A Better Class of Learning: The Sudbury Model
While visiting family over Spring Break, I had a brief yet stimulating exchange with my eight-year-old niece.
We were talking about my school, and when I said the students don't have to take classes, her reaction was, "So they could be dumb." My off-the-cuff response? "Well, I suppose—if the only way you could learn things was from classes."
How disconcerting to see even young children swallow the myth that learning requires classrooms where knowledge is chopped up and delivered in prepackaged lessons...as if civilization couldn't have emerged without mass, compulsory schooling; as if babies need classes like Introduction to Walking; as if, faced with something new, adults must either return to the classroom or hope they somehow learned enough in school.
Despite strong evidence to the contrary, the assumption persists that children won't learn anything (or not the right things, anyway) unless taught by adults in classes. Decades of Sudbury schooling are living proof that the most effective learning happens as naturally as breathing. After just twelve years, I can attest to some powerful examples:
- Our younger students combine the best of youth and maturity, while our teenagers relate easily and pleasantly to people of all ages.
- Withdrawn students emerge from their shells, and the socially awkward become socially adept.
- Apathetic and rebellious students discover their passions and become leaders in the school community.
- Our graduates go out into the world so well-adjusted that they essentially have a fifteen- to twenty-year head start on those of us who needed our 20s and 30s to learn how to be adults.
How do people learn what they need, and avoid having to do a lot of unlearning later? Not by conventional methods, that's for sure. If we want young people to become responsible, self-aware, and thoughtful, a very different approach is required—one that may initially seem counterintuitive.
Sudbury schooling has shown that rather than predetermined curricula, what students really need are extensive opportunities to engage directly with life. Allowing children to be who and where they are, giving them enough time and space to sort things out their own way—in supportive, mixed-age communities in which they are full members—this is the way to develop strong personal character and all-around competence.
In other words, kids need above all to confront the issues we adults face all the time: what to make of our lives, how to deal with unsatisfactory situations, difficult people, etc. They need to start, as early as possible, asking the questions empowered people ask: What do I want? How do I get that? What do I want to change, and how do I go about doing so? Is this or that activity a good use of my time? Sadly, most students get little to no practice with these critical questions, as their days are crowded with classes throughout their years of schooling.
It's true that learning at a Sudbury school takes unusual forms. Given the freedom to direct their own learning, we find that students play and talk endlessly; certainly the majority of their school careers will not be spent in the classroom. Yet somehow this approach enables students to become the most superlative young adults. How does that happen?
Surrounded by passionate people and free of the baggage and stigmas often haunting conventional learning, Sudbury students tap into the inestimable power of free-range curiosity. Enthusiastically exploring the world, they encounter its delights and demands in ways that work wonders for them. By constantly asking What do I want to do now? they lay the foundation for lives of critical thinking, assessment, and planning; lives in which they think for themselves, considering past, present, and future; lives in which they are active, not passive; lives of taking responsibility rather than placing blame.
The second reason freedom enables the best learning draws on the old cliché that appearances can be deceiving. Indeed, assessing someone's learning on the basis of their current activities is at best problematic. Consider books and video games: how many of us would say the first is educational, and the second a waste of time? Yet books can be "TV in print," while video games can involve considerable mental effort. The fact is, what appears to be "doing nothing" can actually entail intense learning. Even wasted time, if it results from one's own choices, can teach the value of making better choices in the future.
All Sudbury students master the basics; they just do it differently, in their own ways and their own time frames. With free access to various communities, a wealth of knowledge, experience, and perspectives lies at their fingertips. Immersed in decision-making and problem-solving situations, they learn in myriad ways. In addition to play and conversation, students opt for such things as reading, school management, internships and, yes, classes—classes they choose, classes that tend to be very small and customized to fit their needs. Classes do have their place, of course; they just have no place dominating students' schedules.
Learning is organic, found not in abstract lessons cut off from life but in the midst of life itself. To the extent that students' lives are constrained by others' choices, their learning will be constrained as well. On the other hand, when learning is contextual and empowering—the result of individual choices made in a community — it is deeper and longer-lasting, and leads to the most amazing results. Indeed, the Sudbury formula of freedom-with-responsibility has for over four decades produced exactly the sort of young adults our society as a whole aspires—and frequently fails—to foster.
Bruce L. Smith is a Denver-based educator and freelance writer. After starting his career in the public schools of Columbia, Missouri, he went on to work at schools following the Sudbury model of education. On staff at Alpine Valley School since late 1998, he became the founding director of the Center for Advancing Sudbury Education (www.sudburyschooling.com) in 2006. CASE promotes awareness of the Sudbury model and provides support to Sudbury schools around the world.
See all of Bruce's posts here.
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