Free at Last

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By Daniel Greenberg

Classes

We have to be careful with words. It's a miracle they ever mean the same thing to any two people. Often, they don't. Words like "love," "peace," "trust," "democracy" -- everyone brings to these words a lifetime of experiences, a world view, and we know how rarely we have these in common with anyone else.

Take the word "class." I don't know what it means in cultures that don't have schools. Maybe they don't even have the word. To most people reading this, the word conveys a wealth of images: a room with a "teacher" and "students" in it, the students sitting at desks and receiving "instruction" from the teacher, who sits or stands before them. It also conveys much more: a "class period," the fixed time when the class takes place; homework; a textbook, which is the subject matter of the class clearly laid out for all the students.

And it conveys more: boredom, frustration, humiliation, achievement, failure, competition.

At Sudbury Valley the word means something quite different.

At Sudbury Valley, a class is an arrangement between two parties. It starts with someone, or several persons, who decide they want to learn something specific -- say, algebra, or French, or physics, or spelling, or pottery. A lot of times, they figure out how to do it on their own. They find a book, or a computer program, or they watch someone else. When that happens, it isn't a class. It's just plain learning.

Then there are the times they can't do it alone. They look for someone to help them, someone who will agree to give them exactly what they want to make the learning happen. When they find that someone, they strike a deal: "We'll do this and that, and you'll do this and that -- OK?" If it's OK with all the parties, they have just formed a class.

Those who initiate the deal are called "students." If they don't start it up, there is no class. Most of the time, kids at school figure out what they want to learn and how to learn it all on their own. They don't use classes all that much.

The someone who strikes the deal with the students is called a "teacher." Teachers can be other students at the school. Usually, they are people hired to do the job.

Teachers at Sudbury Valley have to be ready to make deals, deals that satisfy the students' needs. We get a lot of people writing the school asking to be hired as teachers. Many of them tell us at length how much they have to "give" to children. People like that don't do too well at the school. What's important to us is what the students want to take, not what the teachers want to give. That's hard for a lot of professional teachers to grasp.

The class deals have all sorts of terms: subject matter, times, obligations of each party. For example, to make the deal, the teacher has to agree to be available to meet the students at certain times. These times may be fixed periods: a half hour every Tuesday at 11:00AM. Or they may be flexible: "whenever we have questions, we'll get together on Monday mornings at 10:00AM to work them out. If we have no questions, we'll skip till next week." Sometimes, a book is chosen to serve as a reference point. The students have their end of the deal to meet. They agree to be on time, for instance.

Classes end when either side has had enough of the deal. If the teachers find out they can't deliver, they can back out -- and the students have to find a new teacher if they still want a class. If the students discover they don't want to go on, the teachers have to find some other way to occupy themselves at the appointed hour.

There is another kind of class at school, from time to time. It happens when people feel they have something new and unique to say that can't be found in books, and they think others may be interested. They post a notice: "Anyone interested in X can meet me in the Seminar Room at 10:30AM on Thursdays." Then they wait. If people show up, they go on. If not, that's life. People can show up the first time and, if there is a second time, decide not to come back.

I've done this kind of thing several times. The first session, I usually get a crowd: "Let's see what he's up to." The second session, fewer come. By the end, I have a small band who are truly curious about what I have to say on the subject at hand. It's a form of entertainment for them, and a way for me (and others) to let people know how we think.

From Free at Last

By Daniel Greenberg

Persistence

It's a problem with words again. The way I just described it, learning sounds casual, loose, laid back. Easy come, easy go. Random. Chaotic. Undisciplined.

Often I wish that were true.

When school first opened, thirteen year old Richard enrolled and quickly found himself absorbed in classical music -- and in the trumpet. Richard soon was sure he had found his life interest. With Jan, a trombonist, available on the staff to help him, Richard threw himself into his studies.

Richard practiced the trumpet four hours every day. We could hardly believe it. We suggested other activities, to no avail. Whatever Richard did -- and he did a lot at school -- he always found four hours to play.

He came from Boston, 1-1/4 hours each way every day, often 1/2 hour or more on foot from the Framingham bus station. Like the proverbial postman, "in rain or shine, hail or sleet" Richard made it to school, and to our eardrums.

It was not long before we discovered the virtues of the old mill house by the pond. Built of granite, roofed with slate, nestled in a distant corner of the campus, the old neglected building took on sudden beauty in our eyes. And in Richard's. In no time at all it was turned into a music studio, where Richard could practice to his heart's content.

He practiced.

Four or more hours a day, for four years.

Not long after graduating from school, after completing further studies at a conservatory, Richard became first horn of a major symphony orchestra.

