In May of 1988, Norman Bauer, a Professor at SUNY Geneseo, asked for and got permission to come to Sudbury Valley School, to interview Daniel Greenberg, and basically get a look at the school. We were in our twentieth year at that point, and had finally reached a moment when we felt sort of settled in our momentum. We knew life here would only get more exciting by the year, and we knew we were successful in turning out a rich variety of empowered human beings. Norm turned out to be a very insightful and fascinated interviewer. The interview was filmed, but for some reason did not reproduce well at all, so we didn’t use it much as a film. Separating this recording, and the article, has finally made it very usable. During the interview there was a tremendous thunderstorm. The field in front of the school (the Capture the Flag field) became slick and muddy and kids of every age slid on the mud as counterpoint to the interview. The atmosphere was electric and excited.
Mimsy Sadofsky, Editor
Norm: My name is Norm Bauer, and this afternoon we’re sitting on the second floor porch of the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. With me is Dr. Daniel Greenberg. Dan, it’s very nice to be with you today. Tom, my assistant for this interview, came with me from SUNY Geneseo, and we were wondering about your title. So it would be Dan?
Dan: It would be staff member.
Norm: Would it be all right if I referred to you as Dan here?
Dan: That’s the only way.
Norm: Let’s start with a brief overview of how this school came into being.
Dan: We started to plan the school back in 1965, 1966. A small group of people were working on it, mostly people that my wife and I knew, out of the New York area. The initial ideas of the school emerged from our own personal deep dissatisfaction with the educational system that we were involved in. Both of us were academicians. I was teaching in Columbia at the time, and several people whom we knew were also disaffected. Those were the mid sixties. The interesting part of it is that as we moved up to this area, which is an accidental event, we came into contact with a large group of people that we had never known before. And as we spread the idea of the school among the population, we attracted dozens and ultimately hundreds of people to the concept, none of whom we had known.
Norm: Okay.
Dan: And that’s important to understand the school, because so many schools were formed in the mid and late sixties, the so-called free school movement, alternative school movement.
We never felt part of that. And we were never really accepted into the so-called movement at the time, because it turns out that virtually all of those schools, as I’m sure you’ll remember, were founded by groups of people who had fairly strong political motivations. Which is fine. I have nothing against people with political views starting their own schools. But we weren’t like that at all. The people in this school were attracted to the educational philosophy. And from the beginning, they were from a very wide variety of economic class; educational background; political convictions. We had everything from conservative Republicans to radical left-wingers.
Norm: Let’s just stop for a minute now. You said they were attracted to your philosophy of education. How did they find out? But let’s backtrack and ask the prior question. What was the aim that you had in mind in terms of schooling?
Dan: Well, these things developed with time, but at the very root of the concept of this school were two ideas which are related and which have stayed constant from the beginning. The first was an educational one and stemmed, I guess, from my experience in teaching and my wife’s experience in being a student. That is the simple idea that children, or adults, are not going to learn something that they don’t really want to learn, and that they’re not really motivated to learn on their own. I guess everybody really learns that the hard way. We all try to get around it one way or another, in our classrooms. Whenever you are in a classroom situation, you’re always going to have in front of you a large percentage of people who basically don’t want to be there.
Norm: That’s correct.
Dan: This is true no matter how long you’ve taught or how good a teacher you are, and I tried every trick of pedagogy, I read up on everything you could ask for to make my classes interesting, to motivate the students, to do all these things that supposedly good pedagogical practice tells you to do. I was considered to be a great entertainer, if I can use that term. And that’s where I was. But I was not a great teacher because the people in front of me weren’t eager to learn what I wanted to teach. I guess somewhere along the line, I don’t know why I made this break or if my wife made it first, but somewhere along the line, I just became convinced that the whole idea is useless from scratch, the idea of trying to inculcate something that people are not really eager to receive.
Norm: In other words, interest is the basis for learning.
Dan: It has to start with a student’s really burning interest.
Norm: Yes.
Dan: Not just mild curiosity, not just I wonder what’s there, but really burning interest. And our experience, my own life experience has been that, I’m sure yours has also been. When you talk to laymen out there and they back off for a minute, they’ll all agree that the things they really love to do, their hobbies usually, you can’t stop them from. If they’re into fishing, their wives can’t keep them home.
Norm: Marvelous. That’s right.
Dan: You know, if they’re into carpentry, they’ll do it day and night. If they’re lucky to be into what they’re doing for a living, then they’re away from home all the time. You know, they’re totally engrossed in it. And you, the point is, you can’t really stop them. My wife has often said about this school, if we do nothing else in this school, but not present a barrier towards pursuing your own interests, we’ve already done what you’ve paid your tuition for. The rest is gravy.
