mta
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A Different Kind of School (long)
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Jun 29 22:28 UTC 1995 |
This information is provided by Scott Gray, The Sudbury Valley School,
2 Winch St, Framingham, MA 01701 (508)877-3030:
I work at a School called Sudbury Valley. The school
is celebrating its 25th anniversary of operation, and
several other schools around and outside the country see
our school's success and are modeling their schools on
ours.
The school accepts anyone from ages four and up, and
is accredited by the New England Association of Schools
and Colleges to award a high school diploma (more on that
later). It is a private school, which relies upon tuition
(the tuition is less than half the per-pupil cost of the
local public schools) and refuses grants or government
money. 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.
The physical plant is a beautiful victorian mansion
on a ten-acre campus. It is furnished like a home, with
couches, easy chairs, books everywhere (rather than hidden
in a library), etc. The grounds are excellent for sport
and games, and the school has several facilities; a
chemistry-biology lab, a darkroom, a piano, a stereo, a
pond great for fishing, several computers, etc.
Students (from age four on up) are free to do as they
wish during the day, as long as they follow the school
rules (more on school rules later). The campus is "open"
and people may come and go as they please, without having
to check with an office or other such nonsense. 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 staff (teachers) are equal in every
regard. The students and staff refer to each other by
first name, and the relationships between students and
staff can't easily be distinguished from the relations
between students.
The school is governed democratically, by the School
Meeting. The school meeting meets weekly, and is made up
of students and staff (one vote to a person, following
Robert's Rules of Order). It decides all matters of
consequence; electing administrative officers from among
its own members (yes, no distinction is made between
students and staff as far as eligibility for an office),
deciding school rules (enforced by the Judicial committee,
see later), making expenditures, submitting the annual
budget to the Assembly (see later) for approval, hiring
firing and re-hiring staff (there is no tenure, all staff
are up for re-election each year), etc.
The school Assembly meets annually, and is made up of
students, staff, and parents of students (as most parents
pay tuition, it is considered only reasonable to give them
some voice in the use of their money). It must approve
the budget (submitted by the school meeting) which
includes tuefined by the School
Meeting several times over the last 25 years. Its most
current incarnation revolves around a Judicial Committee
(JC) made up of two officers electedur students selected randomly every month,
and a staff member (who is allowed input, but no vote, to reflect the fact that
a staff voice is valuable but that staff are still in the minority) chosen
daily. The JC investigates complaints of school rules being broken, and
sometimes presses charges. If the JC finds someone guilty, and (s)he pleads
innocent, there will be a trial. If a person pleads guilty or is found guilty
by the trial, the accused will be sentenced by the Judicial Committee.
Verdicts and sentences deemed unfair by the accused (or others, for that
matter) 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.
Democracy alone is not enough to create a stable
happy community. The revolution-torn democratic
city-states of ancient Greece are testimony to this. It
is also important that personal freedoms and rights be
respected. As such, the school grants the freedoms
guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to its students; normally
in American society students are not given freedom of
thought or religion (a parent may force his/her child into
sunday school), free assembly (their not even allowed to
leave their seats to go to the bathroom in traditional
school, without permission from a teacher), etc.
It is understood that the "purpose" of schools is to
educate. So let me put forward the reasons why it is
believed that freedom and democracy are the best
environment for children to learn.
People are born with an amazing capacity for
knowledge -- the brain. It makes little sense to assume
that such a thing could have evolved (or been created, or
whatever) without the means of USING it also being natural
to human beings. Let me list some of the more obvious
"natural" mechanisms by which children (and adults) encode
information about their world. Curiosity (crushed in a
classroom where you must study what others wish, rather
than that subject which you are burning to know),
role-modelling (not easy when the only person older than
you is a teacher whom you probably dislike and is almost
certainly NOT practicing the profession you would choose)
and spontaneous play (that's right out the window, for
children are so restrained by school 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, and it takes a cell (like a traditional
school) to KEEP a curious person from finding out anything
and everything (s)he wants to know.
People naturally learn to deal with the environment
in which they are placed. In a place with grades, where
knowledge is spoon-fed to them and they never have any
reason to make use of it apart from passing a test,
students will learn to GET GOOD GRADES (whether that means
learning to cheat, or learning how to "cram" for a test).
In a place where people do what they want, they find the
INTRINSIC value of knowledge. In a place where people are
treated as adult human beings they learn that they must
live up to certain community standards, but when they are
treated as prisoners (read: traditional schools) they
learn only that they are untrusted, and they learn to wait
for the instructions and orders of others. Its testimony
to the strength of the human spirit that there are so FEW
apathetic and helpless people that come out of the public
school system. (Sudbury Valley alumni, by the way, often
become quite politically active in later life, and often
go into helping professions.)
I hope that there will be lots of questions and
discussion of this exciting approach to education! People
should feel free to email me, or call/snail-mail the
school for further information or publications lists.
--Scott Gray, The Sudbury Valley School, 2 Winch Street,
Framingham, MA 01701 (508)877-3030
Internet:Svalley@world.std.com
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