Preview This Item

By Daniel Greenberg and Mimsy Sadofsky

Reflections of “SVS Kids”

For several years now, Sudbury Valley has been engaged in an ongoing oral history project. The object is to record and preserve recollections of life at the school through the eyes of former students and staff members. These reminiscences are gathered in the course of long, relaxed interviews, during which the questioner and the former student have ample time to converse at leisure and examine all sorts of issues in depth.

During these interviews, the subjects also have a chance to talk about their experiences after leaving Sudbury Valley, and to reflect about the affect the school has had on their lives. Of the twenty-seven people in our study who attended Sudbury Valley as virtually their only school, seven have been interviewed as part of the oral history project.

We have included some of what these people said. We believe this material will give the reader insight into the nature of these former students, their character, and the way they look at the world, all in their own words. These reminiscences do not prove any particular point, or generalize about all members of the group. Rather, these more extensive quotations may convey a slightly richer picture of some of our former students, and what they take with them from their experiences at the school as they go out into the world.

Here are some of the things said by a young woman who was twenty-four years old, just graduating with honors as a student of criminal justice, when this study was made. She was twenty-one, and had just finished her freshman year, at the time her oral history interview was recorded:

I used to think I was shy. I think I was trying to talk myself into being shy but I'm not; I'm not any more if I was.

It's funny though, I don't say anything in class but the kids in my classes think I know everything that's talked about. I asked a kid, "What makes you think I know what I'm doing here?" and he said, "I don't know, just the way you are in class, you look like you're getting into it." I don't ask questions too much. Can't think of anything to ask, or I figure it out as he goes on with his lecture.

Sudbury Valley prepared me to be independent, to set out what I want to do and do it. A few things have been hard for me, like not having expertise in grammar, not knowing what exams were about or how to write a good exam. Well, the mistakes I made in the first quarter, I figured out in the second one; and the ones I made then, I learned from later. I'm constantly learning what my mistakes are. At Sudbury Valley I learned how to take criticism. When a teacher makes a comment, if it’s a negative comment I don't say, "Oh, that's absurd. Why did he write that?" I go, "Yeah, yeah, he's right. I didn't do that." It doesn't hurt my feelings.

At first I felt that the people I met who went to public school had it over me, but I thought of the things that I had over them -- like being in college not because my parents wanted me to be there but because it was something I wanted to do. If I want to better educate myself it's up to me.

Take math. When I first started school, the very first class I ever had to take was math. What really aggravated me was having to do something that I didn't want to do. At Sudbury Valley if you didn't want to take math, you didn't take math. So getting used to going from no set curriculum to all this that you have to do was hard. But even though I may not always believe in the philosophy of the way the college is run, I have to change, I have to adapt to different things. As long as I feel I'm getting something out of it, it doesn't really bother me how it's set up: if I personally feel that I'm getting something then I'm satisfied. I don't necessarily agree with a grade system. I think it's foolish. But if I feel like doing something, I say, “I don't care.

My English and my math SAT scores weren't anything to put on a piece of paper. I didn't study for them at all. I took them as a big curiosity thing because it was the first test I ever took that had a grade. Wow, a grade! This is going to be neat.” But those were the biggest strikes against me because those were my two weakest subjects. I just had no interest in them. But I learned from Sudbury Valley how to voice my opinion and how to say what I want and that's what got me into college. I said to myself, "I'm going to get myself in there one way or the other." I was persistent and I did it.

They took me because I talked, I showed that I wanted to be there and that I wasn't being forced to be there, that it was something I felt I had to do. I walked right in and talked to the Dean. I was really nervous about my interview; it was something I never did before. He said, "What can I tell you about the University?" and that was an instant shock. I was kind of blank for a second, then I said "Well, to tell you the honest truth, I've already made my decision to enter this school, so I think I know as much as I possibly should know about being a student here. What I think you should know is about me and why I want to be here." And he moved around in his chair, looked back at me and said "OK, go for it." And I went on and on and on and he said, "OK, why Criminal Justice?" And I told him about the Judicial Committee. I told him about the staff. I told him about everything. He said, "You know something? I'm going to call my office and I'm going to tell them." He told me right then and there, "You'll see your acceptance letter," and "I'll see you in the Fall." I said, "Thank you very much."