So that’s the central educational idea which is to let children of all ages be completely free to do what they’re interested in doing without any preconceived curriculum or set of ideas or set of notions. I have to take a step backwards on that idea. Do you mind us going on about this? From the very beginning, the question obviously comes up. Well, if these kids can be allowed to do whatever they want, how are they going to be viable adults in the community?
Norm: Right.
Dan: That’s a valid question. I think that if we hadn’t been in the ‘60s, it may have been difficult to answer that question. Cause it’s idyllic perhaps to let children do what they want, but it may not be practical. And there we were helped by the fact that we’re in the post-industrial age. And enough people understood that to be willing to send their children here. In the post-industrial age, of course, what people are looking for in the business world, for example, is people with initiative. People who are creative, people who do things on their own, people who don’t have to be prompted. The opposite of what people looked for in the industrial age. In the industrial age the worst thing you could have in a major industrial company is a person with creative initiative.
Norm: Your point is marvelous.
Dan: It would really be a disservice to people fifty years ago to produce people like this because they’d all be oddballs and mavericks and they could never get a job, because they’d be thrown out as being troublemakers. But today, what the schools produce are the misfits to the community because the schools produce people who literally don’t know what to do unless they’re told. And what companies are looking for today are people who can go out there and be creative, be entrepreneurial. Even large corporations are looking for that. And it’s very interesting to see that in students who come into this school, for example, at an older age—at 12, 13, 14—the length of time that it takes them simply to get used to the idea that they have to figure out what to do. That there isn’t somebody around to tell them what to do all day. Now, we never have that problem with a four year old. They’re busy.
Norm: But when a kid comes here at say 13 or 14, it takes a year or two to even get used to the school?
Dan: It’s tragic.
Norm: Yeah.
Dan: You can only feel that you’re witnessing a tragedy because here’s a wonderful human being and they’re at a total loss. The second major idea was that the country is a democracy. We’re talking all the time about training our youth for citizenship in a democratic society. And yet the schools are the one major autocratic hierarchical institution that’s left in the community, sanctioned by the community as autocratic. And it is such a complete anomaly that it simply didn’t make sense to us. The only thing that possibly made sense to us in order to train children to become viable members of the democratic community is to immerse them in a democratic community from the very earliest age. Plato knew this. He wrote about it, Aristotle wrote about it. Democracy means the willingness of citizenship to take responsibility for themselves, to feel responsibility for the community. There’s no way to do that if for the first and formative twelve years of your life, you’re in an environment where you never take that responsibility, you never have to worry about your decisions or their consequences.
Norm: So in other words, one of the aims would be to build responsible citizenship in these kids.
Dan: And the way to do it is to be democratic. Not to play democracy, not to have a student government, not to give classes in democratic responsibility, but to say, look, this is your school, this is everybody’s school. Your vote counts as much as mine, now make it work.
When we were writing the bylaws to incorporate the school, the attorney, one of our original trustees, was a state senator from this area and a graduate of Yale Law School, and he was helping us draft them. And at one point he just got up and started pacing the floor saying, “Four year olds have the vote? Jesus. How can that be? You can’t be serious.” I said to him, “Bill, that’s what we want. It doesn’t make any less sense than having un-propertied males have the vote made to our founding fathers.”
The fact is that all of the people who predicted failure for this school because of our democratic principles were wrong. The school has run beautifully. We’re 20 years old. You can see for yourself that the campus is beautifully maintained. The building is beautifully maintained.
Norm: This adds a dimension we couldn’t put in even if we tried. Also, Dan, we came here and you were voting on staff.
Dan: That’s right.
Norm: I asked the students down there, about who voted, and they said everyone in the school voted. However, there was a unique aspect to this. I asked them whether everybody had to vote and they said, no, everyone did not have to vote. Would you elaborate on that for a minute? That particular aspect.
Dan: It’s exactly the same as the world at large. Nobody makes us vote in this country. We’re always complaining about the low participation in national elections. As the children learn that their vote really counts, they tend to vote.
Norm: Yeah.
Dan: But that’s the only way they’ll find out. Anything you make them do will become distasteful. If you made them vote, then democracy would be distasteful.
Norm: Now we have these two aims in your philosophy. The question is how are we going to get to them.
Dan: Put them together in the simplest and purest possible form of the school, namely a school which is purely democratic, run like a New England town meeting where every single person in the school community has a vote.
Norm: We are getting soaked on this porch even though it is covered! Alright, we’ll stop for a moment. Would you believe that we were rained on so hard, we really had to stop this tape and go now inside. We’ve seen a wonderful gathering of kids playing in the rain. And I wonder, Dan, if we could start with that and talk a little bit about how you and your fellow faculty members and the people associated with the school see children and youth. What is human nature as you see it?
