The Simple Proposition
that Underlies Sudbury Valley:
Children Are People[1]
Daniel Greenberg
The Setting
My
first memory of people being aware that theres some kind of a problem with education in this country dates back to
1956, when the Russians sent up the first earth-orbiting satellite. That event was really seminal for the United
States. It shook people to the
core. Among other things, it meant to
everybody that our educational system had failed, because if it had succeeded, we
would have been first to put a satellite up.
Back
then we were told that the Russians produced 150,000 engineers a year, while
our schools produced only 15,000. Right
there you could see the failure of the educational system, because if ours was
succeeding we would have produced a lot more.
Imagine ten times more engineers a year! What staggeringly successful schools the
Russians had! Nobody back then had a
clue that Russia was actually a third-world country. That didnt come out until the 90's. Later on, it became clear
that it was all a matter of terminology.
Everybody who went to a vocational school in Russia was called an
engineer when they got their diploma.
It had nothing to do with getting a university engineering degree, but
the people translating saw all these people as engineers!
So
since 1956, weve been really worrying about our educational system
and fiddling with it. One can marvel at
this, because were at it now for forty-five years and its always the same refrain: things are bad, our kids
arent learning anything, the system is a failure, and we
have to do something about it.
Furthermore, the solution is always more
of the same and thats a typical solution for all sorts of problems. The classic situation I always like to refer
to is the First World War, which is not a very amusing model, where the war
degenerated into virtually static trench warfare after about six weeks, just
when everybody had hoped it would be over.
People said, Well, how do we win this war? Were
doing everything weve done in the past and its not working. The answer was, Do more of the same. Its almost incredible when you look at it now. For four years the brightest people in the
world on every side Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, France,
Great Britain, the United States
the most advanced military thinkers, what were they doing during that whole
period to win this intractable war?
They were doing more of the same. In one fortress alone, Verdun, some million and a half people
were killed and wounded battling for over a year. These figures are beyond comprehension. They were doing more of the same, which meant throwing more
millions of young soldiers into the meat-grinder of trench warfare.
Heres another analogy. Suppose you see people suffering
terribly from dysentery, an often fatal form of diarrhea, that usually comes
from polluted water. You look at them
and you say, Why are they so sick? Well, its because theyre
dehydrated. How do you cure them? Give them more water! You put more water into them and they become
sicker. Well, you say, theyre not drinking enough water, because theyre still dehydrated.
So you try to get them to drink more water maybe put a little flavoring into it to make it fun
to drink. They drink more and more
water and they keep getting sicker. So
youve got to make them drink even more water: tie them down, and force them to drink
more. No matter what you do, you keep
thinking theyre getting more dehydrated and that they therefore
need more water. But the more they
drink, the worse it gets.
How
could something like that happen?
Because in a situation like that, which strikes us as absurd, nobody
stopped to ask whats really causing the dysentery. Theyre
looking at the symptoms, but they arent
actually sitting back and asking, Why
is this happening? Is there something
going on thats deeper? In order to do that, you have to go back to
basics, back to the original question of what causes dysentery and what causes
disease. Thats what we tried to do at Sudbury Valley. Instead of saying, Education isnt
working because the students arent
getting enough math, or English, or whatever, we sat back and asked, What
are schools about? Why do we have them
at all? How do they fit into anything? Thats what I want to talk about here.
Why Do Schools Exist?
Schools
are recent. Thats so hard for us to remember. Im
talking about mass education, not specialized little schools where a few people
in the population were taken and trained for special purposes. The idea that everybody should go to school
is not even 200 years old, and its
Western. That means that a million
years of evolution managed without schools.
Think about it the Roman Empire, the Egyptian pyramids, all the
technological advances, all of modern science, all the inventiveness that
created the Industrial Age all that stuff
and there were no schools! The whole
progress of civilization for millennia!
There are even some places today that still dont have schools.
So
why do they exist? The answer for our
culture is that schools are an environment in which children grow up to be
effective adults. Thats what theyre
here for. People decided somewhere
about 200 years ago that they needed to create a special environment for
children where they can grow to maturity.
What
does this mean in practical terms? What
does it mean to be an effective adult, what does it mean to be a child, and how
do you get a child to be an effective adult?
An Adult Citizen in the
Free West
The
meaning of an effective adult very much depends on what culture youre talking about.
Its very different in Saudi Arabia than it is here. We in this country have a very special idea
of what effective adulthood is. The
reason is that in this country adults are given a maximum amount of
freedom. Here, the idea is that you
start with the individual and you give them the maximum possible freedom to
realize their dreams and their potential.
The community and the government are seen as secondary features, there
in order to support individuals and their activities. Our culture specifically focuses on individual realization, and
we do not promote the submersion of the individuals dreams and aspirations to some great national or
religious or ethnic ideal. So the idea of
an effective adult in this country is a person who can handle this kind of
freedom, a person who can function well in a society where individual
realization is the thing thats primary. That in itself tells you something about
what schooling should be like in this country, as well see.
Such
a society is based on a tremendous trust in human nature, to an extent that is
truly staggering. You see that when you
come into contact with people of other cultures. I remember when Russian immigrants started pouring into this
country in the seventies, by the thousands.