He mentioned the SAT's. He said, "You seem to be a very intelligent girl but you have really bad scores." And I said "Look, its because I don't have any interest in those two subjects, and I never concentrated on them very much. But I'm here now and I know I'm going to come across courses that I have to take that I have no interest in. I have the desire to do it now and I promise you I'll do it." He said "OK."

I had confidence. I was scared, but I looked at it this way: I said, “OK, try it. I'm never going to know what's going to happen unless I try it. So if I try it and I screw up, I chalk it up and say "OK, I can't do it right now."’ But eventually I will.

I was confident that I could do the work because I always had encouragement from people saying that I could do anything I wanted to do. Even a staff member who I never really talked to much would say, "Look, you can do it if you want to do it and you will do it." And other people, friends and everything. I think if you have a desire to do something and an interest in it you do it. You take the extra step to work a little harder or find out how to do it. I have to work harder than other kids because they know the tricks of the trade of cramming for an exam or taking a test. So I have to put in an extra couple of hours compared to what they do.

I didn't start college for two years after I graduated from Sudbury Valley. I did a lot of other things first. I worked. I travelled. I worked for a little over a year because I had planned on going to Europe. I worked about sixty hours a week at two jobs; full time at Filene's, and then in a fruit and nut stand as part-time assistant manager. I saved all my money, and went to France. I was in Europe about six months altogether. Then I came home. I made the decision to come home before I spent all my money, because I had seen what I wanted to see, met people, done the things I wanted to do. I went to France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy. I bought a EuRail pass and just went to different countries. I learned a lot about being able to relate to people, being able to deal with hairy situations when you have to, being totally away from everything you're used to. I think that was one of the best things I ever did. Then I could come back here when I decided to, settle down and start studying.

I came back in October of that year and I started applying to schools and deciding what I wanted to do.

Another rather different perspective emerges from the laconic remarks of the twenty seven year old who is now the technical supervisor of a large copy machine service company; he was interviewed three years earlier.

My work is satisfying because I'm on my own. I go to the office once or twice a week at the most. Dispatch straight from my last call at night to my first call the next day. Every day is different, it's always a different angry secretary that I get to meet. A very big part of my job is psychology, and calming people. Why does this machine suck?”"Oh, it doesn't suck." You just have to know how.

And also the work. It's a puzzle. Every time I go to a machine to fix it, this machine is supposed to be doing something, and it's not doing it, and I have to figure out why. It's like you're driving, you're going down this road and you have a decision to make: Do I follow this road or do I follow that one to try to find the problem? If I follow this one, how long am I going to go down it, trying different things before I have to turn around and try a different one, or go back and start over again? It's a lot of problem solving, mechanical and electrical problem solving, and it's interesting and it pays well and you feel like a hot shit when you get this machine that's not doing anything, and you figure out the problem. But then there are days when you come back to earth and you can't figure out something easy.

I think that Sudbury Valley helped me to deal with people, and not be condescending to them, or lie to them. I've got a good relationship with the customers, I think.

I want to be comfortable, you know. I'd love to be rich, but if I have to do it at the expense of being aggravated, or unhappy, or get ulcers by the time I'm 30, I'm not going to do it. I'm not worried about it. I'll be financially comfortable.

One thing that strikes me is that I know people who say to me, “Oh, I wouldn't know what to do with my time if I had a month off.” And I think "What are you talking about? Just use your time." I never feel that if the structure in my life was lost, what am I going to do? I don't feel lost. My ego doesn't fall apart in chaos if I don't have a schedule. I just live. I make my time what I want it to be. I never feel like, “Oh, my God, what would I do without structure imposed upon me from the outside?” So many people I work with talk like that. Even about my job: in my job, we're alone most of the day, most of the time. I'm a social worker in a hospital setting and we're on our own to make our own schedules and get our work done. A lot of people come here and don't know how to do that. They say, “Well, I don't know how to structure. This day is too unstructured for me. I won't get my work done because I don't know how to balance my day to get it done.” And that I can't fathom. That never happens to me. I wonder how I'm going to get my work done, but I appreciate having the freedom to organize my day the way I want to.

I don't think going to Sudbury Valley gives you a problem with authority. If anything, you just have more understanding that the person in authority is the only one taking responsibility in many instances, but you have an idea of responsibility, so you can look at what they're looking at. If you've been to Sudbury Valley, you realize that this stuff has to get done, and you chose to work there and get it done. So even if you can't stand your boss, you realize you have to get it done. You're not at a disadvantage because you never had a boss in school.

