תמצית תאור המאפיינים של בית-הספר סדברי-ואלי:
The Sudbury Valley School has been in operation for more than 30
years now, and several other schools around and outside the United States
see the school's success and are modeling their
schools on theirs.
The school accepts students from ages four and up, and awards a
high school diploma. It is a private school, which relies upon
tuition and does not engage in fundraising. 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.
The physical plant is a beautiful Victorian mansion on a ten-acre
campus. It is furnished like a home, with couches, easy chairs, books
everywhere (rather than hidden in a library), etc. The grounds are
excellent for sport and games, and the school has several facilities;
music rooms, an art room, a high speed Internet connection, a
darkroom, a piano, a stereo, a pond great for fishing, several
computers, etc.
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 most students come and go as they
please, without having to check with an office. 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.
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 30 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), five
students selected randomly every month, and a staff member chosen
daily. The JC investigates complaints of school rules being broken,
and sometimes presses charges. If the JC presses charges against
someone, and (s)he pleads innocent, there will be a trial. If a
person pleads guilty or is found guilty by the trial, that person 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.
Democracy alone is not enough to create a stable happy community.
The revolution-torn democratic city-states of ancient Greece are
testimony to this. It is also important that personal freedoms and
rights be respected. As such, the school grants the freedoms
guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to its students; normally in
American society students are not given freedom of thought or religion
(a parent may force his/her child into Sunday school), free assembly
(they're not even allowed to leave their seats to go to the bathroom
in traditional school, without permission from a teacher), etc.
It is understood that the "purpose" of schools is to educate. So
let me put forward the reasons why persons in Sudbury Model Schools
believe that freedom and democracy is the best environment for
children to learn.
People are born with an amazing capacity for knowledge -- the
brain. It makes little sense to assume that such a thing could have
evolved (or been created, or whatever) without the means of USING it
also being natural to human beings. Let me list some of the more
obvious "natural" mechanisms by which children (and adults) encode
information about their world. Curiosity (crushed in a classroom where
you must study what others wish, rather than that subject which you
are burning to know), role-modeling (not easy when the only person
older than you is a teacher whom you probably dislike and is almost
certainly NOT practicing the profession you would choose) and
spontaneous play (that's right out the window, for children are so
restrained by school that even "recess" becomes a time for working
off violent energy rather than exploring one's world).
People sometimes ask how Sudbury Valley students are "exposed" to
different things. I find this a very odd question, for in reality how
can a person KEEP from being exposed to things? We are in an age of
endless information, and it takes a cell (like a traditional school)
to KEEP a curious person from finding out anything and everything
(s)he wants to know.
People naturally learn to deal with the environment in which they
are placed. In a place with grades, where knowledge is spoon-fed to
them and they never have any reason to make use of it apart from
passing a test, students will learn to GET GOOD GRADES (whether that
means learning to cheat, or learning how to "cram" for a test). In a
place where people do what they want, they find the INTRINSIC value of
knowledge. In a place where people are treated as adult human beings
they learn that they must live up to certain community standards, but
when they are treated as prisoners (read: traditional schools) they
learn only that they are untrusted, and they learn to wait for the
instructions and orders of others. It is testimony to the strength of
the human spirit that there are so FEW apathetic and helpless people
that come out of the public school system. (Sudbury Valley alumni, by
the way, often become quite politically active in later life, and
often go into helping professions.)
Sudbury Valley School