Writing by:
Daniel Greenberg
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Sudbury Valley featured at Carnegie Hall!
Those of us who were able to go to the event sponsored by John Taylor Gatto and the Odysseus Group, on November 13 were bursting-our-buttons proud, of both the school and our representative in the program at… Read more ›
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Some unrelated problems that are linked after all.
I don’t know why this came together for me just now, but it did. Everything simply fell into place on Tuesday night, March 10, 1992. I had completed an extraordinary novel about the Holocaust, David… Read more ›
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From the beginning, the goal of Sudbury Valley was to embed children in the culture of the society into which they would grow up to be adults—to treat them as full members of that society from the earliest age at which they could understand the… Read more ›
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What it Tells us About How Children Get “Educated”
What are the features that we all, as human beings, share, and that are key to understanding how we function?
In this essay I attempt to identify those features. Why do I care? Because when billions… Read more ›
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Since the beginning I have been wondering about the kinds of people the graduates of Sudbury Valley School would turn out to be. More to the point, I wondered what kinds of people I wanted them to be – a very personal judgment, to be sure, but… Read more ›
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First published in vol. 44 of the Sudbury Valley School Journal, Spring, 2015.
Pretty much all of us are familiar with the phrase in our Declaration of Independence that asserts that every person possesses three “inalienable rights”—“life, liberty,… Read more ›
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There is a great deal of talk these days about maintaining, or raising, standards in our schools. The prevailing notion seems to be that children tend to be slackers, and that the only way to ensure that our culture survives without degradation of… Read more ›
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In general, play has gotten a bad press in Western society. It is considered to be the activity that is least useful economically, socially, even ethically. It is associated with laziness and shiftlessness. It is the antonym of “work”. At best, it… Read more ›
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This is an edited transcript of a talk given at Koonan University, near Kobe, Japan, to the psychology class of Professor Hage Daishin on April 29, 1999. It was delivered in English and translated consecutively into Japanese.
I would like to begin… Read more ›
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Note: “In Appreciation of Liberty” was posted on the SVS blog (www.sudval.org) on June 9, 2014. It elicited several fascinating comments which, we felt, enriched the conversation, so we thought you might enjoy reading it as a “package”.
With all the… Read more ›
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When visitors arrive at the Sudbury Valley School for the first time, they usually get the impression that they’ve come during “recess.” Everywhere children are playing and happily enjoying themselves in various ways. If they stay a while, they… Read more ›
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Some issues that have been crying for attention
This essay started with some thoughts I had about the concept of decentralization in the modern world. I was focussing on this because I had a feeling that decentralization is a key idea closely… Read more ›
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Not long ago, an article appeared in a major urban newspaper, which labeled Sudbury Valley as a “School with No Teachers.” Soon after, the newspaper that serves the Metro-West Boston region (in which Sudbury Valley is located) featured us in a big… Read more ›
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The Hidden Power of Conversation
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We have always stressed the central role conversation plays in the way people learn – and, in particular, in the way students learn at Sudbury Valley. The students recognize this clearly, and often talk about the… Read more ›
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During the school year 1997-98, as part of Sudbury Valley School’s Thirtieth Anniversary celebrations, a series of six talks was presented on the theme: What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Thirty Years Ago. This is an edited version of the second… Read more ›