I'll just explain one thing about work. Just because you go to Sudbury Valley and you choose your own profession doesn't mean you're going to like your job. Just because you go to Sudbury Valley doesn't mean you're going to have a harder time with authority or getting to work every day because you have to. Or taking tests because you have to. You're not at a disadvantage. First of all, you're at an advantage because you're not fed up with it when you're faced with it for the first time. People who are dealing with it their whole life are fed up with it. By the time they get to college, they don't want to see another test.

I looked for a college that had a heterogeneous population, as much as possible. They called it “diverse” in my day. I looked for a place that sort of promoted a certain amount of freedom for the students. The school that I went to had expectations but it didn't have a tremendous number of requirements, although I did apply to schools that had more requirements. I looked for places that had good departments in what I was interested in, in dance and in religion. I also looked for schools with good reputations. I visited them and felt the atmosphere and that kind of thing. I took out books from the library, read about the colleges, looked at how many stars they had, read what students had written about them, and visited. I was pretty careful. The interviews were the best feature of my applications I think, because kids from Sudbury Valley are used to talking. They talk a lot. Coming from that school and having to explain it, gives you sort of a leg up. You present as responsible, as articulate, as thinking. You're used to talking to adults. One thing about college is that you're used to having classes not meet all day every day, so that when you get to college and classes meet twice a week for an hour and you have free time, you know what to do with it, you know how to handle that, it's not a shock. And you're not shocked that, “Oh, my God, how am I going to learn this material if I don't sit every day in class?” You're used to intensity in classes. You're used to designing your own schedule. You're used to setting aside time to study because no one's going to do it for you. You have a lot of free time. You learn how to balance that. That comes very easy. What's a little bit hard at first is tests. It takes about one semester and that's it. You're fine.

I think at Sudbury Valley you learn to respect how other people live because you live with them for half the day. You eat maybe two meals a day with them, you spend most of the waking day with a person. So you learn to respect how other people live and you wonder about how they live and that sort of translates, later, into the need to travel to do that. You learn respect for different types of people at Sudbury Valley School and now, travelling, I like to see how other people live. I like to see how people do their laundry in Venice.

The following effusive, enthusiastic and extensive comments were made by the twenty nine year old musician and songwriter and who is now also the manager of a music store.

I became a musician just by doing it. Just by playing. I guess I've always been a musician in some sense. I started writing my own songs when I was about eleven or twelve years old, as soon as I could play chords. I'd make up my own songs. And I've been doing it ever since. So it's been a good long time that I've been doing it, writing words and music.

Obviously when I was younger I didn't really have an idea of where it was leading to. When I got older, I honed it more, but I didn't really have a niche where I was, where my place was in music, where my songs were. Not until maybe 1984 or 1986, when I really started writing substantial songs, where I could feel that this is a song. You know, this is a real song.

When I left the school I got involved with a band, guys who were older than me. These guys were the first guys I was ever involved with who knew how to do harmonies. So I learned. Everybody in this band sang, so they let me lead sing a few songs. Then I started bringing in my own songs, and we'd learn them together. We played them. They liked them. And they were supportive of them.

We'd play gigs. We had a guy managing us. We played a lot of schools and a lot of colleges. We were booked through a big booking agency in Boston, and we made enough money to pay back our expenses. A lot of times we'd have to rent power amplifiers or lights or a truck, so the expenses would be several hundred dollars.

Our band evolved into another band which became very successful. We were in the WBCN Rock and Rumble in 1987 and went to the finals, played the Orpheum which was a lifelong dream of mine, and which was pretty great. Got a lot of air play. Got a lot of record label interest. Made a lot of contacts, did very well and then one of the members left because he said that he wanted to pursue his own thing which, to this day, he hasn't done.

I moved on. Within the last three or four years, I got involved in playing a lot of acoustic shows. Just myself on an acoustic guitar and singing. Sometimes one of the other guys from the band plays as well. In the beginning I had some other people from other bands play with me, percussion, bass. And then I started moving it more towards a band format. Now I have a group of about eight different musicians — two backup singers, a bass player, a percussion player, a guitar player, and me and a keyboard player. I get gigs, but I'm not playing out as much because today the music scene in Boston is a lot different and you don't have people going out as much to clubs to see bands, where in 1987 people were flocking to clubs. The more you played, in 1987, the more people would come to see you. Now, it's the total opposite. We saw it starting to happen then, realizing that you can't play all the time, in Boston. So we started playing outside of Boston a little bit. Still, it was a very small circle.

