Re: Alternative version of the Sudbury model
Masi Denison
Sorry...phone hit send too early...
Quickly... I had a thought about an alternative model that is, I think, similar to the sudbury model but not exactly the same. What if a school had a way for adults to also pursue their own interests (artists, software developers, farmers) so that the staff was a larger percentage of the community but also not an artificial structure. I feel like the adults would be less inclined to "meddle" with teachable moments if they were primarily pursuing their own interests and were available for consult. I.e. move away from people in the industry of education. In a way it would be like the older students available to the younger ones.
Thoughts? Does this even jibe with sudbury? Or is this just an entirely different beast?
Thanks for your consideration of this idea.
Masi Denison
I am an interested party who is not yet a participant
Scott David Gray
that may be surmountable, but realistic problems:
First: At present, it is an extraordinary act of will to manage to
start a Subury school such that it succeeds. The survival rate of
Sudbury schools is small relative to other small businesses. The
capacity of any small shoestring to pay staff who are not *actively*
involved *all* of their time on payroll in clear duties to the school
is basically nil.
Second: Even if it were possible for the school to financially survive
hiring "artists-in-residence" or "farmers-in-residence," could tuition
be kept to the insanely low levels (designed to be affordable to kids
working part-time)? Probably not.
Without resolving these practical problems, it's hardly worth arguing
philosophy about outside members. But, since this discussion often
ranges into the broad and theoretical I'll dip my toe in:
To the extent that staff are making money with their "outside"
ventures, it is ethically complicated to receive two paychecks at the
same time; one for the "contract" work they are doing for someone
else, and one for the salary they are being paid by the school which
is not getting the bulk of their attention at that time. I call that
double dipping.
Staff as "role models" doing "adult things" seems already satisfied by
the fact that staff at work on/for the school already model (or at
least *can* model if they have the professionalism to do so)
responsible management of one's time and careful work on one's
responsibilities.
And, in fact, staff as role models are important to the community --
but it doesn't take *that* many adults around to model it effectively.
This is because, in fact, four year olds are *mostly* looking up top
and watching 7 year olds, who are *mostly* looking up to and watching
12 year olds, whoi are *mostly* looking up to and watching 15 year
olds. So the only people who directly benefit from *watching* staff
modeling are the older kids. (Yes, seeing it casually at all ages is
also valuable -- but less important; and the staff are less likely to
be questioned and challenged by younger kids about *how* they do what
they do).
As far as modelling expertise: There are too many thousands of wholly
different and distinct professions to really model any or all of them
in a staff. Because of that, kids are able to take part in the free
market of ideas and read/watch/visit professional things as part of
their day -- just as adults can. Really, what one needs from the staff
is expertise in some of the most often called upon skills (cleaning,
cooking, reading, rhetoric, general sciences and philosophy,
mathematics, management) and the ability of those staff to discuss
what they do. Also valuable is modelling expertise *itself* broadly --
devoid of the trivia about what one is expert in.
As an aside, the responsible handling of expert knowledge -- handling
it acquiring it, managing it, is something that kids are very prone
naturally to develop and practice as part of the games and culture
that they naturally form. Consider the extraordinary mastery that many
younger children gain over information related to their favorite games
and television shows -- certainly just about every kid in our school
has and models more expertise about certain card games or detailed
fantasy worlds than I can muster (and my outside-staff work is in game
design!). They don't need to have a nearby adult with expert knowledge
about each pokemon on-hand for them to figure out how to acquire and
handle expertise on that subject themselves -- so they have no need to
watch a staff member pool hustler (or pilot, or soldier, or
cardiologist, or butcher, or security guard, or movie mogul) at work
to get the basics about how one gains or uses expertise.
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http://www.unseelie.org/
Scott David Gray
practical real-world problem:
Today. In this social climate. Very, very few adults can even talk to
kids respectfully.
As a result, inviting adults with less direct interest and ability in
the school to be part of this "larger staff" is to invite potentially
very obnoxious and meddlesome people into the community. No -- it is
far better that a school really by the KIDS place, that they know they
own -- where they are a very clear majority, and where in most times
and places they spend time in there are no adults around at all.
Woty Regan
Second: Even if it were possible for the school to financially survive
hiring "artists-in-residence" or "farmers-in-residence," could tuition
be kept to the insanely low levels (designed to be affordable to kids
working part-time)? Probably not.
