I.
We often hear the question asked, “What does the staff at Sudbury Valley School do?” This is not a foolish question to ask about a school which proudly declares that the employees hired by the School Meeting are not designated “teachers”, and that teaching is not a specific function for which they are employed. In fact, the document titled “Basic Staffing Needs of Sudbury Valley” adopted by the School Meeting (and reviewed annually)—a document that guides the hiring process—lists the following specific needs the staff is expected to fill, as a collective group, each member of which is supposed to be able to contribute something to at least some of those needs (I have inserted the italics):
Maintaining the Culture
The staff must grasp the school’s vision; the basis of its educational philosophy in history and human development; and its place in the evolving educational universe. They must be able to formulate ways to implement the school’s vision in practice, and be able to modify these formulations with changing circumstances.
Intersecting with potential enrollees and following enrollees from intake onwards
Every staff member must be interested in getting to know, and in understanding, students. The staff must include people who relate well to adults from all walks of life and all levels of education; and be able to explain the school in a manner appropriate to interviewees, and to answer their questions and work patiently to allay their concerns.
Maintaining the school’s financial integrity and stability
The staff must include people who understand the principles of good financial management, and the history of the financial structure of the school and its current status. They must be able to formulate short- and middle-range financial planning; to formulate appropriate responses to changing circumstances; to see to it that the accounting system of the school is functioning properly; and to serve as comptrollers.
Caring for the physical plant
The staff must include people able to ensure the maintenance of a physical plant that is safe, in good repair, clean, aesthetically pleasing, and serves the community’s varied needs.
Bringing the school into the public’s awareness and acceptance
The staff must include people who can publicly articulate the message of the school in several ways: for the purpose of supporting families of children enrolled in the school; for the purpose of recruitment, which includes developing brand name recognition; and for the purpose of encouraging wider public acceptance of what the school stands for and does. They should be comfortable working with various media, and contributing to the articulation of the school’s philosophy and practice. They must also be able to establish and maintain collegial relations with other Sudbury schools and startup groups.
Dealing with risk control
The staff must include people who can deal with the outside world in matters that range from legal issues, to insurances issues, to governmental issues, and who are sensitive to the balance between risk control and the personal freedom at the core of the school.1
The School Meeting then added to this list a section titled “The basic need underlying each of the School’s basic needs”, which it called “Management” [italics in the original]. Here is how that is described:
There is a difference between management and performing a task. A task is a specific piece of work. It can be defined, and has identifiable parts to it. Managing consists of four major components:
- a comprehensive understanding of the scope and context of the domain being managed;
- the ability to identify continuously over time the evolving set of tasks that have to be performed in order to maintain that domain’s smooth functioning;
- the initiative to take personal responsibility for keeping abreast of the above without the need for direction (although always with an open ear for advice and feedback);
- the availability at all times to attend to one’s management duties.
All of our activities, from before our founding up to the present, are transparent, recorded, and carefully collected by category. A person seeking to be manager of a domain must be capable of independent research into the background of that domain, and devote the time and reflection required by that research. The staff currently managing the various domains have always been willing to discuss any aspects of this research as it is being carried out.
For example: suppose someone says they want to assume a managerial role in the physical plant domain. A prerequisite to serving in that role is being completely conversant with the history of the physical plant, with the various initiatives taken over time to modify and improve the plant, and with the programs currently being planned for the future. That constitutes the broad context of the domain. In addition, they must take the steps to be introduced to, and become personally acquainted with, our current team of tradespeople, and understand the criteria for finding new vendors when necessary.
We need staff capable of being managers in all the domains we have identified as basic to the school’s continuing survival.
Since this document guides the School Meeting at all times in its process of hiring (and of the annual re-hiring) of staff, it is reasonable to conclude that the answer to the question posed in the opening sentence of this essay can be provided by the statement that what the staff at Sudbury Valley does is provide the full panoply of management skills needed to provide for the smooth functioning of the school in all its facets.
And indeed, at some level, this would be a fair and comprehensive explanation of what the staff does at SVS. But it would not really differentiate the basic needs of Sudbury Valley from those of any school, or indeed of any successful business enterprise (with appropriate substitutions—for example, substituting the word “client” or “customer” for “student”). And that observation alone tells you that in some way, the list misses the heart of the matter: is there any relationship between the essential features of Sudbury Valley and the role of the staff that serves it?
The answer to this question is hinted at in the list of “basic needs”, but in a way so subtle and incomplete that one would be hard pressed to understand the hint. It has taken half a century for me to feel that I understand the relationship in question, and that I can articulate it; and it is only now that I realize that it, and it alone, explains how difficult it has been to find people who are truly competent to serve the school in a way that can ensure its continued viability.
II.