Now I have a very close friend, who I've known since 1982, managing me, someone who worked on the road with well-known artists. We went to L.A. and spoke with some different people and some different record labels. So I'm working towards getting a record deal. My manager believes in me, sees my vision, and knows that I'm going to make a record and we're going to get a record deal. We're going to make a hit.

I find, when we're on, when the band is on and we have a great night, we captivate people. Now I'm living at home, I'm not working forty hours a week anymore. I have a brand new 8-track setup in my home studio, and I'm out here in the woods, away from everything that goes on in the city, although I'm very involved in the industry. And I find that now that I have such a low profile in the city, every time I'm out, people want to know where I'm playing next, what's going on, am I recording? I find that we get more and more people out to see us and people seem more excited about us.

I love performing. I'd like to tour. What my manager and I are talking about doing is getting in a camper, putting the gear on a trailer, and going out across the country and playing clubs. I want to get out to the people. I really feel that the music that I'm writing, is different than a lot of other bands, because it has so many different aspects of music involved in it; it's an energy thing, it's a feel thing, and, as people say, it's a groove thing. I think it's different enough that people will be intrigued because it's like no other band. And I think it's accessible enough that people will understand it, that they'll get it, that the average working guy in Indiana or in Louisiana or in Wyoming or in Nebraska, will know what we're doing. It's not foreign to them. It's also a very visual thing. We have a great backdrop, a really cool, almost psychedelic looking backdrop and every show we try and do something a little different.

What my manager and I are trying to do right now is shop a deal. I feel frustrated at times. I wish I was a little further. Now that I don't have a job, I am free to be where my heart feels I need to be, which is writing songs. However long it takes for me to get a record deal, that's how long it will take. When I get itchy, my manager always brings me back down to reality because that's really his job. I know that once somebody has the same vision, and sees what I'm doing and believes in it, I will have the opportunity to prove myself. All I'm looking for is an opportunity to prove to people that I'm a legitimate song writer and that I can write hits and make records that people will want to hear.

I have my parents who love what I do and are totally supportive of it. The main reason for moving back home was that I felt that I had worked forty hours a week for so long — for ten, twelve years — that if I was really going to make it in this field, if I was truly going to be successful, I had to center my career around my career, instead of centering my career around my work. When I was working, it was forty hours a week, forty five hours a week and then I could do my music. There wasn't a lot of time to write. My thoughts were blurred. Now I realize that if I'm going to be serious about it, then whatever I do has to come after my music. Nobody else's store, nobody else's business can come before that.

The thirty year old professor of mathematics, interviewed as a graduate student at the age of twenty-six, although far less talkative about his inner thoughts, nevertheless revealed a clear notion of where he was going with his life at each of its stages:

I left school at about seventeen and I worked at the Natural Grocer [an innovative natural foods store] for a year and a half. I was interested in the Natural Grocer and I wanted to work there, and I wasn't at all interested in going to college at that point. I thought about it, but it was clearly something that I didn't particularly want to do right then. I didn't have any good reason to go to college.

I decided to go to college because I wanted to do more music with other people who were interested in classical music. That was the primary motivation. The secondary motivation was that I wanted to see what it was like to be around a university and to be around other people who were interested in academic things, and to have a rich amount of academic things going on around me that I could participate in if I wanted to or talk to people about if I wanted to. I felt it was something that would be really different from Sudbury Valley in the sense that instead of being one person interested in something, if I was interested in something in college, I figured that there would be lots of other people around who were interested in it too. There would be lots of people to talk to. It turned out that as I got more interested in math, there weren't very many people I could talk to, because where I was there just weren't many people who were that good at math.

I wanted to go to graduate school at MIT and I got in there. They looked at my college transcript, and they looked at recommendations, which was probably the most helpful thing. I had good recommendations, some of them from people who faculty at MIT knew. I went to England in between college and graduate school. I got a scholarship: applying for it was like applying to another graduate school. They award ten a year to Americans.

