What do you want for your children?
You want them to have a good life.
You want them to grow up
…to be independent
…to be able to learn what they need to know
…to love their work
…to have good friends and be good friends to others
…to know how to work with others
…to develop good judgment and learn from their mistakes
…to be fair and ethical in their dealings
…to be good citizens loyal to our country’s core values
Odds are that you try to model these aspirations in your family life. To have a good shot at achieving them for your children, you want the environment in which they grow up away from home—in which they are immersed day after day, week after week, year after year, for some 14 years—to model these same aspirations.
That is precisely what Sudbury Valley School does, all day, every day.
It doesn’t do it with fancy pedagogical tricks.
It doesn’t do it by preaching these values.
It does it by recognizing that all children by nature possess these aspirations, and honoring their right to fully use their inborn skills, talents, and creativity to achieve them.
Sudbury Valley grants each and every child the freedom to develop to the greatest extent the particular gifts that nature has bestowed on them. And it has a culture that recognizes the joint responsibility all members of the school community have to protect that freedom for each other.
The results speak for themselves. For over 50 years, thousands of students have gone into the world possessing that full panoply of characteristics, firmly internalized.
Take a close look at that list of aspirations you have for your children. Every item on it is actively negated by traditional schools.
Is it any wonder that for decades we have been hearing about the crises besetting those schools?
Is it any wonder that the level of anxiety, misery, failure, and desperation among children of all ages, and among their parents, has skyrocketed?