The lead item in the list states that that every member of the staff must be capable of filling the following “basic need”: Maintaining the Culture of the School. The key components of any culture are the core values that define it, and give it its unique configuration. The school is quite explicit about those values, and has produced an extensive literature addressing them. They are the very same core values that inform this country’s uniqueness, only in the school’s case, they have been applied to a community in which the majority of members are children. Here, the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are taken to belong to everyone, regardless of age; and the principle that the primary goal of the body that governs the community—the School Meeting—is to protect those rights with the consent of all those governed, is adhered to rigorously.
What the School Meeting requires of each person it hires annually is not only acceptance of those core values, but proactive measures to maintain them and the culture that they define. That means that those same values must be core values of the individual members of the staff, and that the daily actions of staff members must exhibit those values palpably.
All well and good, but how exactly does this play out in the life of the school? Core values are not only concepts that are discussed and debated; they have to be lived and experienced in all that transpires if they are to be in fact the primary values of the culture. Indeed, this is exactly what the School Meeting, and the judicial system it has created and continuously monitors, demands of all its members. And it does so not only through statements—not only through the Lawbook, not only through the hundreds of decisions handed down by the Judicial Committee every years—but also through the countless number of personal interactions that take place organically all day every day throughout the school. To form the basis of the culture, they must be embedded in the minds and spirits of those who participate in the culture, so that those core values become concretized automatically, without prior analysis, in the myriad events that take place in the school.
And that is precisely what happens, as we have come to realize more clearly with every passing year. We write about it, we talk about it, our essays, books, blogs, photos, videos, School Meeting debates, Judicial Committee deliberations, daily random conversations, all bear witness to this ongoing concretization of our values.
All this bears directly on what turns out to be, in practice, the most important function of the staff of Sudbury Valley: they are, one and all, the only adults who are full participants in the life of the school and, as such, they must be adult role models of those values.2 More than that, they have to be keenly aware, as all the students are, that they are virtually the only adults encountered by the students who model those values at all times in their interactions with the students. If the staff were to deviate from their adherence to those values, their actions would give the lie to the entire enterprise that constitutes the school.
To recognize this as being the most important function of the staff is essential for the continuing viability of the school. It has often been summarized by saying things like, “staff members have to treat all students, regardless of age, with the same respect that they give adults in the world at large.” Somehow, that doesn’t quite register the full import of the core values; we often hear people say, “I respect so and so” when their behavior deviates greatly from treating them as full participants in the culture. I don’t know if there is a way to say it that actually conveys the full import of what this function is, but recently I engaged in a casual conversation that suddenly brought forth a comment that struck me as extremely apt in this connection. I was asking Dionne Ekendiz, who had just completed her first year as a staff member, whether she was happy to be at SVS. She smiled and replied, “very happy; it is wonderful to be working together with colleagues who are comfortable with children.” “Comfortable with children”—what an expressive comment! To me, that conveyed a world of meaning, far beyond phrases such as “respectful of children”. You cannot be comfortable with someone you don’t respect, but you can only be comfortable with someone who you feel has something deeply in common with you—in other words, with someone who you feel shares your core values. The staff is, indeed, a group that is comfortable with children—and with whom, as a result, the students are comfortable in return.
That is the most important function of staff at Sudbury Valley.
III.
It turns out that there is more, and that “more” has to do with an aspect of the core values of this country that the school shares, and that has, to my knowledge, rarely if ever been discussed explicitly. They can be unearthed by a close reading of the seminal portion of the Declaration of Independence that defined the new nation in the New World, and by an understanding of what that portion meant to the Founders who framed and endorsed it:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
While it is a clever and bold rhetorical device to claim something to be “self-evident” that no nation in history has ever acknowledged to be true, nevertheless we have to assume that the Founders believed their “truths” to be, actually, self-evident. Why?
The answer lies in the reference to “their Creator”: the Founders were all steeped in the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, even those few who were not followers of a formal religion. The holy scriptures of that tradition begin with the opening chapter of the book of Genesis, which describes how the world as we know it came into being. In particular, it describes how human beings came into being 3:
And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . .” And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.
For the Founders, all human beings are descendants from the one original pair created by “their Creator”—that is the sense in which all human beings were “created equal”. According to the Biblical account, no one tribe or nation was the original, or preferred, set of humans that populated the earth. And the Bible makes it clear, in the story of Noah and the Flood, that after the first cohort of humans disappointed God by being sinful, and were totally destroyed, once again all persons descended from one remaining family. The equality of the Founders was a blood equality—a universal brotherhood from the outset4.