Ben Robins
The question of broader adult presence comes up often in conversation with prospective families. The question is raised by parents, not kids, and my answer is that kids have the majority say, and what the kids are saying is no.
But my experience visiting Sudbury schools is that many kids are enthusiastic about having another respectful adult around, one who isn't busy doing staff work. A key question, then, is what would motivate an adult to join a Sudbury campus.
To give context, let's first enunciate why kids join. Here are 3 reasons that come to mind:
1) It's a good place to "grow up": A "Sudbury school"
2) It's a refuge from a disrespectful world: A "Sudbury refuge"
3) It's a good place to "go about their lives": A "Sudbury community"
For adults, the larger society is a "Sudbury world", where they are respected and are free to live and grow. But the adults I know don't choose untethered freedom. Rather, in that freedom, many adults choose to limit themselves, by becoming invested in specific communities (for example, hobbyist communities, civic-minded communities, church communities).
Many of these communities, unlike Sudbury schools, ostensibly travel narrow paths: Gamers get together with gamers simply to game, and if they want to do something else, they go somewhere else. However that's not really how it plays out - people share more and more of their lives, and many value the presence of diversity as much as specificity. One thing I love about 5-day contact improv jams is that they're about so much more than just dancing. Walk the grounds and you'll experience vivid conversation about anything and everything.
And so with no need for refuge, with Reason 2 dropped from the above list, many adults continue to choose the restraints of community as an effective way to live and grow.
In the distant future, when kids are respected in the larger society, some will, like adults, choose to limit themselves to specific communities. While some kids will wake up to a respectful world, bellow from the rooftops "Free at last", and walk away, other kids will say (perhaps after distant adventuring), "I like it here. See you at school."
In this future context, a Sudbury campus wouldn't be a relic of the past. Rather, it would be constantly reexamined, redebated and reformed, just like Sudbury schools today. People who didn't find it useful would leave, and people who sensed the "Sudbury essence" would come. Perhaps that essence is more concentrated and vivid when you spend your days on a specific campus than in the larger world.
If you're still with me on this, we agree that even in a respectful world, many kids and adults will still spend their days in specific communities, with similar purposes of wanting to live and grow. The question then becomes, why would these communities be segregated by age?
I'm actually undecided on this, and will toss out some thoughts:
-adults need structure (just kidding)
-adults can't keep up with change (the VCR argument)
-adults are hardwired to help children grow (as parents thankfully are), and would be "constant gardeners", peskily needing to nurture those around them, even those they respect
-on the other hand, the current age range in Sudbury schools brings with it real differences, which are overcome, so perhaps these difficulties could be overcome too
In today's world, as Scott wrote, few adults consistently talk to kids respectfully. If you let one adult in, many parents will want in as well, and some won't be respectful. The thought of having a public debate about the merits of each case gives me chills. School Meeting members can be in school as long as they don't bother others; imagine an adult being written up for bothering others due to their stultifying presence:
A milestone for adult acceptance in a Sudbury school will be when their letter of request doesn't say "Here are all my interests I want to share," but rather "This is where I want to learn and grow."
Scott David Gray
>
> Does *every* school that respects children also need to be cheap?
No.
In fact there is every possibility that, if a school like Sudbury
Valley charged a higher tuition, it would be taken more seriously as a
school. I think sometimes our tuition is scarier than our philosophy.
Parents look at what we charge and make some assumptions; "given how
expensive even the cheapest public schools are to operate, any school
that charges less than $12K *must* be either sub-par or running some
scam."
It's like needing a heart transplant, and having your cardiologist
tell you that he "knows a guy who knows a guy who has a
device-plus-procedure for under $3000, that appears to be more
effective at keeping a person healthy before transplant than the
Jarvik heart -- in the handful of people who have tried it." You may
not even look into it, for fear that there must be something terribly
terribly wrong or dangerous about it. And you may well switch
cardiologists, too.
What they are missing, of course, is that Sudbury schools are not
"cheap." Rather, the costs of running a Sudbury school are not
comparable to the costs of running a traditional school. It is *much*
more expensive (in terms of the number of hours of labor that must be
invested per bushel of grain) to plow a field with 7th century tools
than with 21st century tools. Running a prison is more expensive than
running a vacation spot.
OTOH, if I were a parent, I would be pretty annoyed at a school that
charged $15K for tuition, if I knew that they were spending $10K of
that tuition on hiring adults to "do their own thing" during the day
-- rather than seeing to my child's needs. If that $10K went for
things of clear use to my child or the stability of the school itself,
I would feel a lot better about it.
