A FAQ drafted by Wayne Radinsky. FAQ draft, version 0.2 By Wayne Radinsky ---------------------- ======================================================================= Questions answered in this Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) list: Q1. I have never heard of Sudbury Valley School. What is it? Q2. If students are free to do whatever they want, won't they goof off all day? Q3. If kids are not forced to read, they won't ever learn it, right? Q4. What about math and science or history? Q5. What about equal opportunity? Q6. Is Sudbury Valley weak and lacking in discipline and rigor? Q7. How do you make sure students are exposed to subject materials? Q8. Why don't students misbehave and abuse all this freedom? Q9. What is the role of staff? Q10. How do you know this method works? Q11. How do I find out more about Sudbury Valley? Q12. Is there a school like this in my area? Q13. How do I start a new Sudbury-Valley type school? ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::: Q1. I have never heard of Sudbury Valley School. What is it? Sudbury Valley is a school based on freedom and responsibility for its students. Freedom means that the student can do and learn whatever they want, and responsibility means that they alone are responsible for the consequences of their learning choices. Students (from age four on up) are free to do as they wish during the day, as long as they follow the school rules (more on school rules later). The campus is "open" and people may come and go as they please, without having to check with an office or other such nonsense. No one is required to attend classes and, indeed, classes are rare and bear little resemblance to the usual notion of a "class". There are no tests or grades of any kind. Students and staff (teachers) are equal in every regard. The students and staff refer to each other by first name, and the relationships between students and staff can't easily be distinguished from the relations between students. -- Scott D Gray Q2. If students are free to do whatever they want, won't they goof off all day? No. The kids will get bored with the video games, and will search for more mentally challenging activities. Public school students, who have their days, and their thoughts structured by other people will long for "goof off" time that is unstructured where they don't "have to" do anything. But in an unstructured environment such as Sudbury Valley, they will long for, and subsequently create, their own structure. At Sudbury Valley, students choose an interest and become very mentally focused on it. Students have become mathematicians, physicists, musicians, lawyers, and refrigerator repairmen, simply by following their own interests. Q3. Do you require kids to learn to read? If kids are not forced to read, they won't ever learn it, right? Kids do not need to be forced to read. If you saw signs everywhere that looked like nonsense, and everyone around you could read them, wouldn't you want to be able to? Kids are motivated by their own curiosity -- there is something they want to read, so they learn to read to get that information. For some kids, the desire to read come when they are younger and some when they are older. But all of them eventually learn to read. And when they do, it's easy to learn -- it's much easier to teach a kid that is interested than one you're trying to force to learn. Furthermore, once it has been learned, the age of the kid does not matter. There is no difference between the reading ability of a kid that learned to read when 6 years old than one who learned when 10 years old. Q4. What about math and science or history? Sudbury Valley has no imposed curriculum, so students are not required to learn math or science or history. Different students will develop strong interests in different subjects. One student may study math very intensely, but never know much about literature, for example. Another student may become very talented in music but not be so great at science. There is no notion that everyone who graduates from Sudbury Valley has the same "basic" set of skills. In fact the divergence in interests takes place at a very young age. Q5. What about equal opportunity? Shouldn't all students be given the same set of skills? Sudbury Valley doesn't try to "give" any set of skills. It is all up to the student's motivation -- what do they want to learn? Every effort is made to help the students follow their interests. Students are given as much freedom as their motivation allows, provided it does not interfere with other students. When the student is given the opportunity to follow their own intrinsic interests, the apathy found in traditional schools goes away. Q6. When I went to school, I had to follow a lot of rules -- show up at 7:00 AM, do several hours of homework a night, etc. Sudbury Valley strikes me as being very weak and lacking in discipline and rigor. This is an attitude that our society is coming from which is difficult to change. We think that being tough disciplinarians and forcing kids to learn a lot of things that we are doing them a favor. In fact we are not, because we prevent them from taking responsibility for their own learning, we inhibit their growth of decision-making skills -- keeping them from learning to decide for themselves what is important and what is not. At Sudbury Valley we find that when imposed "discipline" is absent, students develop their own self-discipline. This is, in the long run, much more valuable. Imposed rigor is not nearly as effective as self-discipline, because when the imposed rigor is removed, the student will lose interest in the subject being taught. Q7. If you don't teach math or science or history, how do you make sure that students are exposed to these subjects at all? What if you've got a student who could be a great biologist, but he never realizes the field exists? This does not actually turn out to be a problem. In fact, you couldn't prevent them from being exposed to just about everything, even if you wanted to! Q8. Given all this freedom, what is there at Sudbury Valley to prevent students from becoming