacher in second grade. She was kind of eccentric. One day I could not differentiate a 'b' and a 'd', and she absolutely flipped out and couldn't accept it. She humiliated me in front of the class, saying, "Look, he cannot differentiate between a 'b' and a 'd'. Can you imagine that?" And it didn't stop there. She took me back to my home room and humiliated me again in front of my entire home room to my teacher: "He's so stupid, he can't even do this." I was in a rage, as much as you can be when you are seven years old. I don't think I told my parents about it because I was too ashamed and humiliated and angry.

It was depressing for me. But then I had a really unique experience in the summer of '69. I traveled abroad with my parents all over Europe, and I met a lot of kids who were high school age who I really got close to. That was a time when "hippies" were prevalent, and I just fit right in and really started to feel good about myself for the first time. When I went back to begin the second year of junior high, they were giving me constant grief about dress codes. At that age, to look a certain way means more than just about anything else, and to be told, "Your hair's too long," or "You can't look this way or do this" set off a lot of resentment toward the administration right off the bat. So when we heard about Sudbury Valley, and when I first went, it was a welcome relief.

My whole thing was, "Why won't people leave me alone, why won't people let me do my own thing?" And then when I was in the Sudbury Valley environment, I was just so taken aback, I didn't know what to do with it or how to take it at first. But I really have thought on several occasions that to be in that predicament was the best thing that ever happened to me just to be left alone and to go ahead trying to sort things out and be myself and develop self-confidence, in and around people a lot younger and a lot older too, and not to be hassled all the time.

A lot of my immediate family and relatives never understood me or my parents anyway. Not that we didn't get along with most of them, because we did, but I think there was a lot of skepticism: "Oh, what a totally radical place. Who do they think they're kidding?" That became a lot less of an issue when the school became accredited. But the first few years the school was open, I'm sure that the skepticism was a lot more prevalent in society at large when they came to hear

42

The Sudbury Valley School

about the way the school was, because there hadn't been a chance yet to reflect on people who had been through the system as students.

When I first came, there was a long period of time when I kind of sat back and watched the world go by and took in as much as I could and tried to sort a lot of things out in my own mind.

Initially, I was more apt to hang around in the main lounge. Other people around my age spent a lot of time there, and then there were some younger kids, who were pretty entertaining. After about half a year or so, the place to be, for whatever reason, became the smoking room. We lived in there. I also used to love to go out and walk around on the grounds quite a bit, around the pond and state park.

When I first went to the school, I was fairly confused for a lot of different reasons: my experience in public school, as well as what was going on in the world at the time. It was a pretty hard time to grow up! When I got to know people better, I developed more self-confidence just sitting around and doing anything from talking about anthropology to chatting about how you felt about things, where you were going, and what your expectations might be in life. What gave me confidence was the environment of the school, where you had such a great cross-section of humanity, from kids four years old all the way up to people who were there doing graduate studies.

So you really had a lot to reflect on and many experiences to share with people. I think a lot of us who were in that environment developed an edge in everything from communication skills to not being afraid to go out and deal with things and with people.

We had days we did nothing but sit around and smoke cigarettes all day and listen to music and just talk. We had days when we would play Monopoly or different games all day long, constantly. We had days when we would go out and walk around on the grounds and be involved in different athletic activities. I had days when I was really wrapped up in different types of art work ceramics or painting or hanging out with people who were involved in photography. I had days when I would be in the library for a good part of the day, picking books off the shelf just at random, whether it be a Rolling Stone magazine or an encyclopedia, just sitting there and reading it. I spent a lot of time listening to music no question about it. The first couple of years, that seemed to be the focus of a lot of our attention, just hanging out doing that. I used to hang around with Peggy in the darkroom. She was a sweetheart. I never really got involved in learning how to develop photographs and all that, but I was with people who did. That's when I started to cultivate one of my main hobbies, being an amateur photographer. I would say that at one point or another I used almost every different part of the main building. I even got involved in the art room in my last year.