It is worth noting that the Biblical story in the first chapter of Genesis does not differentiate between the first male and the first female. Both are created at the same time, both are created “in God’s image”; there is no hint of inequality here. I am quite sure that the patent social and legal inequality between men and women in the day of the Founders did not sit well with many of them, as we know the existence of slavery did not. But they were pragmatists working to establish a new culture, not inheritors of a culture well on its way to maturity and able to withstand tough scrutiny. That task of constant re-evaluation was taken up, and continues to be, by their successors, just as the culture of the school is under constant examination year after year, generation after generation.
Once we have a handle on the way the Founders understood “equality”, we have cleared the path towards a deeper understanding of the “unalienable rights” that the Founders felt were endowed to all humans by their Creator. The first of these listed is “life”. The book of Genesis relates where “life” came from as follows:
the Lord formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being 5.
“Life” is thus not just a property of living things; the “life” of a human being is a gift of breath from God, and gives human life a special place in the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. The first recorded murder in the Bible, that of Cain perpetrated against his brother Abel, elicits the following reaction from God:
“What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground! Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” 6
Even the earth is cursed for having accepted the lifeblood of Abel!
The unalienable right of liberty listed by the Founders is also a direct result of their religious background. The essence of the concept of liberty is the freedom to choose one’s path of action at any moment. Its existence is independent of any efforts by an outside force to eliminate it. In the simplest case, demanding obedience to a certain rule does not deprive the person on whom the demand is made of their liberty to choose to defy the rule. The Bible makes that clear, once again at the very beginning of the story of the creation of human beings. According to the Biblical tale, once God has made the first couple, He places them in a beautiful environment created to satisfy their every need and desire—the Garden of Eden. He gives them the freedom to do as they wish there—“liberty” in almost every respect—except that he makes one little rule that seems almost too easy to be mentioned:
“Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it, for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” 7
Note that he does not take away the freedom to eat of the tree; on the contrary, he makes it clear that it is up to Adam’s own choosing whether he will obey the rule or not, and the consequence of not obeying is clearly spelled out. Nothing could make the human unalienable right to liberty clearer.
(As it turns out, Adam—in an all-too-human reaction to any outside restriction on freedom of action—chooses to disobey the rule, and take the consequences. The story takes on an interesting twist. The consequence is that Adam, originally created without any restriction on the length of his life, and with the clear implication that he will live forever, will now eventually meet his death. At that point in the story, God becomes alarmed, because there is a tree of eternal life in the Garden of Eden, which was not forbidden to Adam because Adam already had an eternal life span, but which now could be the cause of a reversal of God’s sentence of death should Adam eat its fruit! God hastily decides to throw Adam out of the Garden of Eden before he catches on!)
So we see where the first two “unalienable rights” originated in the tradition of the Founders, but what of that strange third one: “the pursuit of happiness”? To begin with, what on earth did that mean to the Founders? We know it didn’t mean then, nor does it mean now, the unalienable right to party away your life! But what did that phrase signify to them?
There is no way to know definitively the answer to this question, but in a thoroughly researched paper by Carli N. Conklin, published in “The Washington University Jurisprudence Review”8, the author concludes that for the Founders, “happiness” was “best defined in the Greek sense of eudaimonia or human flourishing.” To have the right to pursue happiness was to have the right to live a life of human flourishing—a life of meaning, of deep satisfaction, and of action at one’s maximum level of ability. This concept is found in ancient Greek philosophy, but it follows naturally from the notion that every person is created in God’s image, and has the inherent ability to flourish—to thrive, to blossom, to reach their prime—and the God-given right to pursue the realization of that ability to their utmost capability.
It is in this sense also that the staff is expected to model the core value of “pursuit of happiness”. The School Meeting seeks to hire adults who they see striving to reach the maximum level of excellence they are capable of achieving, and endowing their lives with meaning. The students in school themselves exemplify this striving at every turn—it can be seen wherever one looks, if only one has eyes to see. They expect no less from the staff.
The staff as role models of the core values of the school—that is who they must be, that is who the School Meeting wants them to be. That is how they “maintain the culture” of Sudbury Valley School.
ENDNOTES
1. Note that only the first two items in this list are deemed to be requirements for each and every staff member.
2. I am using the title “staff” to include all adults present at the school on a regular basis, who have been granted full membership in the School Meeting by that body.
3. Genesis 1:26-27 (Tanakh, A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures, According to the Traditional Hebrew Text; The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1985), p.4.
4. There is a second version of the emergence of humans on the planet, related in Chapter 2 of Genesis. It is quite different in its details, but still has the entire human race descendant from one set of progenitors.
5. loc. cit., Genesis 2:7. The translation points out that the word in Hebrew translated as “man” is “adam”. This word throughout the Bible refers equally to any person, male or female, although grammatically in Hebrew it appears to have a male form.
6. loc. cit., Genesis 4:10-11.
7. loc. cit., Genesis 2:16-17.
8. Vol 7, No. 2, pp. 194ff (2015)
Copyright © Sudbury Valley School Press ®