Many people think that Sudbury Valley is an easy school, many think that it is hard. The truth, it turns out, is much more subtle and depends entirely on your point of view. This lecture talks about “easy” and “hard” from a very new angle. This lecture was delivered on March 17, 2010.
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“The simple answer is: of course they can! If they’re given the freedom to do what they would do naturally – to do all the things that learning is about – of course they can learn. They do it as infants, they will do it as adults, and they do it throughout the ages in between.”
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A look at what “guidance” means, plus a thought-provoking discourse on how human beings get where they want to go, both literally and figuratively, and the role guidance plays in that journey.
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In the Spring of 2000, Mimsy Sadofsky was interviewed by Dr. Daria Brezinsky on her live radio show, “Children Come First”. The wide-ranging and searching questions asked on the show mirrored those that are so often asked during enrollment interviews and other conversations about the school.
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“Sudbury Valley School was consciously modeled on the American experience. Our book The Crisis in American Education stressed the theme that this school’s values parallel those of American society. Why is it so hard for Americans to accept its premises? Why is it such a hard sell to the rest of the world?”
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A good introductory presentation with a lively question and answer session. Given to an audience composed of graduate students at the Harvard School of Education.
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“Its judicial procedure is a community’s way of dealing with breaches of the rules that have been set up in order to deal with actions that derive from the tension between the individual’s desires and the community’s needs. Every social order, no matter how primitive, has some judicial procedure.”
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“The generation gap gets broken down in this school in a way that you don’t find in the home or in the church or in any other institution that I’ve ever been. So even though the home is number one, Sudbury Valley School is right there too and they do interweave in a beautiful way.”
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“What are the characteristics people should have to be comfortable in this new reality? I think you’ll all agree with these. They have to be flexible and adaptable, and can’t be stuck in any rut. They have to be able to interact seamlessly with their environment, and the environment now means the globe.”
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“You want children to grow up in an environment in which they can have their native curiosity unleashed. Kids who are good at following their curiosity are ready to step into the modern world and lead a satisfactory life.”
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“Forty years of amazing students have passed through our campus, but parents still worry while their children are here, students still struggle with the difficulty of the school, and the public still hangs onto models of education that have fallen into disrepair. Why?”
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“The seeds for having a sustainable school are planted at the outset. How you start is largely the determining factor in how long you’re going to stay in existence. I’m going to examine the things that are necessary from the beginning and see how they tie into keeping a school sustainable over the long run.”
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“I was just a kid from East Boston who was not sure that this was going to be the right fit for me but I think in my time here I decided that I was going to make it the right fit for me. Success can be a choice and you certainly can do that here. You can go in any path that you like.”
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Changing a world view is not an easy thing. There is no lack of people who are convinced that there’s something seriously wrong with the educational system. But it’s much more difficult to go to a completely different world view, that the whole traditional way of looking at education is wrong.
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“Nature has arranged matters in such a way that play is the chief, overridingly absorbing, activity of human young. According to the natural order of things, then, play – the activity central to people in their most accelerated learning mode – must be the most effective instrument for learning.”
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“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. They are acutely aware that very young people are not given this much freedom or this much responsibility almost anywhere in the world.”
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“I feel Sudbury Valley does give people some self-confidence. What I feel is that I can cope with failing or succeeding at doing anything that I'm interested in trying to do. It's self-confidence in the sense that one's not really afraid to try things that seem hard.”
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This interview covered a wide range of topics including the conceptual background of the School, how it was founded, and how the concepts and practices evolved over time.
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“Tradition gives you a sense of security. It’s scary – the world out there is scary. You have to use your own judgment, you have to really look at things and say I believe in this, it makes sense to me even if everybody else thinks the opposite. What I am trying to do is to allay some of that anxiety.”
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What education needs is something it rarely gets: a thorough, deep re-examination of its essence – of what it is, and what it means. To do that requires an understanding of human development, and a comprehension of the great historic forces that have shaped human nature and society.
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