Then, during my last year, I also had my first job, working for a geotechnical engineering firm.

I did everything from developing sepias to working on the job site with geologists. I also worked as a carpenter's helper. So, towards the end of my experience at the school, I spent more time off the campus as opposed to actually being there. But again, the concept of having an "open campus" and seeing what was out there in the job market was part of the way the place was run.

I really needed the breathing space that the school provided me with to sort things out in my mind or speculate about what I might want to do.

Voting for the staff was a pretty radical thing. What student ever had any say over who was going to be a teacher of theirs? It certainly was far out that students had an input into it. The staff always seemed to be wrapped up in something, involved in something. But they were always

43

The Sudbury Valley School

pretty much there for us, if we had an issue we wanted to raise or a concern or question that we wanted to ask. Certainly what little time I did want to devote to doing anything academic, they were very willing to spend with me.

I think that every staff member who was involved had something to offer, but I seem to remember some of them were maybe doing a lot of soul-searching of their own too, which there's nothing wrong with . . .

Jan was one of the more aggressive of the staff members in his manners. One day I accidentally broke one of the windows in the smoking room and I came forth and said that I did that.

He got the building supplies and said, "OK, go and fix the damn thing." I was surprised, and I guess afterwards, when I fixed it, I was glad that I had the experience to learn how to do it. That was just the way he was. He was straightforward in his manners and his approach.

I don't remember there being any significant vandalism or anything like that. A lot of kids did stuff like that out of their resentment towards a structured environment. I can relate to that from the time before I went to Sudbury Valley. I seem to remember when I was an early teenager, and younger, a lot of kids were wrapped up in that sort of thing out of anger. I don't ever remember that occurring at the school because of the way it was set up.

There was a lot of apprehension when the school tried to become accredited. Some of us worried about, "What are we going to do if we get out of here and graduate and it doesn't end up being accredited?" It wasn't just the student population either. Some of the staff too were wondering if they were going to be able to convey the philosophy to those people or make them understand it.

Then the accreditation committee came down and saw the place and how it was run and what people were doing and what they had accomplished after leaving that was the icing on the cake, the school becoming accredited.

I started to understand the school more when I saw people who were older than me go through the system and graduate. The whole concept of the school became clearer when people went through that process. I just sat back and observed it all. Actually, the full meaning of the school's philosophy didn't really come to me until I was out of it and entered adult life, when I found an area of focus that I was interested in and, for the first time in my life, from an academic point of view, I really sat down and was disciplined about it. My own drive, my own motivation was applied to the area that I wanted to get into. Basically the school says you're responsible for your own education and when and if you want to study a given subject, or whatever area you want to enter then you're going to meet obstacles along the way, but if you put your mind to it and apply yourself to it, it's going to work out and it'll have more meaning because it's come from within you.

When it came time for me to leave, I was self confident, for the most part. I had a good self image. I had an idea of a few different avenues that I might pursue; nothing concrete, but I was ready to leave the school to go out and find my way, so that's essentially what I did.

The thesis defense was, naturally, a little bit scary. But other people who were friends of mine had already been through it. Based on their experience and my experience at the school, it really wasn't too hard.

One of the things the school did for me was that I have no problem getting up in front of a group of people and talking. As long as I know what I'm talking about and why I want to say something, I don't mind. I learned it by being part of the School Meeting and having an opportunity to be heard before I graduated. And then from the thesis procedure, by being in front of the student

44

The Sudbury Valley School

body and staff and Trustees and so forth.

At Sudbury Valley we were handed the opportunity to be our own person and cultivate our own interests and academic pursuits as individuals, but we weren't handed the diploma. We, in turn, had to recognize as individuals when we were ready to go out and pursue whatever we were going to do, and we had to convey that to all the people involved. We were left to do and pursue what we wanted to, but when we were ready to leave we had to convey that we were at least partially "together," responsible enough to be able to go out into the world.