brats? Why don't they abuse all this freedom? Sudbury Valley is run democratically. This requires the students to learn to negotiate with one another to meet their needs or interests. It has a judicial system to handle more serious behaviors. Scott Gray explains the School Meeting and judicial system: The school is governed democratically, by the School Meeting. The school meeting meets weekly, and is made up of students and staff (one vote to a person, following Robert's Rules of Order). It decides all matters of consequence; electing administrative officers from among its own members (yes, no distinction is made between students and staff as far as eligibility for an office), deciding school rules (enforced by the Judicial committee, see later), making expenditures, submitting the annual budget to the Assembly (see later) for approval, hiring firing and re-hiring staff (there is no tenure, all staff are up for re-election each year), etc. The school Assembly meets annually, and is made up of students, staff, and parents of students (as most parents pay tuition, it is considered only reasonable to give them some voice in the use of their money). It must approve the budget (submitted by the school meeting) which includes tuition rates, staff salaries, etc. It also votes on whether or not to award a diploma to any students that have requested one. The Assembly is the broad policy-making body of the school. Within the school, the rules are enforced by a judicial system which has been re-defined by the School Meeting several times over the last 25 years. Its most current incarnation revolves around a Judicial Committee (JC) made up of two officers elected every two months (always students, ever since the positions first opened), four students selected randomly every month, and a staff member (who is allowed input, but no vote, to reflect the fact that a staff voice is valuable but that staff are still in the minority) chosen daily. The JC investigates complaints of school rules being broken, and sometimes presses charges. If the JC finds someone guilty, and (s)he pleads innocent, there will be a trial. If a person pleads guilty or is found guilty by the trial, the accused will be sentenced by the Judicial Committee. Verdicts and sentences deemed unfair by the accused (or others, for that matter) may be brought before the school meeting. All school meeting members are equal before the law. In fact, the first guilty verdict ever was against staff members. Typical sentences are things like "can't go outside for two days", "can't enter the upstairs for a week", etc. -- Scott D Gray Q9. If the students can do what they want all day and they run the school's judicial system, what are the staff there for? Are they needed at all? Staff are considered on an equal level with students. The major difference is that staff are paid by the school and have specific duties they must perform as part of their employment. Q10. This all sounds like other unstructured forms of education which I've heard don't work. My kid is too important to be part of some educational experiment -- I want something I know works. What evidence do you have that Sudbury Valley School really works? Sudbury Valley School has been in operation for 25 years. That's a long enough amount of time for a generation of students to go through the school and into their adult lives. How have these people turned out? Studies of our alumni show them to be "successful" by any criteria; most have gone on to their first choice career or college, most have a comfortable income, and (the best definition of success, in my mind) most are happy people. (Sudbury Valley alumni, by the way, often become quite politically active in later life, and often go into helping professions.) -- Scott D Gray Q11. How do I find out more about Sudbury Valley? To find out more about Sudbury Valley, the best way is to contact the school and ask for the latest list of books, audiotapes and videotapes available. Write to: Sudbury Valley School Press 2 Winch Street, Framingham, MA 01701 Or FAX: 508-788-0674 Or Email: sudval@aol.com In addition, Sudbury Valley has excerpts of these documents on the Net: A large body of SVS documents are available by anonymous FTP! They are housed at yarn.insted.unimelb.edu.au The files are in the YARN/Research/Learning directory. The files currently available are as follows: artonoth.txt -- The Art of Doing Nothing, by Hannah Greenberg. How to be a staff member at a student governed school. bac2basic.txt -- Back to Basics, by Danny Greenberg. Defending the claim that student governed schools are more "normal" or "basic", and traditional schools are truly failing experiments. freelast.txt -- Excerpts from the book Free at Last, by Danny Greenberg. An anecdotal account about learning at SVS. injustice.txt -- A melodramatic (but, I think, accurate) account of life as a traditional school student. By yours truly. lrn2trslf.txt -- Learning to Trust Oneself, by Alan White. A general philosophic treatise on the importance of self-reliance. schltdy1.txt -- A School for Today, by Mimsy Sadofsky. Interviews with students. Part I. schltdy2.txt -- A School for Today, Part II. ?1;2 schltdy3.txt -- A School for Today, Part III. school.lst -- A list of student-governed schools. svsfaq.txt -- A FAQ file about svs, composed by yours truly. You can mail questions about svs to the svs mailing list, discuss-sudbury-model@sudval.org. You can join the list by mailing majordomo@sudval.org, and putting the phrase "subscribe discuss-sudbury-model" in the body of your message. Q12. Is there a school like this in my area? New schools are being formed based on The Sudbury Valley model. You can obtain this list by contacting the school (use the address from previous question). A list is also on the FTP site mention above. Q13. How do I start a new Sudbury-Valley type school? First get the School Starter Kit, available from the Sudbury Valley School Press. In addition you should contact other schools for support. An updated list is available by contacting Sudbury Valley. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::