Over and over again, when you met these people, they simply couldnt believe our supermarkets! They couldnt believe that you could walk through a store with a
carriage and pick things off the shelf and put it in your carriage and check
out all without a hundred people watching you all the
time. Their reaction was, In Russia, if there was a store like this, it would be
robbed blind within one day! One couldnt just walk up to the shelves in a Russian supermarket. But our whole culture is based on
trust. Sure, there are a lot of people
who violate it people who steal, people who cheat but we factor that in and accept it as a cost of our
culture. We would rather hold to
freedom and trust.
The
question is, Why does it make sense to create a society with such
freedom and trust? The answer is
that we have culture-specific notions of what adults are like. For example, lets assume we all thought that adults cant learn how to tie their shoes. This is trivial, but it illustrates the
point. Then we would either create a
society in which we had helpers standing by who were trained to tie shoes and
helped every single adult in the morning, or we would create shoes that dont have laces, that worked on velcro. In other words, theres a relationship between what we think of adults and
the concept of how an adult functions.
What Im going to do is list six characteristics that we
associate with adults in our culture.
The number six has no magic to it.
There are six that I happened to come up with, and I just want to list
them and talk about them briefly, because it is these characteristics of
adulthood that lead us to believe that it makes sense to trust people and to
create a society that glorifies individual freedom.
(1) Adults are self-motivated
self-starters. Thats what we expect adults to be: people who get
themselves up in the morning, who go out and find jobs, who receive an
assignment at work and proceed to carry it out under their own steam. We dont
expect adults in this society to be sitting with their hands folded in the
morning waiting for somebody to contact them on the phone or on their TV screen
in their bedroom and say, Good
morning. Now you are to get up, brush
your teeth, go here . . . We expect
adults to be able to conduct their own lives, to manage their own order of the
day and so forth on their own. Thats a big expectation.
It reflects our belief that its
human nature to behave this way, not something superimposed from the
outside. We actually believe that the
standard, normal condition of people, when theyre grown up, is to get up and do things. Youre expected to be able to keep yourself busy, and you
expect other people to be the same.
(2) Adults are responsible. This means theyre capable of taking on a task, or engaging in some
activity, and understanding the consequences of their actions. We dont
feel we have to walk over to each other and say, You know, you shouldnt be drinking
that much milk because if you do, youre
not really getting the proper nutrition.
You should eat this or that instead. We might ask each other for advice, but we
expect people on their own to comprehend the outcomes of their actions and to
be accountable for them. Our whole
system of law is based on that notion
that if you do something, you do it with knowledge and you should have an
understanding of where its going to lead.
If you decide to rob a bank, thats
your decision, and you suffer the consequences of what youve done. As an
adult, you can be held to that.
(3) Adults have judgement. They can evaluate on their own, they can
prioritize. To be sure, were all out there preaching what we think is good and
bad; were telling our neighbors, were telling our friends, were joining groups, clubs, and so forth. But were
doing that because we want them to internalize those values for
themselves. Underlying the whole
enterprise of telling other people our ideas is the notion that every
individual has judgement, and that were
trying to get them to exercise their judgement in ways that we approve. This essay I have written is a perfect
example. I think every reader has
judgement. Im giving you my spiel, Im telling you how I see things, but Im not telling you youve got to
see them this way. Im assuming that you have your own judgement, that youre going to read this and that some of you are going
to say this is a lot of baloney, some are going to say part of it makes sense,
and some are going to say it all makes sense!
(4) Adults
know how to learn. This is an
important characteristic. Our society
cuts off formal schooling at a certain point:
at sixteen by law, at eighteen for high school graduates, at twenty-two
for people who go to college, and older for people who insist on being graduate
students. But at some stage our
assumption is, Youre an adult,
you know how to learn on your own from now on. In fact, what do we do in our
adult lives when we want to learn something?
We figure out how to learn it!
If we didnt think adults could do that, wed say everybody has to go to school all their
lives! Instead, what we say is, You have the tools, you have the capacity to learn,
and somehow you can figure out how to do it.
You can either get the information yourself, or you can find experts, or
you can go to the web, or to libraries
you figure it out. As an adult,
once youre cast free of the school system, you are assumed to
be able to learn all of the skills and information that you need all your life.
(5) Adults
are problem solvers. We assume
that when you come up against something in your life thats stumping you, youre
going to figure out a way to get over it.
Of course, there are times when you have trouble solving your
problems. But part of knowing how to
solve problems is knowing how to get help, and we assume thats something adults can do. We dont walk up to people and say, Im going to put
you through a series of evaluations to find out what your problems are, and
then Im going to tell you how to go about solving them. We assume
that adults are problem solvers and theyre
going to figure things out, and that if they have trouble figuring things out,
one way theyll go about it is to seek help, which itself is a part
of problem solving.
(6) Adults
are social. I use that term in
the broadest sense, meaning that they know how to communicate with people, they
know how to relate people, and theyve
figured out how to conduct themselves within the framework of a larger
society. We assume that adults are able
to carry on interactions with other adults that will create stable
relationships and a stable community.
We assume that adults are capable on their own of figuring out how to
find a common language with each other, and how to behave in a social setting.