The Sudbury Valley School Experience

How do Sudbury Schools work? For over thirty years, founders, staffs, students and parents have written about this exhilarating new way of schooling children. Many excellent articles on the concepts and experiences that make up a Sudbury School have been collected in this book, which provides a solid introduction to this model of education. One of the profound truths one learn is that we are all so different from each other that peer pressure and comparisons of worth are meaningless.

 

"The people who play sports as we do at S.V.S. learn far more profound lessons about life than those that can be taught by regimented, performanceoriented sports. They learn teamwork—not the 'we against them' type of teamwork, but the teamwork of a diverse group of people of diverse talents organizing themselves to pursue a common activity—the teamwork of life. They learn excellence, not the 'I'm a star' type of excellence, but the type of excellence that comes from setting a standard for yourself to live up to and then trying your best to live up to it."

 

Contents : 1. Introduction 2. Back to Basics 3. What Children Don't Learn at SVS 4. How and What Do Children Learn at SVS? 5. What do Students Choose? 6. A New Look at Learning 7. On the Nature of Sports at SVS and the Limitations of Language in Describing SVS to the World 8. Reverence for all Life 9. Learning to Trust Oneself 10. The Little Girl Who Taught Me a Big Lesson 11. The Art of Doing Nothing 12. Wrong Questions, Wrong Answers 13. Do People Learn From Courses? 14. A Moment of Insight 15. When does a Person Make Good Use of His Time? 16. Doing "Nothing" at School: A Lesson from History 17. Snapshots 18. Sudbury Valley's Secret Weapon: Allowing People of Different Ages to Mix Freely at School 19. The Beech Tree 20. How the School is Governed; Who Cares? 21. When You Think of the School Meeting, What Passes Through Your Mind? 22. Five Myths about Democracy 23. Subtleties of a Democratic School 24. The Silent Factor 25. Teaching Justice through Experience 26. SVS Glimpses 27. On Law and Order 28. "When You Were Young"; A True Story 29. To Thyself Be True 30. A School for Today.