Gist: a fun, inspiring little book about alternative pedagogy and "free range education" taken to an extreme.
This 184-page short book/long essay is written by Daniel Greenberg, one of the founding teachers of the Sudbury Valley School. As such, the text must be read with a grain of salt; the book itself is chiefly a series of (very interesting, mind-opening) anecdotes and not so many researched facts in the rigorously scientific sense; though you could say that the school's results in producing high-achieving youngsters year after year have spoken for themselves as being both very reliable and repeatable.
The school itself was founded in 1968, in Massachusetts, by a group of teachers and parents who wanted "out" of the mainstream education system. They found a patch of land and initially operated a barebones school without any extra funds to even pay its staff. The founding belief was (and still is) that children's education ought to be entirely self-directed. Not mostly self-directed. Not, "inspired by a belief in" self-direction. Entirely self-directed.
This was and still is a radical idea in education; certainly while K-12 education has shifted it focus on rote knowledge acquisition to the emphasis on intrinsic rewards (reflection and self-evaluation is commonplace now, even in very young children) and the development of softer skills (especially with the proliferation of LLM-AI tools), the complete lack of adult-directed structured learning in a SVS-style (or "democratic") school is considered something that might work for a select few and not for all mainstream children.
(This is my belief too: students and families who enrol in SVS and SVS-style schools are a self-selected bunch. Comments on Reddit suggest that they select for folks with a high degree of self-motivation, whether that is toward constructive of destructive tendencies.)
On the topic of structured learning: the book is very quick to clarify that there isn't a complete lack of structured learning, or that structured learning is anathema to the school. In fact, students, both young and old, frequently request structured learning. But they do so at their pace, and entirely at their request. It's just not done according to a curriculum, set by adults hundreds of kilometres away from the children themselves.
I suppose another way to restate the core belief is that children know what they need and will naturally seek it out; the book takes it one step further and makes the oblique argument that, "knowing what one needs and having the skill to seek it out for oneself" is a highly useful skill to develop and master, and those who do so at a young age will have a huge advantage in the wider world.
One example of this latter argument is its stubborn commitment to non-evaluation. It's a disorienting practice, but one they absolutely stick to their principles about: they firmly (and gently) refuse evaluation that might pit a student against another, or against an imaginary yardstick of "the average student." Students seek out criticism of their learning, to be sure, but it's never about a mark on a transcript or how they measure up against an external standard. Students may well find their own standards to measure themselves against—that's totally allowed.
"The policy makes things a little harder for [the students,] to be sure. But that kind of hardship is what the school is about: learning to make your own way, set your own standards, meet your own goals." (p. 98)
As a trustee (and the wife of an opinionated intellectual), I frequently debate evaluation and assessment in general. A longstanding argument is that the shift away from letter grades make kids unprepared for the post-secondary world; the rest of the world will still evaluate you; "sheltering" you from evaluation just makes you worse at life. This philosophy looks at evaluation wholly differently. It's not that children are sheltered in a school that doesn't evaluate you; it's that children get to choose which evaluations to subject themselves to; they learn to be judicious about what to self-evaluate on.
Here in BC, there was a democratic school named Windsor House. It began as a "private" independent school based mostly in Vancouver; North Van School District was its host for some time, but they voted to close it due to financial unsustainability; the Gulf Islands District took it in, and eight years later voted to close it for the selfsame reason. WHS parents, students and alumni begged the VSB to take it over, but it was too costly and being a large district we were wary of setting a precedent of hosting yet another alternative school. We were on a path to try to reduce them to provide everyone an equitable and inclusive education, not absorb more segregated classrooms with differing philosophies, even if the philosophy was beautiful and inspiring and all that.
