The Spirit
of Ma’at Vol 1, No 10
Article by Scott Gray
Interview by Diane M. Cooper
Shortly after we made the Internet available, one of the
technicians ... told me, ''My God, what are you doing there? ... More data
flows to and from your handful of computers than the whole Boston School
district.''
- Scott Gray, Sudbury alumnus and
staff member
The
Sudbury Valley School has been in operation for more than 30 years now. Several
other schools both in and outside the United States have observed our success
and are modeling their schools on ours.
The
school accepts students 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.
Sudbury's
physical plant is a beautiful Victorian mansion on a ten-acre campus. It is
furnished like a home, with couches and easy chairs. Books are everywhere - not
hidden in a library. The grounds, which include a great fishing pond, are
excellent for sports and games. The school's indoor facilities include music
rooms, an art room, a darkroom, a piano, a stereo, and several computers, with
high-speed Internet connectivity.
Students
are free to do as they wish during the day as long as they follow the rules
(more on that later). The campus is ''open,'' and most students come and go as
they please, without having to check with an office. 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 teachers are equal in every regard. They refer to each other by first name,
and the relationships between students and staff are much the same as relations
between the students themselves.
The
school is governed democratically by the weekly School Meeting, which follows
Robert's Rules of Order and consists of both students and staff. The School
Meeting elects administrative officers from among those in attendance, with
students and staff being equally eligible for office. The Meeting decides upon
the School Rules, allocates expenditures, submits an annual budget to the
Assembly (see later) for approval, and does all hiring, firing and re-hiring of
staff. Also, there is no tenure procedure. All staff are up for re-election -
or not - each year.
The
Assembly, made up of students, staff, and parents (since they are usually the
ones paying the tuition fees, it is considered only reasonable that parents
should have some voice in how their money is spent). The Assembly meets
annually to approve the upcoming year's budget submitted by the School Meeting.
Budgetary items include tuition rates and staff salaries. The Assembly also
votes on whether or not to award diplomas to students who have requested them.
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), plus five students selected randomly every month and a staff
member chosen daily. The JC investigates complaints of school rules' being
broken, and sometimes presses charges.
If the
JC presses charges against someone and he or she pleads innocent, there is 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 by
the accused or others to be unfair 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.
As the
revolution-torn democratic city-states of ancient Greece attest, democracy
alone is not enough to create a stable, happy community. It is also important
that personal freedoms and rights be respected, and in this spirit, Sudbury
School grants to its students the same freedoms guaranteed to adults by the
Bill of Rights. This alone, as you may recognize, is highly unusual. In
traditional schools American children are not even allowed to leave their seats
to go to the bathroom without permission from a teacher. Nor do American
children normally have freedom of religion - parents may force them into Sunday
school or other religious practices.
But
children come into this world with an amazing natural capacity for knowledge,
and it makes little sense to assume that such a thing as the human brain could
have evolved, or been created or whatever, if the means of using did not come
also naturally. Let me list some of the more obvious ''natural'' mechanisms by
which children and adults learn that are customarily suppressed by the lack of
freedom in traditional schools:
*
Curiosity. This is crushed in classrooms where children must study what others
wish, rather than the subjects they are burning to know about.
*
Role-modeling. This is not easy when the only person older than you is a
teacher whom you probably dislike and who is almost certainly not practicing
the profession you would have chosen for yourself.
*
Spontaneous play. Play is right out the window in our traditional schools,
where children are so restrained 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. It takes the
prison-like cells of our traditional schools to keep a curious person from
finding out anything and everything he or she wants to know.
People
naturally learn to deal with the environment in which they find themselves. In
a place with grades, where knowledge is spoonfed and there is never any reason
to make use of it apart from passing tests, students will learn to get good
grades - whether that means learning to cheat or learning how to ''cram'' for a
test.
When
children are treated as prisoners, as in traditional schools, they learn only
that they are not trusted and cannot trust themselves - that they must 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 coming out of
the public school system.
In a
place like Sudbury, where all people are treated as responsible human beings,
they learn that they must live up to certain community standards. Sudbury
Valley alumni often become quite politically active in later life, and often go
into helping professions.
When
young people are allowed to do what they want, they find the intrinsic value of
knowledge and cooperation.
Interview
with Scott Gray by Diane M. Cooper
Diane:
Scott, in your article you mention the words ''democratic society.'' Please
provide a further explanation as it applies to Sudbury School.