Cambridge, England was fun. It wasn't so useful mathematically, but it was a lot of fun. The students there were really advanced. They were much more advanced than I was and so I was always scrambling to understand anything that a lecturer was talking about when I went to classes. I was getting sort of worried there, but after a while, being back here, I realized that I wasn't really any stupider than them. I just didn't know nearly as much. The undergraduate math program at Cambridge is really good. It's probably better than any undergraduate math program in this country and is certainly a lot better than mine was.

My wife and I got to Cambridge a month early and we travelled in England and then when I finished in June, we travelled for a couple of months. We travelled for most of June and all of July and a little bit of August. That was really nice. Travelling in France was the best, because France is really cheap and you get good food all the time. And it's also really pretty. We travelled in England and in Germany and we'd stay in youth hostels and try to live really cheaply and then we went to France and, at the exchange rates then, for under $10 we could both stay in a hotel and for under $10, we could both have a good meal, with wine, at a restaurant. So it was really amazing.

In her interview, the sister of the graduate just quoted saw the world from a quite different point of view, yet shared with her brother many of the same perspectives on life:

When I went to college, the biggest gap in my knowledge was not knowing how to write a research paper. I mastered the tools that I needed to do it, and it didn't take me long. But to learn to write an essay took me longer. Not an essay on what I thought. That I can do easily. But an essay on what you're supposed to feed back to the teacher. Each teacher wants you to feed back something else, and what you need to know is not so much how to write, but what it is that teacher wants. It's a matter of learning what the teacher wants and not learning for the sake of learning. You're supposed to figure out what they think is important. I didn't know that when I went to college; I learned that there. To me, it's more valuable to learn what is important.

I learn a lot from other people — from those who offer me knowledge, or those I can extract knowledge from. The people I don't learn from are people who stand up there and read from a textbook that I could also read from, and don't actually say what they think is important. They expect you to extrapolate, from something that they haven't said, what they might think is important. That's not learning. That's memorizing what somebody else thinks is important without having any reason to see why that person even thinks it's important.

I wasn't that happy in that atmosphere. It's not that I didn't learn. But I didn't feel I got the kind of guidance in terms of the kinds of things I should be studying or things that might be significant later on. So you go on and you learn for yourself. But I could have done that without them.

I work part time right now because I want to blow glass. I have to earn enough money doing something else to pay to blow glass, because it costs a lot of money both to take courses and to rent the studio (which costs $30 an hour). I also volunteer my time to assist other people and learn that way.

I love blowing glass, but I'm not sure if I'll ever be good. You can make a piece that's pretty, but that doesn't mean you're going to be good. I have an eye for beauty, but I don't always know where the starting point is to get to that. I'm not sure yet if I can ever make a career out of it. It might just always be a hobby.

I used to feel that I had to give, give, give and I had to teach people because I knew more about life and I had to somehow contribute. But now I don't have that. Something changed and that's gone. I don't feel I have to change the world or I have to convert people or show them my way. I just have to live. I just have to be happy in my life. My contribution to the world doesn't have to be some great change.

It's not selfish, it's just not selfless. You don't have to be selfless all the time. Go enjoy life.

I'm not saying I won't do things in the world. I still contribute. I still work on the kinds of things that I feel change the world that I can maybe affect. But I don't have to be doing something twenty-four hours a day to change the world. I can help people some of the time. Or maybe I can help them in another way that's not so giving of myself all the time.

I think I'm a better person now. I think I'm more whole. There are a lot of people in the world who have to control everything, or have to always be serving, or have to somehow make everybody see things their way. I don't need that. I'm more self-sufficient in my emotional needs. If I become a physiotherapist, as I'm considering doing, I'm sure I'll be able to contribute to that field. I'll be able to help people get better and treat people the way that I've been treated by physiotherapists. But I also know that I can do something else and get satisfaction from that too. I don't have to give my whole self to be satisfied; I can just give a part.

I have total confidence that I can do what I set out to do. That comes mostly from my track record. At Sudbury Valley you get a track record. Even as a young person, at Sudbury Valley you do things and you get things done by yourself or with others — with other children or with other adults. It's a self-confidence that you establish: you see how things work and you can go after something and get it done. One of the big things about Sudbury Valley is that it gives you that.