45

The Sudbury Valley School

29 I don't know if I really understood everything about the school right away, but the thing that I did understand was that I loved it. It was somewhere that I wanted to be. And it stayed that way until it was time for me to move on!

Most of the time as a little kid I played. I loved exploring. We spent a lot of time going into the woods, building forts. We built amazing pine needle forts that were set up all over the land adjoining the school. They were very, very secret, although select people got to come out and learn about them. As a matter of fact, when I got involved with them, there were some older kids who were building them and they had brought me and a few other people out to see them, and then we found out how to do it, so we started our own secret ones. We thought that was so cool!

We were outdoors winter, summer, fall and spring. There was no difference at all. Winter, we'd take the toboggans up the trails. We would go down this big, long hill in Callahan State Park.

There would always be skimobiles, during the day too, and we hated them. We were nature guys!

We never used anything with power, and we were very much against that. One day we took a huge, twelve foot toboggan down the hill. As you came down the hill, the trail went into a field; you just continued down the path and you'd eventually just stop. We came to the bottom of the hill and saw a skimobile come down. We all bailed out at the same time and the toboggan went right into the skimobile, broke the toboggan and the guy's skimobile.

Sometimes I wished there were more kids. When I got a little older and I was interested in girls I was never interested in the girls who were close to me in age, only in the older girls there never seemed to be enough kids. But it didn't really make that much of a difference to me. I enjoyed everybody. I enjoy people.

I loved to cook with Margaret. The great thing about Margaret was when you cooked with her, she'd show you how to do something and you'd do it. And then while you were waiting for the things to bake or to cook or whatever, she'd sit down and tell you these unbelievable stories. She always had a great story, and always kept us very entertained.

The first time I realized that I was actively learning something was one night when I was about seven. I picked up a book I had never been able to read (but was read to me often) and read the whole thing, and I was so excited! From that day on, I could read, just like that. There'd be words that I'd have to ask the meaning of, but I could read the words after thatnight. By the time I was ten or twelve years old I was reading a lot. Later, I read a lot of Shakespeare, Greek and Roman tragedies, a little Thoreau and Steinbeck, and I was into plays for a very long time.

I felt that there was an expectation from outside people, there was a little bit of pressure put on you, when people asked you what you did in that school, and how you learned in that school.

When I got a little older, I would say, "I'm as ignorant as the next guy." And I'm probably a lot less ignorant from having the experience of going to Sudbury Valley. I had friends who were so rebellious about everything that by the time they got out of public high school, they didn't know what they wanted to do, or who they wanted to be. And they would be the same people who would say to me, "You go to that school. How can you learn anything?"

46

The Sudbury Valley School

I picked up the guitar when I was seven or eight years old. A student at school taught me my first lessons. At that time none of the younger kids I knew had any interest in playing music. So I started taking lessons at a few different local places. It was just your basic method books that they were teaching out of, and I got bored with it quickly and stopped. Then I took classical guitar for a while, which I really loved, but it was too hard for me.

I'd play at home. There were teenage kids at the school like Dominic, who I thought was great because he had all the gear and he could play fast; he could learn songs off of records, which I couldn't do, so I felt almost embarrassed. But I'd sit at home with my guitar and play. My dad got this old reel-to-reel tape machine from a friend of his, and I found out that if you plug your guitar directly into the input jack where the mike goes, halfway in, you could get distortion, and it would sound great. So that was my amp, a reel-to-reel tape recorder! Later on, when I was about fourteen, I bought a big old speaker cabinet with four twelve inch speakers, and I put my tape recorder amp on top of it. It was kind of funny.

There was a kid, Gene, who played drums at the school, and he and I jammed a lot.

Somebody else was jamming with us too. Then Gene's father told me that he didn't want his son playing with me because Gene was a much better musician than I would ever be, and he couldn't have his son playing with me!