Richard was followed soon by Fred, whose love was drums. Drums in the morning, drums in the afternoon, drums at night. Emergency action was in order. We fixed up a drum room for him in the basement, and gave him the key to the school so he could play early, late, and on weekends.

We discovered that the basement wasn't all that isolated acoustically from the rest of the building. It was often like living near a jungle village, with the constant beat of drums in the background.

Fred moved on at the age of eighteen after two years. We loved him, but many of us wished him godspeed.

It isn't only music that brings out the stubborn persistence we all have inside us. Every child soon finds an area, or two, or more, to pursue relentlessly.

Sometimes, it isn't even material they enjoy. Year after year, older students with their hearts set on college drive themselves steadily through the SAT's, the infamous "aptitude" tests which measure children's ability to take SAT tests -- and which colleges everywhere seize upon to help them make their hard admissions decisions. Usually, the kids find a staff member to help them over rough spots. But the work is their own. Thick review books are dragged from room to room, pored over, worked through page by page. The process is always intense. Rarely does it take more than four or five months from beginning to end, though for many this is their first look at the material.

There are writers who sit and write hours every day. There are painters who paint, potters who throw pots, chefs who cook, athletes who play.

There are people with common everyday interests. And there are others with exotic interests.

Luke wanted to be a mortician. Not your most common ambition in a fifteen year old. He had his reasons. In his mind's eye, he could clearly see his funeral home ministering to the needs of the community, and himself comforting the grieving relatives.

Luke threw himself into his studies with a passion: science, chemistry, biology, zoology. By sixteen, he was ready for serious work. We took him out into the real world. The chief pathologist at one of the regional hospitals welcomed the eager, hard-working student into his lab. Day by day, Luke learned more procedures, and mastered them, to the delight of his boss. Within a year, he was performing autopsies at the hospital, unassisted, under his mentor's supervision. It was a first for the hospital.

Within five years, Luke was a mortician. Now, years later, his funeral home has become a reality.

Then there was Bob.

One day, Bob came to me and said, "Will you teach me physics?" There was no reason for me to be skeptical. Bob had already done so many things so well that we all knew how he could see things through to the end. He had run the school press. He had written a thoroughly researched (published) book on the school's judicial system. He had devoted untold hours to studying the piano.

So I readily agreed. Our deal was simple.

I gave him a college textbook, thick and heavy, on introductory physics. I had taught from it often in the past, even used an earlier version when I was a beginner. I knew the pitfalls. "Go through the book page by page, exercise by exercise," I told Bob, "and come to me as soon as you have the slightest problem. Better to catch them early than to let them grow into major blocks." I thought I knew exactly where Bob would stumble first.

Weeks passed. Months.

No Bob.

It wasn't like him to drop something before -- or after -- he had gotten into it. I wondered whether he had lost interest. I kept my mouth shut and waited.

Five months after he had started, Bob asked to see me. "I have a problem on page 252," he said. I tried not to look surprised. It took five minutes to clear up what turned out to be a minor difficulty.

I never saw Bob again about physics. He finished the whole book by himself. He did algebra and calculus without even asking if I would help him. I guess he knew I would.

Bob is a mathematician today.

From Free at Last

By Daniel Greenberg

With Liberty and Justice for All

Getting a fair shake is hard in any society. In schools, it is often impossible.

I'll never forget the time I was eleven, sitting through an algebra class, bored and fighting sleep. I stretched my arms over my head to wake up. Unfortunately, outside my consciousness, the teacher -- a gruff martinet -- had been ranting angrily at the class and had just shouted, "Which one of you guys is a wise-guy?" My upstretched arms seemed to make me a volunteer. Three days' detention followed.

Most of us have had similar experiences. For twelve years of school, I was terrified of the arbitrary authority of the teachers and administrators, from which there was rarely appeal. All of us at school were determined Sudbury Valley would be different.

It is.

When the school first opened, nobody knew how to go about setting up a system that would maintain order fairly. The only school we knew of that seemed to make a successful stab at this problem was A.S.Neill's Summerhill,where they worked out conflicts at their community meetings.

So we tried taking care of things at the School Meeting. The second item on the agenda, after announcements, was the "gripe session," where problems were to be handled.

Predictably, as the weeks wore on, the gripe sessions became longer and longer. Soon, they overshadowed all the other business. We found ourselves holding three and four hour meetings, then two or more meetings a week. Most of the time was devoted to hearing an endless array of complaints about what this student did, or those kids may have done, or that person said he would do.

