Community Notebook
Natural Learning: The Sudbury Way


Photo by Dion Ogust

Many people would consider it a giant leap of faith. A school with no set curriculum and no required courses, where children are free to decide for themselves what they’d like to do at any given moment? A school where rules and policies are set by the entire community, with the kids’ voices carrying as much weight as those of the adults? We live in a culture that doesn’t take such ideas very seriously.

Example: I’m sitting in the district office of the Rondout Valley Schools, and out of semi-idle curiosity I pick up a colorful paperback entitled What Your Kindergartener Needs To Know. The introduction explains the German origin of the word—kinder garten, literally a garden of children—but immediately goes on to warn rather sternly that in current educational thinking, that metaphor just doesn’t make it. Children, says the book, are not comparable to flowers that will bloom spontaneously.
In Mainstream Educational America circa 2002, even the Germanic approach lacks sufficient rigidity. The folks opening the Hudson Valley Sudbury School in Woodstock next fall, on the other hand, not only trust that the seeds will germinate and bloom—they expect even the tenderest shoots to lend a hand in laying out the garden, choosing the fertilizer, and making sure the soil stays damp. For the naysayers, they have a ready response: the thirty-plus-year track record of the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts.

The classic Sudbury Valley story is also the answer to the question that organizers are most often asked: What if the kids don’t want to do anything? What if, for example, a kid just wants to play video games all day?|

Co-founder Eugenia Buerklin can understand the doubters. “It takes an enormous amount of trust to hang back—but you’re really just trusting in the same impulse that drives a baby to crawl, then walk. Learning is natural—we get into trouble when we try to force it, manipulate it.”

Maybe so. In conversation with a friend who devotes much of her time, energy and top-flight intelligence to her local school district, which she serves as a board trustee, she mentions her concern about her young-adult son. “I never wanted him to just be playing video games all day, so he had a strict half-hour limit. Now it seems like that’s all he wants to do.” She willingly admits that the Sudbury model sounds exciting. “But you’d have to have some kind of guidance, I mean, couldn’t it just deteriorate into a pointless experience?”

The Sudbury Valley student who wanted to play video games all day was guided into recognizing the real-world steps he needed to take to achieve that goal. In a move that many mainstream parents might wish they’d thought of first, he was told that he’d need to raise the money for computer equipment himself. He started with a food business, moved into administering a computer center for his fellow students to use; he’s now a computer engineer.

Not that some students don’t take a little while finding their sea legs on the open water. “Sudbury Valley finds that kids do go through a kind of detox period, waiting for someone to tell them what to do,” said Buerklin. “Then they get bored, and start to look around—and the other people around them are busy and excited…”

That they are, according to Mimsy Sadofsky. Sadofsky has been on the staff of the Sudbury Valley School for thirty-three years, and says the atmosphere is anything but a wasteland. “So how’s life around there?” I asked her in an e-mail. “Intense, busy, not quiet, emotionally exposed, and fascinating,” she replied. “Children are aware of themselves and others in a very pleasant way, and also very focused on their play/work. Every child should have this opportunity, yes, yes, yes!”

Another question on the lips of skeptics tends to be “How will these kids ever get into college?” According to co-founder Jeff Collins, the one who first fell in love with the Sudbury concept and has devoted, with partner Lisa Montanus, enormous time, energy, and money to making it a reality, that too has been proven to be a non-issue. “Kids that come out of this kind of school have had so much practice at knowing what they want to do that they really stand out,” Collins said.

In lieu of a New York State diploma, the school will issue certificates of graduation, neatly bypassing the recently toughened state requirements that have been causing consternation in school districts from Montauk to Niagara. Not surprisingly, Collins and his fellow founders feel that standardized testing, more and tougher graduation requirements, and other such tweaking of the mainstream model are part of the problem, not the solution. “A lot of the excitement about what we’re doing comes from people who can see that the way education’s currently being done just isn’t working,” says Collins. “The people involved in the
bureaucracy know it’s not working too, and their solution is just to keep doing more of the same.”

That’s just not good enough, said co-founder Sheri Ponzi, who’s been home schooling her two sons and loving it (there was a science experiment going on in the background as we spoke) but welcomes the Sudbury experience enthusiastically. “Their interests and their sense of who they want to be should dictate, not a system that was set up to produce wage slaves for industry,” she said. “I want them to own their own education. I’m thirty-two and just getting to the point where I really know what I want to do and am focused enough to go out and do it. I’d like to spare them that.”

Or, as Buerklin put it, “It’s just a deeply flawed system—sit still, eyes front, don’t talk. They’re even talking about doing away with recess. I remember sitting there in sixth grade thinking, ‘So much of this is ridiculous.’ Well, why set yourself up for a midlife crisis if you can figure out what you want to do when you’re a kid?”

—Anne Pyburn

For more information on the fledgling Hudson Valley Sudbury School, call 679-1002 or visit www.hudsonvalleyschool.org.