That crushed me, but I continued to play, and to this day, no matter what kind of comments I get, I just keep going on. That's something the school taught me. You can't just end things because someone tells you you're not good or you can't do this, or they're not interested in what you're doing. You have to do what's true to yourself. You just go on and you live your life; you survive and you move on, and you do what's important to you.

Let's say someone is playing and it's terrible. If they ask my opinion, I'd probably tell them the things they were doing wrong, and then give them advice as to how to go about making it better.

I'd never tell anybody, "Give it up. Don't do it.", because I don't believe in that at all. I believe if somebody is involved in what they're doing and they love it, then if they're not talented, they'll find that out on their own. For myself, I had a lot of belief in what I did.

By the time I was ready to leave school, I had reached the decision that music was the most prominent part of my life. One of my first memories of the school had been music. That was at the end of the sixties, when you had a melting pot of great experimental music. I was hearing all this fantastic music as a six or seven year old kid: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Doors, and I never realized until recently how important those bands were to me. That was what got me involved in music. As I got older, those bands were no longer the hip thing. There was a big '70's surge of pop rock bands, and I got caught up in the mainstream; it was different from the earlier bands, but it really wasn't. It just appeared to be because it was all covered up in gauze. And I went on and I graduated and kept moving in that direction, and it wasn't until maybe five years ago that I realized that the real music for me was those bands that I heard as a child. They were my teachers.

Music was the common bond between all of us in my peer group at school. We talked about music and we explored music together. I remember when Alan made a harpsichord and everybody was in awe. We all did different things, but we seemed to do them together.

When I was seventeen years old, I felt I was an adult. I felt that I'd learned everything that I could inside the school and by that time I had befriended people who weren't at the school, and I wanted to meet more people. I felt it was time to move on. But my memories of the school are probably the fondest of my life.

47

The Sudbury Valley School

How it Feels to Send Your Child to a "Free" School

By Mimsy Sadofsky

Over the years, we have found that the parents who choose to send their children to Sudbury Valley School have very few things in common. They don't seem to come from the same socioeconomic class. In fact, most of them seem to be impossible to "class"ify at all; certainly it is impossible from the cursory amount of information we collect from them. Clearly, however, there are always more parents who struggle to pay our modest tuition than parents who find it easy.

These parents also have widely different standards for all sorts of categories of behavior in their homes, or at least so they and their children tell us.

Very often they turn out to be parents who would not ordinarily be sending their children to private schools; that is to say, they are the kind of people who generally feel that private schools have an odor of elitism about them, and they find that odor unpleasant.

However, what our parents do share is an overwhelming desire to do the best they possibly can for their children. Even though they might be people who only questioned the process of public schooling because their children forced the issue, they are not people who accept the status quo in child rearing or in education.

We have written extensively about what happens to kids who have had all or part of their education at Sudbury Valley. It has also become pretty obvious that their parents examine their own lives in many of the ways that every Sudbury Valley student must do over time. That in itself is enough to scare away many parents who are not willing to accept this challenge. It seems that this willingness to undergo intense re-examination of their own lives is one of the few generalizations we can make about our highly individualistic parents.

So, let us say that someone has examined the philosophy of Sudbury Valley, feels confidence in their child's curiosity and judgment, and decides to enroll that child. One might hope that the enrollment would signify the end of anxiety; that the decision to put full trust in the child's judgment would be a relief to parents. And it is a relief. But it also isn't. This is what a parent of a teenager in his second year at Sudbury Valley had to say to the other parents at an informal Assembly meeting: For our son, the philosophy of this school made so much sense that coming here seemed like second nature. For us, however, slow learners that we are, the decision was much more an act of faith than one of reason. Molded by our parent's values, our own educational experiences, and the predominant thinking of today, it was clear that in order to be "good" SVS parents we would have to let go of many deep-rooted expectations of what education should be. We needed to get in touch with what we felt really mattered about school, and disregard the rest. This reorientation process hasn't been easy, and has offered a number of terrifying moments, as well as some extremely happy ones. I realize that in many ways hope is merely the flip side of fear. We hope that something good will happen, while fearing that it won't. Some days one face of the coin is up, other days the opposite side is showing. This contributes to a pretty exciting ride on an emotional roller coaster, especially where SVS is concerned.