Scott:
The thing that I think most defines what we are doing here is a respect for the
concept of individual liberty and individual rights that the community itself
can't touch - a respect for political democracy in which all the citizens have
the same rights to participate and a respect for the notion of equality before
the law, in which the school is ''ruled by laws and not by men,'' to use an old
term.
Children
and adults tend to be involved in power relationships that are very lopsided.
And when you have a school that calls itself a ''normal'' school, wherein there
are no written rules and success depends on what the adults around you say is
acceptable, what happens, in my opinion, is that any sense of equality is lost.
Equality is protected better in an environment that has written codes of rules
that can be debated and discussed by the entire community.
When
you compare us to other schools that started in 1967-68, you will find that
most of them were attracted to notions that relied on consensus and on gentle,
guiding hands. We started a school that is run like a town meeting, wherein if
it isn't a written rule, no one can say anything about it.
Diane:
How old were you when you came to the school?
Scott:
Twelve I think
Diane:
What kind of educational system did you come from?
Scott:
I had been in local traditional school until grade four.
Diane:
How was it for you coming into a nontraditional environment?
Scott:
It was a very interesting experience. I had read about the kinds of things
Sudbury stood for, but frankly I was very suspicious. I had felt myself to have
been lied to, cajoled, and misled by adults all though traditional school, and
it took me a while to realize that this place actually did what it said it did.
I
remember distinctly my first year at Sudbury. I read all the school law books
and bylaws and so forth. I made it a point to attend the School Meetings. And
after a year or two of seeing these ideas in practice - of seeing that the
adults in the community were not forming a voting block, and that they were
looking at issues just like everyone else - I realized that the School Meeting
indeed had force of law here. As soon as I knew I could exercise a vote if I
needed to, I didn't have the same partly paranoid sense that I needed to look
out to make sure it was for real.
Diane:
In reading the book Free at Last, by Daniel Greenberg, I have an understanding
of what is being done at Sudbury. In fact, I wish I'd had the opportunity to
attend there myself. But what about children of fourteen who are pretty much
''programmed,'' shall we say, by the other models of education and the
traditional parent-child relationship? How easy is it for them to make the
transition?
Scott:
I do think that people who come here younger, with a minimum of experience in
traditional schools or schools that have a curriculum, have an easier time of
it. Many schools calling themselves alternative still have curriculums or sets
of goals, things that they expect the child to ultimately do - and if the child
doesn't do these things, they start to be psychoanalyzed or cajoled in the
accepted direction.
I would
say that I've never seen a case of someone coming younger than age 13 that had
so much baggage that it was an impossible transition - but I also have to admit
that we've had a couple of kids that came in at age 16 and 17 who just couldn't
integrate. Basically they were ready to drop out of school, and their parents,
in a last-ditch effort, said maybe they'd fit in at this school. But they could
never break down their barriers.
There
are a lot of alternative schools in the country who won't enroll anyone over
the age of twelve for just this reason.
Diane:
In looking back now from the perspective of an adult, what would you say was
your most profound moment as a student?
Scott:
Hmmm. You know, that questions catches me a little off guard.
Diane:
Why?
Scott:
I guess because I look at my time and education here as a whole, as a process, and
that kind of question invites an answer about moments of epiphany or moments of
real deliberate changes in thinking, and I guess I can't identify a moment like
that in my education. The things that I can remember that were personally
significant were the kinds of things that would be significant to most people
in their lives - like a friend moving away, or the meeting of someone who
becomes a lifelong friend - normal aspects of living are the ones that stand
out in my memory. I guess they wouldn't seem spectacular to anyone but me.
But I
will say that I felt very moved on a number of occasions by particular
experiences that had to do with the structure of the school. After years of a
traditional school in which I felt powerless, one of the moments that really
stands out for me here was at a School Meeting. Another student and myself
started a conversation about a staff member we were calling into question. That
conversation actually resulted, ultimately, in the staff member's not being
offered a contract for the coming year. Our conversation was taken seriously.
Our age or situation didn't color the way in which we were being listened to.
That for me was very powerful, and I know that a number of other students find
this power to be a real wake-up call. The vote on staff members here is a
serious thing, and my experience wasn't the first or the last time a staff
member lost an annual election and was denied a contract.
I also
think that the experience of arguing a case and losing is a very powerful experience.
What was conveyed to me, as I recall, was a sense that - okay I've got my ideas
and the community has its ideas, I am a member of the community. I care about
the community, but we are not synonymous. We are a group of citizens with
private opinions, and we can belong to the community while still disagreeing
with decisions made by the whole. That thought was very liberating. It is the
very basis of what we call pluralism in society at large - the notion that the
society can make a choice for itself without having to insist that all of its
member go along with it.
