In Kids We Trust

By Kim Ridley, Ode. Posted August 25, 2005.

While his peers at other schools were memorizing their multiplication tables, Ken Pruitt was lying on his back watching clouds, building tree forts with friends, or poking around in the woods. Pruitt was no juvenile delinquent. He was a student at the Sudbury Valley School near Boston, where children get to decide for themselves how they want to spend each day.

Come again? What does cloud watching or fort building have to do with learning? Everything, according to Sudbury Valley's founders. "Children don't know what they want to learn, they know what they want to do," says Mimsy Sadofsky, one of several original founders who still work at the school. What children typically want to do is play -- which cognitive scientists say is one of the main ways human beings learn.

 "Learning teaches us what is known, play makes it possible for new things to be learned," says David Elkind, Professor of Child Development at Tufts University, and most recently author of The Hurried Child, All Grown Up and No Place to Go, and Miseducation. "There are many concepts and skills that can only be learned through play."

Pruitt, who attended Sudbury Valley from ages six to seventeen, enjoyed a "Huck Finn childhood". "I spent hours by myself climbing trees, walking on the trails, sitting and observing," he says. He especially liked to perch on a tree leaning low over a swamp and peer into the tea-colored water, watching fish and insects, frogs and turtles go about their daily lives.

He recalls sitting perfectly still on a stone wall in the woods to watch for wildlife. A deer came so close he could almost touch it, and then a raccoon. Something stirred in him that never would have happened had he been sitting behind a desk. "Human beings, especially children before they're programmed by society, are open to seeing other living things in the world as equals instead of having the sense that we're their masters. That's what set me on the course to want to preserve wild nature. By the time I was fifteen, it was clear to me that I'd follow a career in wilderness protection." Today, at age thirty-five, Pruitt is Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions. In a state that loses forty acres a day to sprawl, his organization helps people in more than three hundred communities protect the kinds of wetlands he loved as a child.

A new survey of alumni from the Sudbury Valley School shows that such idyllic school experiences has not harmed or hampered them as adults. Eighty-two percent of graduates interviewed pursued further study such as college or trade school after Sudbury Valley. The others said they were ready to enter the fields they planned to pursue as adults. Alumni have become ballet dancers and farmers, physicians and circus performers, carpenters, teachers, lawyers, farmers, entrepreneurs, musicians, clerks, you name it.

But the most important measures of success seldom have much to do with college admissions or job titles. And that's where Sudbury Valley graduates like Pruitt tend to excel. Eighty-six percent of those surveyed said their lives reflect their values. That's what the founders had in mind when they started the school in 1968. Sadofsky and another founder, Daniel Greenberg, along with Jason Lempka, have just published a new book, The Pursuit of Happiness: The Lives of Sudbury Valley Alumni. Of the past thirty-seven years they write, "We believe that the school provides an environment that trains each individual to think for themself, and to lead an examined life that is fulfilling, meaningful, and fun."

Sudbury Valley is the oldest existing democratic school in the U.S. and the most widely imitated. It has no tests or grades and is run by a "school meeting" patterned after New England town meetings in which all participants have an equal vote on important matters. At a time when debates rage about education standards and testing, these schools offer an intriguing and controversial alternative: putting children in charge of their own education.

Although each of the more than 160 democratic schools around the world evolved independently, they generally share the practices of allowing students to choose how to spend their days, vote on important school matters, and participate in a community of equals, regardless of age. These practices raise many eyebrows in education circles, but advocates say democratic schools can teach more traditional schools a thing or two about helping children grow into happy adults, learn to navigate a complex world -- and participate in a free society.

In mid-December, the Victorian mansion that houses the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, bustles with activity. Some students rehearse music and dance performances for an upcoming show at the school. Others make gingerbread houses, play video games, read, argue, sew, study, or just hang out. There's nothing here that even remotely resembles a classroom. Just lots of rooms filled with comfy chairs and books, plus music studios, an art room, a woodshop, performance space, a darkroom, and kitchen.

Learning flows from the daily life of the school, which includes 160 or so students and 10 staff members. Students know each staff person's areas of expertise, and ask for help when they need it. "Although kids may never be in a formal class," says Sadofsky, "the adults here are models for them."         

Kim Ridley is co-editor of "Signs of Hope: In Praise of Ordinary Heroes." She writes about people creating positive social change for Ode Magazine.

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