48

The Sudbury Valley School

None of us lives in a vacuum. Everyone has friends, relatives, parents, sometimes other children, who feel that allowing a student so much freedom is tantamount to telling that child that no one cares what happens to him/her. Most everyone is in a workplace or a neighborhood in which such a brave decision is treated as a sign of abdication of the responsibilities of parenthood. And the very same people who might hesitate to criticize if they thought one's child had been nursed for too long, or put in day care too early, or not forced to sleep through the night, have no trouble spending a great deal of time denigrating the educational philosophy with which parents at Sudbury schools are trying so hard to align themselves.

Partly that is comforting. It opens up many forums for discussion. But partly it isn't, because a lot of the people one has these discussions with are working from a very small amount of information mostly from the tops of their heads or from what you have haplessly told them or from a position in which many of their beliefs are threatened. A lot of the people each parent knows are sure, totally positive, that the structure of education that is most familiar to them and it will almost always be a variation of the structure that most children are in today is the only possible one that guarantees that we will not produce a generation of savages, ignorant savages at that. They feel threatened by the idea of the loss of adult power and control that such a "free" school is predicated on.

But of course we parents too feel threatened. There we are, open to attack from all of those other people who think we are crazy, as well as from our own anxieties. It is very well to say in the abstract: "Sure, I know that my kids will grow up constantly busy learning things. I understand that to be the human condition." But then when the things your kid spends time doing perhaps Nintendo, or playing games in a tree, or poring over Magic Cards for months on end don't look at all like the things you did in school at that age, and don't require that they learn the capitals of the states, or how to diagram a sentence, then it is not so easy.

In fact, sending a child to such a school is a courageous and still an almost unique choice. We all want our children to have even better lives than we had, no matter how good ours was. When we think of a better life these days, we don't usually mean materially better, because most of us have had quite adequate material lives. We mean intellectually, emotionally and spiritually better. And it is hard to keep your "eyes on the prize" of the excellent, well-examined life when the life your children are leading is one in which they can play Nintendo as long as they want, or work with clay for months on end, or read a million science fiction books, or talk to their friends on the phone for hours and hours and hours after talking to them all day at school.

Most of us went to traditional schools, which became the tradition because society was heavily into educating for uniformity. Now that we are adults, we have noticed that uniformity is not much of a selling point when we want to get interesting jobs, or create a work of art, or create a new idea, or create a new product, or create a new way to market a product. In fact most of us are either in creative jobs, or at least totally excited about the creative activities that fill our leisure hours, and we realize that we don't have to all know exactly the same things as everyone else. Of course there needs to be some overlap between our knowledge and other people's; being alive in the world makes us crave for that overlap, so we go after it. Often, we look for commonality with others even in areas that are of limited interest, because we want to have things in common with people who are not just like us. That is one of the social imperatives of life.

If you are now a parent, odds are that in your childhood you were educated mostly for a world that was going out of style at the time and is becoming a distant memory now, a world where

49

The Sudbury Valley School

uniformity was vital to the workplace. Since my childhood the possible ways of earning a living have changed from many, to incredibly many, to no- one-can-count-how-many, because new ideas of how to spend time are invented every minute. Kids need to be educated for a world that changes even faster than today's world, which is a hard thing even to imagine. But that is why we have to allow them to use their minds in their own ways because that will guarantee the most complete possible development for them, which will maximize their chances of succeeding in a wide-open world.

