Also available in hard copy, A Bird's Eye View of Sudbury Valley: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About the School.
In the Spring of 2000, Mimsy Sadofsky was interviewed by Dr. Daria Brezinsky on her live radio show, "Children Come First". The wide-ranging and searching questions asked on the show mirrored those that are so often asked during enrollment interviews and other conversations about the School.
Q “What types of things do the children learn at Sudbury School?"
A “Well, I think they learn every type of thing but there are some things that I think every kid has to learn here because you can’t be here and not learn them. One of those things is to love the outdoors. Kids can spend as much time outside as they want here and that’s very healthy for their minds, their hearts, their souls, their bodies. There’s not a kid who’s gone to school here who doesn’t afterwards talk about how important the outdoors was to them.
“I also think the whole idea of the governance of the school means that they have to constantly examine ethical issues and that’s another thing I think kids who go to school here cannot possibly avoid learning.
“Once you’ve gotten past those things, then it can be anything you’re passionate about or excited about, or whatever you happen to be accidentally exposed to. One of my children who went to school here was in college and had to take a foreign language course. I said, ‘You can’t do that! You don’t know what a noun is, or a verb!’ He said, ‘Of course I do.’ I said, ‘Well, okay,’ thinking maybe everybody in the world knows what a noun or a verb is, and I said, ‘You certainly don’t know about pronouns or adverbs.’ This is the supportive mother, right? And he said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ I said, ‘How?’ He said, ‘Well, looking things up in the dictionary when I was playing Scrabble.’ And he did. He knew plenty. That’s an example of totally accidental, incidental learning, but maybe not really. Maybe it was really stuff that he was interested in and that’s why when he looked things up in the dictionary he noticed things about words that you or I might not have noticed.”
