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Sudbury Valley School: Former Students
Look at Their Lives
by Mimsy Sadofsky
Co-founder/Staff, Sudbury Valley School
Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968 and
has served as a beacon welcoming the beginnings
and now the flourishing of the Information Age.
The school began at the point in history when it
was quickly becoming clear that the explosion of
information, the almost infinite variation in
methods of obtaining information, and the
infinite variations in the responses that humans
have to their environment, had freed humankind
from any reason to be schooled harshly.
The school’s beginnings lay in an examination of
what it meant to be a free and empowered human
being, and whether or not most schools were in
the situation of optimizing that outcome. We
wanted to try to extend liberties in a
meaningful way to children as young as four. We
discovered quickly that young children, in a
respectful and trusting environment of people of
all ages, behaved in ways that were respectful
and trustworthy. They also, as an extra bonus,
got a phenomenal education that way. A mind free
to “play” with ideas – and toys and other people
– expands at an amazing rate and drinks in ideas
and attitudes and information without much
effort from others. A person free to converse
fairly constantly learns, as we hoped they
would, to understand a great deal about
themselves, other people, and the world they
live in.
We knew that growing up was hard work, but we
expected it to be joyous work, and we have not
been disappointed for one minute of these 38
years.
In 2005, an in depth study of people who had
spent a significant part of their formative
years at Sudbury Valley was published. (The
book, The Pursuit of Happiness, is
available from Sudbury Valley School Press,
www.sudval.org.) The following quotes are
from adults who grew up with complete autonomy
and total responsibility within a participatory
democracy.
We asked them, among other things, to describe
not just their work but the meaning their work
has for them. The first quote is from a young
woman who has taken the ideas of the school into
a rather natural community forum and at the same
time found deep meaning in her work:
Since I’ve been out of college, I’ve been
working in libraries, children’s libraries, and
I find that really meaningful. It’s kind of my
mission to change libraries to be more open. I
think there’s a lot of potential for libraries
to use their meeting space for a whole host of
things that they don’t use them fornow. For
example, I have teenagers come into the library
and they bring bands and they play music after
the library is closed. This summer we put on a
play where the high school students were
teaching the younger kids improv acting.
I think that libraries in the old-fashioned
sense are unfortunately – or fortunately – kind
of defunct. My vision of a library of the future
is a space where information on all kinds of
different platforms can be exchanged.
This man has a different social aim – but
he has one nonetheless! – for his work:
When you’re teaching science, I think it’s
very important to keep your personal views
private. It’s important to try to prevent
students from thinking that having a certain
view will be good for them. The whole point is
to try to convince people to analyze things
critically, and carefully look for evidence,
without jumping to conclusions.
The following three people talk about
entering university after a Sudbury Valley
education and how that impacted them. The first
was prepared well by never having lost his
innate self-motivation:
I think that in a lot of ways Sudbury Valley
made it easier for me. I remember how my
roommate and his friends would never ever work
up the energy to read the book or prepare
themselves for any aspect of the class until the
night before a test, that sort of thing. And I
remember feeling astounded because it seemed to
me that there were more efficient ways, that you
didn’t have to work any harder but you could
prepare yourself in a more leisurely way when
you simply kept up with the reading. The whole
campus would be in a panic just before midterms
and just before finals, while my tendency was to
work the opposite way. I think that’s an aspect
of having taken charge of how you spend your own
time. I was able to walk through campus
whistling and not worrying about it while
everyone else was panicking.
This young woman is thankful that the
competitiveness which gained her classmates
admission to college was not part of her
background:
It was an adjustment, but it was also clear
to me that it was an adjustment for everybody.
In particular, at a prestigious college like the
one I attended, the students were used to being
in the top 5%, the top 1%, whatever, of their
high schools, without doing all that much work.
So, to suddenly find that, “Oh, I’m not
automatically one of the best students because
everybody else around me is of a similar
caliber,” was a strain on a lot of people. I was
fortunate, because it was plain to me that
college was going to be a big change.
In my first semester, I got the first letter
grade I’d ever had. It was kind of a big deal in
the sense that it was kind of bizarre for me. I
realized that it was a good thing that I had
gone to a school that didn’t have grades. I
would have been a very competitive, annoying
sort of teenager, if I had been at a regular
high school, trying to get all A’s.
And this person sums it all up:
I think it was a lot easier for me than it
was for a lot of my peers at college. It seemed
like they had always been told what to do in
school, so they were used to following
directions. Suddenly they had some freedom and
for them there was not a good understanding of
cause and effect: if you do your work you’ll get
a good grade, and if you drink yourself into a
stupor and don’t get your work done you’ll not
get a good grade, you know?
For me it wasn’t that hard, because I’d been in
an environment where I learned that if you want
to get something done, you need to look at the
steps to take to achieve that.
A common worry expressed about schools as
individualized as Sudbury Valley is that
students who are allowed so much freedom will
develop less community responsibility. Because
they are involved in a community non-stop, every
day, for which they have total responsibility,
we have never been concerned with this. Our
alumni shed light on it for us:
I’m committed to democracy. I’ve always been
interested in politics. I guess the way I’d
explain it is that I developed a view of society
while I was at Sudbury Valley and of how a
society could work. Sudbury Valley was a small
society – around 100 people most of the time I
was there. But there was fairness and there was
democracy and there was self-rule and that gave
me kind of a blueprint. Where I see that
blueprint failing or not being mirrored in the
society at large has troubled me, troubled me
greatly.
I’ve always been very easily angered by anything
that seems to be unfair. When I was in public
school, when I was 7, 8, 9, I used to rebel and
tell people that they were being unfair, that
they were denying us freedom of assembly,
freedom of speech, and so forth. It’s always
been a matter of deep importance to me that
people be given the freedoms that are their
rights by birth as human beings, and I hated not
seeing it in school.
It’s one of the reasons I’m so deeply
interested in history. We’ve watched the
development of the ideas of fundamental human
rights among various groups during the 15th,
16th, and 17th centuries, and of course in the
United States. Seeing how people have worked or
fought for those things and, to some extent, a
morbid interest in what various people had to
put up with over time, has always passionately
interested me.
I was probably born tending to be a person who
was always trying to make sure that things were
done fairly. My parents reinforced that
tendency, my rebellion against school reinforced
that tendency, and I think the fact that my
rebellion against school succeeded and I was
taken out and sent some place else reinforced
that tendency.
And for this last young man, his background
gave him the strength to know that he could
achieve whatever he aimed for:
In spending your whole life at Sudbury
Valley making your own decisions, and going
after your own passions, you’re constantly
having to make new decisions every day and
change how you are. Anything you try to do – if
you decide to go apprentice with a mechanic –
the Sudbury Valley student will learn faster.
They’ll adjust because their environment was so
dynamic. So to me college, mechanic school,
starting your trade or working for a living,
they’re the same thing – learning to acclimate.
The beauty of Sudbury Valley is: you strengthen
the natural abilities, and then all other things
will follow.
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