Diane:
I've been talking to friends about the Sudbury concept, and I've had some very
interesting responses. When talking about the idea of ''no set curriculum'' and
open campus, many adults have asked how children can know what is good for
them. What would you say to this?
Scott:
I tend to come at these kinds of questions from a civil-libertarian viewpoint.
I would say, ''Who else can know?'' What capacity does anyone have to step inside
someone's else's mind and say what's needed. And how would you defend your
ability to do that? I don't think it's appropriate for any person or group of
people to say for this other group of people what's good for them.
Diane:
Doesn't our society do that somewhat in the sense that it says you've got to
know certain things in order to be considered successful, employable, and go on
to higher education? How does the school address this?
Scott:
These are very real things that people need to deal with. The fact is, the
reason some students learn to read is that they find things they want to do.
And in order to do them, they find there are things that they need to know.
That's a natural process - the discovery of what one needs gives one's aim.
Why should
a school have to sell something in a curriculum by cajoling children to do
things. It seems to me that anything which is worth doing is worth doing on its
own. And if it's worth doing, people will come to it. If it's not worth doing,
then people will stay away from it. If it turns out that for one person reading
wasn't necessary, why should anyone else care?
Diane:
What about the requirements some states have for annual testing?
Scott:
There is a test called the MCCAS - Massachusetts Circular Assessment Test - but
that test is only a requirement for public schools, or schools in Massachusetts
that receive public funding. This is one reason we remain totally out of that
system and take no government grants or other aid, because we don't want to be
obligated to instill curricula on demand.
In the
United States, each state handles its own educational system independently. In
Massachusetts, the state licenses the town and tells the town that it is
responsible to license local private schools in the area. That was done for us
back in 1967, and we've had repeated success with this system over the past 30
years. No one has ever approached us about reversing that decision, and it
won't happen.
But in
some states it is practically impossible to start a school like this, because
of the nature of mandatory testing there.
Diane:
M.I.T. has now said that a majority of education will take place on the
Internet. How is the Internet handled at Sudbury?
Scott:
We handle it very casually. About four years ago, we were going through the
budget, and decided to fund a major library program wherein we connected a
handful of computers to the Internet with a T1 line. Right now there are six
computers available for regular students or staff, and they may be used however
people want to use them.
We see
a lot of web exploration. Some use it for composing writings or computer art.
You see people who watch movies on computers, or communicate with others
through email and session groups - just about any sort of activity that you
find online.
Something
interesting is that shortly after we made the Internet available, one of the
Mermac Education Center technicians (Mermac is a nonprofit company that gets
Internet access at cost for nonprofit organizations and schools) told me, ''My
God, what are you doing there? You guys are on a T1 and more data flows to and
from your handful of computers than the whole Boston School district.''
Frankly,
I'm not surprised. When people are only able to go to sites that are listed in
advance, you could put all that on a CD - why do you need a multimillion dollar
budget. When you have a portal that is open to the world - why close it? So we
just leave it open, and people do what they want.
Diane:
How many students do you have?
Scott:
We are in the unfortunate situation of having a waiting list. We have 200
students at any given moment. There is some talk about adding a building in the
future.
Diane:
What would you say to parent who were considering enrolling their child in this
type of program.
Scott:
To be honest, my tendency is not to try to sell the school. My tendency is to
try to speak honestly about it, because the fact is, some families are not
prepared to deal with a place that has this philosophy. And neither the school
nor their child is going to be well off if they make a mismatch. So I would
tell them what it makes sense to tell them based on their questions and
concerns.
Diane:
Thank you Scott for sharing your experiences with us.
For
more information on democratic schools, or to obtain a School Planning Kit
which covers the nitty-gritty details of starting and maintaining a school,
write to Sudbury Valley School Press, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA, 01701,
Fax: 508-788-0674; or visit www.sudval.org.
For those
who have questions or comments about Sudbury Valley School, these can be
directed to a large number of people who are familiar with the school
community, including students, alumni, staff, parents, friends and critics, by
email to discuss-sudbury-model@sudval.org.
To
become a member of this email list, send a one-line message that reads
''subscribe discuss-sudbury-model'' to majordomo@sudval.org. Please note that
this mailing list is private, maintained by myself. It is neither maintained
nor endorsed by the Sudbury Valley School.
Scott
Gray, The Sudbury Valley School, 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701
(508)877-3030. Email: sdg@sudval.org. Website: sudval.org