It used to bother me actually it still does that I had no one to turn to for help with problems once the computers we were using at school had a certain number of programs on them. The configuration became totally unique, and there were so many possibilities that no one who had not studied our system could possibly be on top of them all, and be able to help us; and maybe not even then.

The kind of anxiety computer problems raise in me are the same kinds of anxieties we have about our kids. These are control issues. They are already in a world that is out of our control, all day every day, bombarded with information we hardly have a clue about. We are raising them for a world where there are less and less secure answers, and more and more possible paths, and that means such a total and necessary abdication of authority over them on our part that it is terrifying. I think every one of us who has chosen to send a child to a Sudbury school has contemplated that abdication of authority, that releasing of control, and everyone, no matter how secure, also has some residual worries about making a mistake.

So, now that we have taken a look at some of the things that are guaranteed to make one anxious if one is the parent of a child in such a school, let's look at the other side of the coin.

What do kids learn at a Sudbury school? Are there any guarantees? I actually think that there are, and I think the things that can be (almost) guaranteed are the most important things of all in an explosively changing world. A student learns to concentrate. A student gets constant opportunities to make ethical judgments. A student learns to be treated with total respect. A student learns to appreciate the outdoors. A student learns to be self-reliant. A student learns to be self-confident. A student learns what it means to set a goal and reach for it, to re-assess, to reach again, to achieve the goal, or to fail miserably, and to pick him or herself up and do it all over again, with the same or a different goal. A kid learns life skills. Real life skills. The skills that it takes to be successful at marriage, at child rearing, at friendship, as well as at work.

What does it mean when I say that a child learns to concentrate? It means that the person focuses in on the interest of the moment, or the hour, or the year, and pursues that passion until it is a passion no more. Which of course also means that the tremendous let-down of losing a passion and having to go out and find a new one is a frequent companion. I see this focus mirrored in students in our school every day. I see it in the student who at 17 has suddenly developed a passion for math, and spends hours a day grinding away at it. I see it in the determination of a kid to get up into the heights of the beech tree, a goal that can take years to reach not that the goal will be pursued, of course, every minute of every day, but more as a theme of life constantly working on climbing skills, and constantly working on what it means to look down 15 or 25 or 50 feet and know only your skills keep you safe. I see it in the kids who constantly design and re-design Lego planes, airports, and space stations; and play elaborate games with the structures they have made. I see it in the drive to learn everything a person has to know in order to be allowed to work in the photolab alone, or on the pottery wheel. And I know, because I have children of my own, and because I have

50

The Sudbury Valley School

seen a generation worth of Sudbury Valley students, that I see only a fraction of a percentage of what is going on, of the concentration that is happening.

One of the hardest things for all of us to see and to understand is the work necessary for a teenager who comes to our school to do what has to be done first: to come to grips with who s/he is.

To many people, a lot of teenagers look like they are wasting their time. They just seem to spend so much time hanging out, talking, drinking coffee, sometimes even unfortunately smoking cigarettes, talking some more, driving around. Yes, they read. Yes, they are wonderful resources and usually extraordinarily kind to younger kids. But what are they doing? Part of what they are doing is forgetting. They have to forget that they spent years hearing that other people had an agenda for them that was touted to be the "best" thing for them to pursue. They have to get in touch with the idea that the person who really knows what is best for them is themselves; that they can become responsible for their own intellectual, moral, spiritual, and even physical development. That is no small trick. And, yes, a lot of the time they are squirming, suffering, struggling to shoulder these burdens or to escape from them. We, the adults around them believe that, in the atmosphere the school provides, the likelihood of them deciding to shoulder the burdens is as high as you can get. So we let them struggle. We let them suffer. They offer each other a tremendous amount of support.

All the adults in the school can do is tell them we understand how hard it is. But what every parent must understand is that support offered from the parent must, first and foremost, take the form of confidence that the struggle will be fruitful. This also maximizes the chances for it being fruitful.

