The Sudbury Valley School has, for the past forty years, been the best-kept secret in American education. Most students of education have never heard of it. Professors of education ignore it, not out of malice but because they cannot absorb it into their framework of educational thought. The Sudbury Valley model of education is not a variation of standard education. It is not a progressive version of traditional schooling. It is not a Montessori school or a Dewey school or a Piagetian constructivist school. It is something entirely different. To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the thought: Adults do not control children's education; children educate themselves.
But the secret is getting out, spread largely by students and others who have experienced the Sudbury Valley School directly. Today at least two dozen schools throughout the world are modeled after Sudbury Valley. I predict that fifty years from now, if not sooner, the Sudbury Valley model will be featured in every standard textbook of education and will be adopted by many public school systems. In fifty years, I predict, today's approach to education will be seen by many if not most educators as a barbaric remnant of the past. People will wonder why the world took so long to come to grips with such a simple and self-evident idea as that upon which the Sudbury Valley School is founded: Children educate themselves; we don't have to do it for them.
In the last posting I summarized evidence that hunter-gatherer children learn the extraordinary amount that they must to become effective adults through their own self-directed play and exploration. In the posting before that, I pointed out that children in our culture learn many of the most difficult lessons they will ever learn before they start school, entirely on their own initiatives, without adult direction or prodding. And now, based on the experiences of the Sudbury Valley School, I contend that self-education works just as well for school-aged children and adolescents in our culture as it does for preschoolers and for hunter-gatherers.
For many years I have had the opportunity to observe the Sudbury Valley School, both as the father of a student who went there and as an academician using the school as a resource to study play and self-directed learning. Here I'll tell you a little about the school.
First, a few mundane facts. The school was founded 40 years ago and has been in continuous operation since then. It is a private day school, in Framingham, Massachusetts, open to students age four on through high-school age. The school is not in any sense elitist. It admits students without regard to any measures of academic performance, and it operates at a per pupil cost that is about half that of the surrounding public schools. The school currently has about 200 students and ten adult staff members. It is housed in a Victorian mansion and a remodeled barn, which sit on ten acres of land in a part of town that was largely rural when the school began operating. Now, the more remarkable facts concerning the school's mode of operation:
The school operates as a participatory democracy
The Sudbury Valley School is first and foremost a community in which children and adolescents experience directly the privileges and responsibilities of democratic government. The primary administrative body is the School Meeting, which consists of all students and staff members. In one-person-one-vote fashion, the School Meeting, which meets once a week, creates all of the school's rules, makes decisions about school purchases, establishes committees to oversee the school's day-to-day operation, and hires and fires staff members. Four-year-olds at the school have the same vote as do older students and adult staff members in all of this.
No staff members at the school have tenure. All are on one-year contracts, which must be renewed each year through a secret-ballot election. As the student voters outnumber the staff by a factor of 20 to 1, the staff who survive this process and are re-elected year after year are those who are admired by the students. They are people who are kind, ethical, and competent, and who contribute significantly and positively to the school's environment. They are adults that the students may wish in some ways to emulate.
The school's rules are enforced by the Judicial Committee, which changes regularly in membership but always includes a staff member and students representing the full range of ages at the school. When a student or staff member is charged by another school member with violating a rule, the accuser and the accused must appear before the Judicial Committee, which determines innocence or guilt and, in the latter case, decides on an appropriate sentence. In all of this, staff members are treated in the same way as students. Nobody is above the law.
The school does not interfere with students' activities
Students are free, all day, every day, to do what they wish at the school, as long as they don't violate any of the school's rules. The rules, all made by the School Meeting, have to do with protecting the school and protecting students' opportunities to pursue their own interests unhindered by others. School members must not make noise in designated "quiet rooms," misuse equipment or fail to put it away when finished, deface school property, use illegal drugs on campus, or behave in any way toward another person that makes that person feel harassed. Behaviors of those sorts are the fodder of Judicial Committee complaints.
None of the school's rules have to do with learning. The school gives no tests. It does not evaluate or grade students' progress.[1] There is no curriculum and no attempt to motivate students to learn. Courses occur only when students take the initiative to organize them, and they last only as long as the students want them. Many students at the school never join a course, and the school sees no problem with that. The staff members at the school do not consider themselves to be teachers. They are, instead, adult members of the community who provide a wide variety of services, including some teaching. Most of their "teaching" is of the same variety as can be found in any human setting; it involves answering sincere questions and presenting ideas in the context of real conversations.
The school is a rich environment for play and exploration, and therefore for learning
Learning at Sudbury Valley is largely incidental. It occurs as a side effect of students' self-directed play and exploration. The school is a wonderful place to play and explore. It provides space and time for such activities. It also provides equipment--including computers, a fully equipped kitchen, a woodworking shop, an art room, playground equipment, toys and games of various sorts, and many books. Students also have access to a pond, a field, and a nearby forest for outdoor play and exploration. Those who develop a special interest, which needs some new piece of equipment, might convince the School Meeting to buy it, or they might raise the money and buy it themselves by some means such as selling cookies in the school.
The most important resource at the school, for most students, is other students, who among them manifest an enormous range of interests and abilities. Because of the free age mixing at the school, students are exposed regularly to the activities and ideas of others who are older and younger than themselves. Age-mixed play offers younger children continuous opportunities to learn from older ones. For example, many students at the school have learned to read as a side effect of playing games that involve written words (including computer games) with students who already know how to read. They learn to read without even being aware that they are doing so.