(Despite voting down the motion to absorb WHS, I've stayed in touch with a small number of the ex-WHS parents. They've all found different pathways for their children: some are being home-schooled, or mostly so, with the children going to a few mainstream classes when it suits them [and where/when they do, they frequently excel]; some are enrolled in self-paced remote classes and spend most of their time outdoors; many are in mainstream schools, spreading their signature quirky, confident, self-starting ways to unsuspecting schoolmates and adults alike.)
That was back in the spring of 2019—I was a baby trustee then, not even a year into my term.
One other bizarre and impossible thing with the Sudbury Valley School was that the staff are the last to be paid. School maintenance comes first, because they agree that the school building is one key aspect of school culture; and of course it means that staff are independently wealthy enough to not need the salary to work there, which is a luxury. Staff also change year to year; if the school, based on a school-wide vote, deems your particular set of skills unneeded, you'd be off the payroll. There's just no way we could do that in a unionised environment.
Here's a quote that hits home for me, and highlights my tension with organised labour:
One morning I was walking toward the main building with the chairman of the visiting committee [who was there to accredit the school]. He looked at our beautiful old building and, seeing it with the eyes of an experienced school administrator, asked, "How do you keep this old building in repair? Just that slate roof alone must cost a fortune to keep in good order."
"We are determined," I answered, "to do everything we have to do to keep this school going."
"But where does the money come from?"
"Out of staff salaries," I replied. "The school's needs come first. The staff gets what remains. We are of one mind on this subject."
"That's the difference between us right there," he said, with a touch of wistfulness. "In our school, the staff's needs come first, no matter what. The roof could cave in, the building could collapse—that would be my problem. The kind of commitment to an institution that Sudbury Valley's staff has is absolutely unique." (p. 147)
Of course I want teachers to be paid a living wage. And due to rising costs of living (and an increasingly hostile work environment) we have trouble hiring and retaining teachers—this I know. But the feeling of "oh yeah, the unions don't care that the Board struggles to pay for things—that's 'my' problem" is absolutely real.
I was eager to flip to the chapter on cleaning (p. ). Based on personal experience and speaking with other volunteering, cohousing and strata groups, getting people to pitch in their fair share of work is always a delicate topic.
According to the author, they tried every system under the sun: no set schedule or duties ("let them that litter, litter; let them that clean up, clean up"); a mandatory, scheduled rotation where every piece of work was carefully organised; paying students to be trained to do the cleaning.
In the end, they landed on what we do at LMC: a voluntary system that more-or-less works. Which gives me a lot of comfort.
The chapter on troublemakers took me by surprise. Of course I expected the author to regale me with tales of bad kids finding themselves at school, and becoming successful; I've heard plenty of these through discussions during the WHS saga. What surprised me was this:
Alas, the "A" students have a harder time. ... These kids, not the "troublemakers," are the real victims of society. After years of conforming to outside authority, they have lost touch with themselves. The spark is gone from their eyes, the laughter from their souls. If they do not destroy, neither do they know how to build. ... Invariably, ... they will rouse themselves, out of sheer desperation, to create their own framework. It happens, sooner or later, but what a cost these poor "good children" have to pay for their former acquiescence! (pp. 157-158)
So do I think this would work for everyone?
I don't think so, and here's why. First, I don't think we could hire enough teachers who would be able to fulfill what's asked of them in a system like this. Too many adults think they know better—hells, that includes me too—and just can't hold themselves back from "giving" to students unless asked.
Secondly, and I'll concede that there might be a way for folks to democratically work around it, but the number of times I've heard adults who are grateful that their parents "made them" learn a musical instrument or a second language, even though as children they hated it, makes me think that there's more to adults who sometimes really do know better. The fact we have to ban mobile phones in school and kids just couldn't self-regulate enough to figure it out themselves is enough evidence to me. I wonder how SVS works in an age where media consumption is easy and ubiquitous—I'd be curious if they've "solved" the issue.
Still, teaching kids to be self-motivated and reflective are noble goals, and I applaud SVS for doing so beautifully. As someone who struggles with self-worth, I wonder how I would have handled growing up in a democratic school.