My main point, though, is that it is already hard for an
entrepreneurial business to make a go of it, without blowing half of
it's staff salary (generally the biggest expense by far in most
businesses) on staff time that does not actually contribute to the
institution. Generally, if you take a job and then spend your time on
the clock "doing your own thing" you will not have a job for very long
OR you (and others doing the same thing) will make it substantially
harder for the business to survive.
Further, a climate that tolerates staff goofing off, may also lose
it's most effective workers. The working staff would get sick and
tired of doing the real work while the other staff pursue their own
careers or hobbies. Those annoyed staff would probably respond by
deciding to goof off themselves (meaning that nobody would be left
doing the real work of keeping the school going), quitting (again,
meaning that nobody would be left to do the real work), or at least
feeling terribly insulted annoyed and jealous at the people pulling a
salary without taking direct responsibility for the institution (which
would have a direct negative impact on the community felt in other
ways).
The fact is, a School Meeting that runs efficiently will *not*
rehire staff that do not work actively and effectively on seeing to
the school's needs, in proportion to their salaries. Over the past
thirty years, our School Meeting has refused to rehire staff that
appeared unable (or unwilling) to earn their salary. As Ben put it,
"what the kids are saying is no."
--
-- Scott David Gray
http://www.sudval.org/
D B
Masi,
It does sound like you are describing "a different beast". You might want to contact the Society for the Advancement of Non-Coercive Education (SANE) about your ideas as these are in line with something they are working on which they are calling a Learnery. SANE is the Society that developed from Windsor House School which is a non-coercive democratic school. As a very inadequate description, the Learnery will be an environment/community where learning is emergent and shared among all ages. WH has between 100 to 175 kids of all ages enrolled in it and has some similarities to Sudbury but also important differences. It welcomes parents, family, and community members. WH just celebrated its 40th anniversary and shared, emergent, inclusive, and multi-directional learning has always gone on there. SANE is attempting to expand and grow this concept by finding or building a new suitable space. The assumption that parents and adults are a problem and should be excluded is one of the biggest problems I have with the Sudbury model as I see it discussed here, although I think variety of offerings is a good thing.
You might be interested to know I conducted several in-depth interviews with about 20 Windsor House alumni who had attended for at least 4 years and most for over 10 years. For range of experiences, I made sure to include people who left because they stopped liking being there. A very strong theme expressed by all participants (yes all) was that they loved the inclusivity. They described enjoying interacting with and developing true friendships with people of all ages. Indeed, as a parent, I developed friendships with people who are up to 30 years younger and up to 30 years older than me as did my son who attended there for 4 years. Participants all expressed enjoying having their parents around and involved and also for some, they loved that they didn't have to leave their toddler siblings at home because little ones could come too. I attended classes put on by 7 year olds or JC's chaired by 8 year olds (the 8 year old expelled a parent from the JC for breaking the rule about not talking on her cell phone after a first warning). I won't go on but there are some folks thinking about the ideas you talked about. And I am not suggesting you believe this, but the assumption that adults/parents will be "meddlers" makes me want to say that parents are no more or less able to understand concepts of profound respect and democracy, etc than anyone else. I have always been somewhat nonplussed by these kinds of assumptions. Also, the idea that attachment between children and parents is an inherent problem also gets me going but that may be moving into another topic.
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 09:19:06 -0400
Subject: [DSM] Re: Alternative version of the Sudbury model
From: masid...@gmail.com
To: discuss-su...@googlegroups.com
Karen Hyams
Vegetarian recipes, meal plans and cooking tips:
http://thedailygrindchopandfry.com
Masi Denison
Andrew Cady
This has come up before -- the most immediate issue is, if adults have
jobs, how can they be on the campus at the same time as students? And
if the adults are unemployed, how do they eat? Their participation
cannot be very regular and long-term if it is financially unsustainable.
(I think Scott is assuming that these adults are being paid as staff,
although I am assuming that they are more like students, who may even
pay to attend. But if they are staff, then how can they be paid?)
Maybe some kind of solution is that the school has to be open evenings
instead of days, or weekends, but of course that does not solve
everything, while creating some severe problems in itself. (Since the
parents work: where do the kids go during day? When do their parents
see them?)