Worse than the time we lost was our sense of frustration. We tried to be fair, but were we succeeding? Gripe sessions consisted of charges and countercharges, often highly emotional, always picturesque. We rarely had the feeling we were getting to the bottom of things, unless we spent an inordinate amount of time at it. The climax came when the school underwent its baptism by fire in the fall of its opening year. It took a gripe session lasting three solid days to sort things out!

Something had to be done. For some time, we had been looking around for a clue to how to proceed. There was no satisfactory model.

It finally dawned on us that our problem was just the same as any community's problem. And the community had spent thousands of years and immeasurable brain power to devise a solution. Over the centuries, systems of jurisprudence had been developed in different cultures to assure fairness in handling gripes.

We looked hard at our national tradition and studied its essential features. Before long, we assembled the elements of the school's judicial system.

In a nutshell, these elements are simple: there has to be a thorough and impartial investigation of all charges, each of which is specific as to what rule was allegedly broken; there has to be a fair trial before a jury of peers, with full safeguards for the rights of the defendant and with respect for the rules of evidence; and there has to be a fair system of sentencing. Through it all, the personal rights enjoyed by every adult citizen of our nation have to be safeguarded in the school, even though the Supreme Court has held that the United StatesConstitution does not extend these rights to minors.

The judicial system was set up in the early winter of our first year. It is entirely under the supervision of the School Meeting. There have been changes and adjustments over the years, but the fundamental outlines have remained constant.

The system of justice at Sudbury Valley is our pride and joy. It runs smoothly, handling well over a hundred complaints a year, sometimes ten or twenty a week, without a hitch, year in, year out. Rarely has its fairness been criticized by any member of the school community.

The heart of the system is the group that does the investigating. This is called the Judicial Committee, or "JC" for short. On it serve kids of all ages, a cross-section of the school, drawn by lot, and joined at each meeting by a randomly chosen staff member. It is chaired by a Judicial Clerk elected by the School Meeting four times a year.

The JC meets several times a week. It starts its work with a complaint someone has written, alleging some rule was broken.

Using every avenue open to it, the JC investigates the complaint. It calls witnesses, sifts the conflicting testimony, until it comes up with its best version of what happened.

Since everyone is part of the process, justice at Sudbury Valley belongs to everyone. This has practical consequences that can be seen every day. People rarely lie deliberately to the JC, even though they may give widely differing versions of what happened. For the most part, everyone cooperates.

Most interesting is the way the kids have learned to differentiate society's needs from personal matters. Everyone knows that the school's functioning as an institution depends on a general acquiescence to the rules passed by the School Meeting. That's the business side of it. That means, for each individual, that they all have to help enforce the laws, to judge fairly and testify truthfully, even if the matter involves a friend. When the official judicial process is over, the personal side takes over. Friendships resume as before, with no interruption.

Over and over again, I have seen close friends clash bitterly in a JC matter, only to emerge from the session and play or work together as if nothing had happened. For new students, especially those transfering from other schools, this is the hardest part of Sudbury Valley to take. They have gotten used to an "us versus them" mentality at school, where anyone who testifies against a fellow student is a "rat." Sometimes, it takes a while for new kids to adjust, but in the end, virtually all of them do. It couldn't be otherwise.

The act of writing a complaint for the JC is called, in school vernacular, "bringing someone up." None of us remembers how this phrase was born, although there are lots of theories. Some think it dates to the days when the JC always met on the second floor, and people were brought upstairs to appear before it.

Not long ago, one five year old said to another, who was new at school, "If you don't stop doing that, I'll bring you up." "Then I'll come right down," came the ready answer.

The illiterate ones at school have to collar a scribe to write their complaints from dictation, a practice far from extinct in the world at large. Usually, older students help, but the staff is always available for this service.

Occasionally, someone tries to misuse the judicial apparatus for personal ends. They do this by filing a stream of complaints against someone -- harrassment, it's called. It doesn't take long for the JC to realize what is going on. There can only be two reasons for a student to be "brought up" repeatedly: either the student is being a pile of trouble, or the student is being harrassed. The JC deals firmly with students who harrass their fellows.

At times, kids will file a complaint in the heat of passion when there has been some sort of an argument or high-tension game. By the time the investigation is begun, everyone has cooled down. The matter is then easily mediated by the JC, or even dismissed. Often, the cooling-off takes place before the complaint has been completed, as it's being written. I recorded one such session recently, one that was not at all atypical:

"When You Were Young..."

A True Story

"Will you help us write a complaint?"

I was startled from a mid-day reverie as I sat on the couch outside the office. Standing over me, peering at me somewhat hesitantly, were Avery (age 9) and Sharon (7). "Maybe we should find Marge."