The student who grows up learning that the most productive motivation is self- motivation, and that s/he can in fact learn how to fail and how to succeed, has the best chance for a life that is rich.

We also notice that children given the gift of trust by their parents become closer and closer to their parents, and sometimes these kids even provide the insights and strength to work to solve family problems that have developed over time.

Students at a school like ours will surely be practiced in ethical judgments. Moral questions are the bread and butter issues of Sudbury model schools. This community has very high standards for ethical behavior, standards that have forced me, over time, to raise my own. The school is run democratically. That doesn't mean that every kid has something to say on every issue. No one polls every person in the school every time something comes up. It does mean that for every issue that comes up, the School Meeting is a forum in which each person, no matter what their age, is treated respectfully and equally, and also has an equal vote in decisions. But there is much more than that.

The system for solving problems that have to do with behavior involve a changing sub-group of the entire population, a sub-group with total age variation in it, that investigates, reports on, and comes to grips with, problems of a social nature. This means littering, this means irritating noisiness, this means taking another child's cookie, this means not doing the trash when it is your turn. It also can mean more serious violations of the community norms. Each community's members spend a great deal of time informally and formally defining these norms, to themselves and to others, till they have worked out definitions that will serve them, at least till the issue comes up again.

I would like to end with more of the hopes and fears of the same parent whose remarks were quoted earlier: Letting my imagination run wild, I hope that when our son is ready to leave SVS, he will move on with an empowering sense of purpose and direction. I realize that this is asking a lot. It's certainly not something I could have done when I was his age.

51

The Sudbury Valley School Most of all, I hope that SVS will help each one of its students to find happiness deep down inside, to feel loved and appreciated, and to pass that love along to others. I don't have too many fears about this, because it seems that this is what a whole lot of people around here are hoping for.

52

The Sudbury Valley School

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Parents, Children, and Staff

By Hanna Greenberg

Usually I like to focus on the positive aspects of being at Sudbury Valley. I enjoy thinking about the many facets of life in our little community which is so rich with wondrous encounters and experiences. Every single student is like a whole world and in the course of time each one of them shows me something new that I never knew before. That is what keeps me wanting to work at SVS all these many years and why it is never boring to be there.

Of course, life is never perfect and neither is Sudbury Valley. Disagreements and misunderstandings often occur, as they would in any group of people who share space, time, resources and responsibilities. Students and staff alike have to learn to live with these problems and overcome the discomfort or anger that they may feel from time to time. I am no exception and I admit to having made my share of mistakes by doing or saying things which were hurtful to others.

Sometimes I have been insensitive, neglectful or forgetful. I have done many things at SVS, and I have been seen by students at times when I was less than wise or intelligent. Usually they point out my inadequacies and I can accept their laughter at my expense and even their anger, because it is clear and above-board. They tell me to my face what bothers them and give me a chance to explain or apologize. Most of the time I am astounded by the kindness and tolerance that the students exhibit and it has taught me to be more understanding of others than I had been before coming to SVS. Occasionally, I am angry or hurt by others' mistakes or insensitivities and then it falls on me to discuss the matter openly with the persons involved to give them a chance to explain or apologize.

By and large people at the school get along quite well because of this ability to air grievances and work things through face to face. In cases where communication between people is impossible they can choose to avoid and ignore each other.

Unfortunately, this mode of interpersonal interactions is thrown out of balance when it is interfered with by others who are important to the individuals in the school but who are not a part of the daily life of the school. What I am going to describe has happened every year since our inception in 1968, and uncannily is enacted as if according to a script which is always the same. I would find it bizarre and amusing but for the pain that it causes to all the participants in this drama, including myself.

This is how it unfolds. Students are led to understand by their parents directly or by subtle suggestion that it would be good for them to take some sort of class. The kids agree in principle but can't bring themselves to do it. What we see is kids who ask for a lesson, and then behave in a manner which isn't congruent with wanting to take the lesson. Thus they forget their appointments, or their homework. They may come to the lesson with an attitude of "tell me what I need to know so I can get this boring stuff done with as fast as possible and be free to do what I enjoy doing".

