Education: Class Dismissed

It's every modern parent's worst nightmare—a school where kids can play all day. But no one takes the easy way out, and graduates seem to have a head start on the information age. Welcome to Sudbury Valley.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on May 01, 2006 - last reviewed on July 05, 2006

"I've learned a lot about how my mind works by paying attention to how I unicycle," Ben declared in preparation for high school graduation. And from the time he was 12, Ben paid attention to nothing so much as unicycling. When students elsewhere were puzzling over, say, the periodic table, Ben, along with a handful of schoolmates, was mostly struggling up and racing down New England mountainsides, dodging rocks, mud and other obstacles. His "frantic fights to maintain balance" demanded both deep focus and moment-to-moment planning. But they gave him something missing from most classrooms today—a passion for pursuing challenges and inhaling the skills and information (to say nothing of the confidence) to master life's complexities.

At Sudbury Valley School, there's no other way to learn. The 38-year-old day facility in Framingham, Massachusetts, is founded on what comes down to a belief about human nature—that children have an innate curiosity to learn and a drive to become effective, independent human beings, no matter how many times they try and fail. And it's the job of adults to expose them to models and information, answer questions—then get out of the way without trampling motivation. There are no classrooms per se, although students can request instruction on any subject or talk to any staffer any time about an interest. There aren't even grades. From overnight hiking trips to economics classes to weekly school meetings at which all matters—including my visit—are discussed and voted on by students and staff, all activities are age-mixed.

Some kids start Sudbury at age 4, their parents committed to democratic principles even in education and trusting to the byways of self-motivation. Some, like Ben, arrive around age 6. "Ben was a kinesthetic learner," says his mother, Pam Swing. "He really learned by doing. I could tell that he wouldn't make it at the local kindergarten, where the kids were arranged in rows and raised their hand to speak. On a visit, he declared, 'I'm not going there.'" Others land at Sudbury because they lost interest or failed in conventional schooling and the place was a last-ditch choice by parents or students.

Students spend an inordinate amount of time talking to each other, reading in quiet corners, drawing or painting, hunkered in the computer rooms and moving around the mansion, barn and 10-acre estate. Mostly, though, they spend time playing.

The Future with Sneakers On

Play—it's by definition absorbing. The outcome is always uncertain. Play makes children nimble—neurobiologically, mentally, behaviorally—capable of adapting to a rapidly evolving world. That makes it just about the best preparation for life in the 21st century. Psychologists believe that play cajoles people toward their human potential because it preserves all the possibilities nervous systems tend to otherwise prune away. It's no accident that all of the predicaments of play—the challenges, the dares, the races and chases—model the struggle for survival. Think of play as the future with sneakers on.

But when Jeffrey Hohl and his wife first heard about Sudbury Valley, where the tuition is $6,000 per student (less for families with multiple enrollees), they were categorically dismissive. "I mean," he says, "how can kids learn anything without doing much of anything?" That, however, was before the first four of his six kids started school elsewhere and their curiosity began withering. "After spending many years in the business world, it dawned on me that you learn best what you really want to learn, and you really have to have that spark." When he read again about the Sudbury idea of letting kids pursue their own interests, he was ready to buy in. It took two trips to get all four kids their required weeklong trial visit, but when the kids gave the thumbs up, he sold his house in Nantucket and moved his brood a mile or so from SVS. "You don't realize until you're an adult how natural it is to learn, how interesting the world really is. We adults think we know how to do it and that children don't and therefore we have to teach them how."

So ingrained is the belief that kids learn only when confined to their seats and explicitly taught that most adults overlook obvious evidence to the contrary—the young struggle persistently against even their own clumsiness to master such formidable tasks as crawling, walking and talking on their own. "Learning and teaching have nothing to do with each other," declares Dan Greenberg, who, with his wife Hanna, is a founder of Sudbury Valley. In traditional schools, he says, teaching is driven by coercion, which breeds resistance. "Learning is driven internally by curiosity. Teaching can be effective only if the person you're teaching has sought you out to teach her." A physicist by training, Greenberg abandoned an Ivy League tenure track career in academia to start SVS.

Outsiders commonly choke upon hearing that no one even teaches reading. Sometimes insiders get a bit antsy, too. When Ben was in the second or third grade, anxiety temporarily overtook his well-read father, who offered the boy a dime for every 15 minutes he'd spend reading at home. Ben accepted the bribe long enough to prove he could do it.

But true to the Sudbury spirit, his reading proficiency took a huge leap forward only after he began playing with airplanes and then an electronic flight simulator—because that led him to read the flight manual. And that led to discovery of flight simulator communities on the Internet, which led to mock airplane battles, which led to communicating with squadron leaders, which led to spelling and writing, which ultimately got Ben into Swarthmore, where he is now finishing his freshman year.