I looked at them for a moment. "What for?"I asked. "Skip (13) and Michael (8) were disrupting our activities in the quiet room," came the answer. Idly wondering whether I, in turn, should file a complaint against them for their activities in the quiet room, I answered, "Sure," and we marched into the empty office.

It was 1:30. Virtually all the staff was closeted in the newly refurbished stereo room, where they had been meeting with interested students since 11:00 to decide the future use of the room. My task at hand seemed trivial in comparison. Nevertheless, I sat at the office desk, pen in hand, looking as official as I could. Avery stood close by my right, Sharon leaned over the edge of the desk to my left, both watching every move I made, every word I wrote. This was to be a serious enterprise.

Complaint form before me, I turned to Avery and said, "Start at the beginning. The very beginning."

"I probably shouldn't have called them names," said Avery, a bit worried. "That was probably wrong."

"Start from the beginning. What happened?"

"Jim (8) and I were playing in the barn alone. Skip and Michael came in and started teasing Dennis (12)."

"Dennis was there too?"I asked.

"He came in. Then they came. I called them names to protect Dennis. I did it to help him."

Wondering why Dennis needed Avery's protection, I asked him to go on with the story.

"Then they chased us. Skip took my hat, and we ran out of the barn. Daniel (7), Jim and I escaped."

"Daniel was there too?"I asked, rewriting the story yet another time.

"Dennis, Michael and Skip chased us. I got away, grabbed my hat, then Skip picked me up, dragged me back to the barn, but we all escaped --."

"Just a minute," I interrupted, sensing that I was losing any semblance of understanding of what had taken place. "Why was Dennis chasing you too, if you were protecting him?"

"I don't know," answered Avery with a smile. By now the words were spilling out in an excited recitation. His eyes were glistening. There was no stopping him.

"Then we tried to run to the main building and they trapped Jim in the sports closet and Daniel ran and told me and I went to rescue Jim. I made believe I was helping them lock him in but I didn't really and he escaped and I was in but I got out --."

At this moment a happy and calm Jim walked into the office and stood by Sharon. He certainly didn't look to me like someone who had just endured a harrowing experience.

Avery was really into it. I turned to him and asked, "Did you have a good time?" He laughed heartily. "Yes," he said. "How about you?"I asked Jim. "Yes. I don't want to write a complaint."

"But they disrupted out activity," Avery protested.

"What activity?"I asked.

"The magic show."

I hadn't heard of any magic shows that day. Knowing I was letting myself in for it, I said innocently, "What magic show?"

"Sharon and Cindy's (7)," answered Avery.

A cheerful Daniel had joined us by now. Sharon, who had been silently watchful throughout, perked up at the mention of her name. "We tried to kick them out of the room, but they wouldn't go," she said with excitement, "then we pushed them." "And I tried to get them to go," chimed in Avery. Daniel was smiling. Jim was somber.

"Can I tear up the complaint?"Jim said.

Sharon grinned. Daniel smiled. I asked Avery, "What would happen if the complaint remained?"

"They would stop doing it," he answered with a great show of confidence in the effectiveness of the school's judicial system.

"Do you want them to stop?"I asked.

"No," he answered with a hearty laugh.

Jim tore up the complaint. General satisfaction. Then Avery turned to me as he was preparing to leave and, with a broad smile, asked me, "When you were young, did you have such adventures?"

The fact is, everyone gets a fair shake at Sudbury Valley. Everyone rests confident in the knowledge that freedom here is protected by a system of justice that is blind to age, sex, or status.

Free at Last

The Sudbury Valley School

Format:

Paperback

$9.95

by Daniel Greenberg; photographs by Michael Greenberg, Denise Geddes, Carol Palmer and Andy Brilliant

Pages:

184 pages

Edition:

2nd ed., 1995

SKU:

106

Our best-selling description of the school is bursting with the excitement of life at Sudbury Valley. Free at Last is also chock-full of stories that illustrate the many unique features of this highly original model.

“Age mixing is Sudbury Valley’s secret weapon. I never could make heads or tails of age segregation. People don’t live their lives in the real world separated by age, year by year. Kids don’t all have the same interests or abilities at a particular age.

“Anyway, we soon found out how children mix when they are left to their own devices. They mix. Just like real people. The principle is always the same: if anyone wants to do something, they do it. Interest is what counts. If the activity is on an advanced level, skill counts. A lot of little kids are much more skillful than older ones at a lot of things.

“When the skills and rate of learning aren’t all on the same level, that’s when the fun begins. The kids help each other. They have to, otherwise the group as a whole will fall behind. They want to, because they are not competing for grades or gold stars. They like to, because it’s terribly satisfying to help someone else and succeed at it. And it’s terribly pleasing to watch. Everywhere you turn at school, age mixing confronts you.”

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