Time and again we see bright kids learning very little and hating every minute of it. They often ask the staff for instruction just before they leave for the day, or while the staff person is in the middle of another activity which makes it clear that no lesson can be given. These modes of behavior are in marked contrast to the way they behave when they want us to help them do something that they

53

The Sudbury Valley School

really want to do. Then they hound us with questions, wait for us to have time to attend to them, retain what we teach them and avidly do work on their own. They are purposeful and focused and it is evident in their whole demeanor that nothing will stop them from pursuing their interest. The contrast with the behavior of the same students when there is an externally imposed push to take classes is remark- able.

When children are questioned by their parents about classes which they really are not interested in taking but which they engage in to please their parents or allay their anxieties, they are in a quandary. How are they to explain their non-performance? They hem and haw and under enough pressure they begin to project their own behavior on the staff. They say, almost with no variation, that Hanna, or Denise, or Danny, or Joan, or Mikel, or Mimsy, or Carol were too busy to help them, or didn't show up for class, or were too late to do it, or were uninterested in teaching.

Sometimes we are accused of going shopping instead of attending to the students! At first when I heard these complaints say about Joan, or Mimsy I thought to myself, "It's possible that it's true, but it is strange that they are both attributed the exact same behavior when I know them both to be so different. Mimsy is so well organized that it is unlikely that she forgot an appointment, and Joan is usually in the Art room and easy to locate. When she goes shopping it is for art supplies with a student and all the other kids in the room know where she went." I wondered: could it be that the whole staff at SVS talks a good line but refuses to be attentive to the students needs? Could it be that all of us are identically forgetful, uninterested in attending to the students needs and dedicated to shopping during school hours? It didn't make sense.

It was only after numerous repeats of these accusations, leveled at all of us at one time or another, that the pattern began to show itself clearly. The formulaic nature of these criticisms belied their truth and revealed their origins. The students want to do what their parents think is good for them. However, they find this difficult to do at the school. They are too busy doing what they think is interesting and important. Only at the end of the day do they remember what they "ought" to have done. They need an explanation for their parents and for themselves, which will not reflect badly on them, and so they attribute their own forgetfulness, or lack of interest, or preoccupation, to the staff. The trouble is that what they say doesn't fit the characters of the particular staff involved. It does, however, fit the stereotypical reaction of kids to parental pressure to learn things which the parents think are important to learn but which the students don't.

Neither I nor other staff members hold a grudge against the kids. We know that both they and their parents are doing what they think is best and that we have to cope with these complaints as part of our job. But it does upset me that often the parents involved don't want to hear what we have to say on the matter. They usually are offended when we imply that the child lied to them because the child did not want to disappoint his or her parents. They also often don't agree with us that "suggesting" things to learn to their children constitutes pressuring their children, and that it is not in harmony with the school's approach to education.

It looks to me that when things get to this stage the children are better off in a different kind of school, where there is a curriculum which the children are obliged to learn and where the teachers coerce them to learn it. I believe that it would be better for the family, and the children in particular, not to attend a school where they are daily put into a situation of conflict between following their own idea of what is important to learn and listening to their parents' advice. It causes the kids to be depressed, guilty and anxious and worse, insecure about their future.

Yes, SVS is an all or nothing approach to children. Parents either do or don't trust their children

54

The Sudbury Valley School

to acquire the skills needed to survive in America according to their own judgment. If the latter is the case, it would be better to transfer the children to one of the many humane and kind schools available which believe that children need more help and guidance than we provide at SVS.

55

The Sudbury Valley School

Learning to Trust Oneself Alan White

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.

56

The Sudbury Valley School

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

57

The Sudbury Valley School

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.

58