There are some areas in my life where I don't have that track record, and where I don't have self-confidence. When I first started blowing glass, I was devastated when the first piece that I dropped on the floor smashed into a hundred little pieces. I was ruined for the whole day. I thought, “This is my piece. This is my dream piece. This is a concept that I had and it was so beautiful and now it's in pieces.” Once it shatters, it gets cold and you can see the color and you know how it was going to turn out. And you're devastated. Everybody else goes about their business and gets on with it and says, “You know, you have to get used to this. This happens.” But last week I was making a beautiful white plate. I really loved it. It was a new thing; I had seen somebody else's work that was white and I was inspired and tried it, and here was this gorgeous thing — and then it smashed into a hundred pieces. The person I was working with said, “How come you're not upset?” I said, “Well, I am upset a little bit, but I've broken pieces before. It's going to happen. It happens to the masters all the time, too.” Not as often, but it still happens to them. You just have to say, “Well, ok, that one broke, but I'm going to make another one right now and it's not going to break.” So you have to reestablish your track record. When you have things that are failures, you have to go and try it again, learn from what happened, learn from the mistake.

Finally, we have the thoughts of the twenty nine year old musician, songwriter, art photographer, and entrepreneur owner of his own custom color photolab. Here is what he had to say:

There are two big things I learned about democracy in the School Meeting, which I think apply equally well to life in America at large. To me they've always explained the incredibly low voter turnout that happens in this country. The biggest rule is, that everything's going to run itself fairly reasonably with or without your presence. Once you have a fundamental trust in the reasonableness of the society you're in, you don't have to attend to every detail, and not attending to every detail is not a sign of not caring about it. It's a sign of basic faith that the system will more or less run along reasonable lines with or without your attention and that you can devote your attention other places. That's certainly how I felt about a lot of political things in my later life. I have a certain faith in the government, in the country, in the overall will of the American people. I can pretty much sleep easy knowing that America as a whole is going in a certain direction. There may be variants, there may be scoundrels, there may be scandals, but the basic overall thrust is going to be fairly reasonable, and I don't have to lose too much sleep over it. So I don't find myself super politically involved. I find myself the opposite. I find myself realizing that democracy guarantees me a certain reasonableness in society and that I don't have to worry about that aspect of my life. And I think that's one of the best things about democracy, that you're not constantly looking over your shoulder wondering what's going to happen.

The other thing was the cold hard fact of majority rule. There's a lot of times in the School Meeting — and this is a good example for life, where it's just as true — when your own particular interests and the majority's are not the same and you just have to bite it. It's just a fact of life. The larger group's will is the will that is usually gone with, and when your personal individual thing comes in conflict with this larger, greater, good of the community, a lot of times you just have to swallow that fact. For example, you can't expect the government of the United States to hand you money to do your particular project. There's a larger interest at stake. It's not just what you want to do with your life. So that was another big thing. A lot of people have to learn that lesson. When the majority feel a certain thing and you feel another thing, you just have to live with that and come back the next day happy with that instead of being permanently upset about it.

The musical group that I'm working with now runs by the “one lone nut” theory. What we say is that if one person disagrees with the entire group, they basically have to eat their disagreement. If one person has a problem with something and it's not shared by any other person in the group, then it's their personal problem. Whereas if two people from different perspectives feel something strongly, we tend to take that as a sign that we should try to figure out another way to do things. That's the way the group runs.

I felt more and more fortunate as I was out in the world at having had the school experience. I felt fortunate specifically at having been born at the time I was because the early years of the school were amazing years. I feel much more a child of the sixties even though I was only six years old then, than I feel a child of the seventies, when I was in my teens, which most people think of as their formative years. I think in many ways the sixties were a much more interesting time in our culture. There was a lot more up for grabs, a lot more questions being asked and I feel very excited to have been part of all that. That still informs a lot of my life, that experience. I've grown more and more to appreciate over time the lucky confluence of events that happened in my early childhood.