However, a campus providing educational facilities (libraries, computer
labs, quiet study spaces, whiteboards, tools, musical instruments...)
does not have to be for children only. If that is how the school is
conceived, then (to me at least!) it makes good sense for it to be open
to any age. It seems to me this would be ideal, because one could
imagine a (social, geographic, etc.) continuity into more advanced
kinds of study/research -- which would also mean that the more gifted
students would have, from a very young age, an advanced environment to
accept them at their level. But as was pointed out by Scott, this kind
of concept, though perhaps socially/operationally feasible, is going to
require more funding than is likely to be raised by private tuition --
because it would have to be like a university, or at least further in
that direction than a high school.
Some multi-million dollar grant, such as the one that founded Stanford,
could create such a school. Surely, Warren Buffet could found such a
school, if he were convinced -- but good luck getting a meeting with
Warren Buffet. Also, possibly, a well-funded university could expand
'downward' in age bracket (however, this seems much less realistic,
since all universities assume that high schools exist to filter through
students for colleges, and indeed assume that they exist to filter
through students for employers -- and SVS quite radically abolishes
this filtering/ranking role). Or, perhaps, some kind of public funding
could establish such a school -- but this would require a rare political
climate, indeed.
Maybe the necessity of the younger and older 'students' being on the
campus at the same time could be somewhat relaxed: before work hours,
the campus is a school; after, it becomes more like a hacker space.
Younger students who wished to interact with the more advanced adults
could do so by "staying after school", and of course there would be
other overlap on various occasions according to each individuals'
schedule.
Or, if the facilities available were actually sufficient to produce
monetary income for the adults (for example, programmers can work
anywhere), the adults could be there during the day -- being there would
*be* their job. Inevitably these adults would be at least somewhat
available for students to learn from. In fact, historically, it was
quite common for the young to be present in, and learn from, productive
working spaces. (Of course, ownership was very different then: the
children, once old enough, would be welcome on the family farm, but not
in a factory owned by some Carnegie type. And basically to imagine what
I have said is to imagine a return to this old situation, in which one
typically owned one's own workplace.)
To imagine this all coming together without a large initial grant of
cash is difficult. It might be possible to expand 'outward' from an
already-sustainable business. For example, earlier I posted a link to
the ecovillage project <http://opensourceecology.org/>. While they have
not yet acheived a financially self-sustaining farm, that is their goal.
If one were created along the model they imagine, it could devote some
of its resources to providing a place for learning. More traditional
farms (which do not build technology) could do the same, although the
educational possibilities are somewhat domain-limited in that case.
Farms do typically have the advantage of abundant land, though. World
Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms <http://www.wwoof.org/> is geared
to providing internship opportunities for young adults; I suppose it
might be feasible to approach some of those farms with the concept of
expanding their facilities to provide a broad learning environment.
Anyway, separate from the issue of financial bootstrapping, I think
a movement toward (re?)integration of institutionally-separated
adult/child production/learning environments into a single community is
an ideal to strive toward -- and I have seen a lot of support for it,
from various people, in various ways. But it is important to realize
what a daunting task this is: not just one, but two institutions must
undergo revolution -- both school and work.
Paige Breisacher
Erik Haugsjaa
You would love reading some of the SVS books!
I especially recommended...
1. Reflections on the Sudbury School Concept. Including the essay
"“The Loneliness of the Information-Age Learner: Students' Ability to
Pursue Knowledge as it Relates to a School's Size" (beginning on p
219) talks about what the campus could/should be as it relates to
internships and/or pursuing an interest from a unlimited range of
options in the world and the role the school plays.
2. Announcing a New School: A Personal Account of the Beginnings of
the Sudbury Valley School
(Check out some of the early ideas for the school from the 60s in the
appendices. The idea was that it would/could be much larger, all
ages, adult members, generally more a part of the wider community.
The reality is that having parents around complicates things, as well
as the issues discussed above in #1 and the work/life disconnect
discussed here on the list)
Erik Haugsjaa
A SVS dad
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:33 PM, Andrew Cady <andre...@gmail.com> wrote:
Caren Knox-Hundley
Founded by unschooling supporter Blake Boles, author of College
Without High School, ZTC is not in a set location, but offers
something for every autodidact. Currently, there's a blurb on the site
about "students are mainly 15-23, but learners of any age can join"; I
imagine that might change over time, or at least I hope it does! I
guess if plenty of older adults keep signing up, it will change, or
someone will start something similar, but more specifically for
everyone.
peace,
Caren