I feel like I'm in an accelerated development in many ways. I was able to enjoy a period when a lot of people are just waiting for their life to begin. They hate their school or they hate their whole childhood or something, and they really start being themselves when they become adults. I haven't really fundamentally changed my behavior with the exception of paying bills. I'm doing the exact same thing I was doing when I was six years old except that I now allot a certain chunk of my time for paying my bills and for making money. That's the only difference. You can say that's a major thing but I'm not sure that is such a major thing. I mean, I think that's something you do, but the rest of my life is fundamentally like what it was when I was a kid. I do what I want to do every day. And that's a very unusual lifestyle. I feel like I have the inborn right, because I grew up this way, to stop what I'm doing in the middle of the day and play the piano for half an hour. Because I run my own business and I can set my own hours and I don't see why I should work eight continuous hours when I feel like playing the piano in the middle of the day. That drives my partner crazy, because I'll say, “I didn't have any time today to do grocery shopping.” And she'll say, “Well, you played the piano.” And I'm like, “Yeah, that's not grocery shopping. That's what I want to do.” I took time off from work to do something I wanted to do. I didn't take time off from work to do grocery shopping. I'll do grocery shopping after my work hours. I've set aside certain hours in my life every day for work and, if I can work faster and have some of those hours free for leisure, I take them. So in a sense, it's just the same except when I was younger I didn't worry about my bills.

Travel has played a pretty big role in my early years. After I left the school for about five or six years I took every possible opportunity to travel and I lived for a year in Europe. I think that living for a year in Europe was probably for me in my life what a lot of people go to university for. It was being exposed to a very divergent bunch of cultural things that I wouldn't have been exposed to if I had just sat here in America. I was seeing a lot of different perspectives about the world at once. And it was also being very, very far away from home, in every sense of the word — physically, culturally, mentally, everything.

I think a lot of people maybe go to university because it exposes them to life. They'll take a philosophy course. They'll start reading philosophers that maybe they wouldn't have read otherwise. Now, I don't go with that. If I want to read philosophers and I'm too lazy to get a book off the shelf, I'm not that interested in philosophy. If I really want to do something, it's all available to me at any time at any place. But the thing about going to Europe was that it gave me that totally outside perspective on my culture, on American culture and on my life. When I came back I was more determined than ever to do exactly the things I'm doing now. I realized a lot of good things about the kind of life I could lead in America. I also realized I had options. I realized, hey, if I didn't like the American option, I had a European option. I had other options. I could live anywhere I wanted to. It made me realize that the ultimate vote is the vote you take with your feet. If you choose to live somewhere, do it for the reasons that help your life. I'm where I am because this is one of the few big-sized cities where you can still get a lot of space cheap. When you're an artist and you need space for your band to rehearse and space for your theater company, that's a primary consideration. So being in a city where space is cheap feeds a lot of other artistic endeavors. I don't think I'd be here if rents were what New York's rents are. I would have found another place to be. I would have kept looking until I found some place first rate, wherever it would have been.

Travel in that sense, too, has definitely played a big role in my life because it made me realize that places are important. You exist on your own to a certain degree but the place where you do something affects you and affects your options. You have to choose the place you're in like you choose everything else in your life or it will be chosen for you and you'll just have to live with the consequences. And I think that in a way that's true of the school. I definitely think the sense of place, the building, the physical surroundings, being in New England and specifically in Massachusetts with its tendencies of thought, those are all factors. You can't really separate them from being at Sudbury Valley School. The school would be a very different place if it was located in the hills of Greece. It might be the same place philosophically, but it would not be the same place in any other way.

Seven sets of reflections, seven very different perspectives on life. Yet, common threads run through them, as we might expect from students long immersed in the philosophy and practice of Sudbury Valley.

Legacy of Trust

Life After the Sudbury Valley School Experience

Format:

Paperback

$12.95

by Daniel Greenberg and Mimsy Sadofsky

Pages:

334 pages

Edition:

1992

SKU:

110

This is a comprehensive study of the personal and professional histories of 188 former students. Included is a great deal of anecdotal information about their lives after they left the school, along with extensive comments on how they feel the school influenced them. Also included are the results of three earlier studies.

“There is no way for this or any similar study to provide a definitive answer to the questions of how a Sudbury Valley education influences the future course of a student’s life. But it is possible to answer the more limited question: does a person’s attendance at Sudbury Valley, whether for a short or long time, have an adverse effect on the options available to that person? The data presented in the study leaves no doubt that the answer is ‘No’; former students enjoy the full range of life choices available to every other group of young people going out into the world. And they enjoy a childhood of freedom, respect, and trust.”

Main Menu

Legacy of Trust

A Clearer View

Summer Special

The Sudbury Valley School Journal

Outline of a New Philosophy

Search form

Legacy of Trust

You may also like...