Dan: Well, that’s a rather a long story to answer but why don’t I pick the most important features as it applies to the school. I think the key feature that we focus on is human curiosity, which is actually, as I know you know from current studies in psychology, mammalian curiosity; and for all we know, it even goes to lower animals. That’s the absolutely fundamental instinctual drive that people have to explore and learn and find out about their environment.
Norm: May I just add that I’m reviewing it because honestly, as I got close to this school, curiosity was building up, and in fact curiosity motivated the letter to you and the desire to interview you.
Dan: I’m sure that’s true. That’s clearly the motivating factor. Of course, there are classic studies now where even lower mammals will almost starve themselves to death exploring something rather than eating. And of course, Aristotle opens his Metaphysics by saying human beings are naturally curious. And that’s where everything starts for him.
Norm: They want to know.
Dan: That’s right. That’s their desire. That’s where we start. And we have found that to be almost too self-evident to talk about, especially in little children where it hasn’t been doused yet. Everybody knows it about little children. In fact, they know it so much about two year olds that they refer to the age of two and thereabouts is the terrible twos, the age at which children become mobile enough and expressive enough to actually go out there and do something about it. That is our starting point, that it’s built into the mind, built into human nature to want to explore, to want to understand, to want to create models and world views that will make something sensible out of the environment.
If you let them do that, there are no limits that they can’t reach. Now, you understand, this is not an ethical judgment. We don’t have a naive viewpoint that all children are angelic, that they’re all good.
Norm: I understand that. Yes.
Dan: On the contrary. We accept evil as part of the natural order of things; we accept unhappiness. That’s key. One of the things we are not focused on in this school is happiness, as a goal. I happen to think that we’re the happiest school I’ve ever known, and that our children are the happiest, but not always, because real happiness comes out of meeting a challenge and overcoming it and achieving something. But as you’re getting there, you’re going to go through an awful lot of tremendous failures and disappointments and lows and sadness.
The argument that I’ve always had with the progressive movement was that their central goal is happiness. They will do cartwheels to keep children from disappointment, from failure, from anything negative. I think that prepares them very poorly for life. We tell our kids, openly, we’ll support you when you’re down. We’ll be nice to you, but there’s nothing we can do about it. You have to fight that battle. That’s what life is about. Life is about being bored and climbing out of it, being down and climbing out of it, failing and coming back and trying again.
Norm: So what you’re talking about is opening spaces, opening places for possibilities to emerge and develop.
Dan: And not worrying about the pleasure or the happiness that comes out it. A friend of mine once said that in a progressive school kids are supposed to like what they do and in your school they’re supposed to do what they like.
Norm: It’s an interesting thing.
Dan: Right to the point.
Norm: How do you organize the kids? Do you organize them by grade levels, by age levels? Do you organize them in any particular ways?
Dan: The school is completely ungraded. It’s very much like a community or a village. The kids come, the school is open from 8:30 to 5:00. It’s a day school. The kids can come anytime. They have no schedule. They don’t have to report anywhere. They check in on a check-in list because we have to know who’s here.
Then they go about their business as they see fit. Some go to the woods, some go to various different rooms to engage in play, different activities. Of course, from my vantage point, the most important activity any child can undertake in this school is play. I’ll take an hour of play against a week of academic study any day because it’s through play that they really learn model-building. They learn how to make constructs in their minds that they’ll later apply to real life.
Norm: You talk about model-building and constructs. Would you elaborate on what you mean by that? What are you expecting a child to do when he is model-building?
Dan: What I’m expecting a child to do is to create his or her own mechanisms to make sense out of reality. That is what I call building a model. It’s making some kind of a comprehensive order out of reality. It may not be the same order that you or I have, but it has to have a structure that is comprehensible to the child.
One of the things that the modern world has found out is that there’s a much wider range of viable world models than people used to think a hundred years ago. And that, again, is typical of the difference between the industrial age and the post-industrial age. Now, interestingly enough, in the pre-industrial age, that’s the way people felt as well. And we know that in early communities, people had a much wider tolerance of visionaries, of mystics, of people whom in the industrial era, we’d call crazy and we’d put away even or we’d ignore. Now, today, we’re going back to that. Today, we have a much broader tolerance. What I want kids to be able to do is to be confident in their ability to make structures in their own mind. Now, of course, as they do that, they’re going to be measuring this: people say, well, a kid can’t go off and just make his own world up. But of course kids don’t. That’s silly. They don’t do that. They’re constantly measuring their own models against yours and mine and other people.
Norm: That’s correct.
Dan: That’s part of the process. They want to: they don’t want to be isolated. They want to communicate, they want to be part of reality. But by respecting their own constructs and not tearing them down, we give them the confidence to build real alternatives. We tell them, you have to do the testing against other models, not us. That’s the way creativity and real genius come about. A real genius is a person who is confident enough to create new models, but not so detached that he won’t measure them against reality and other models.
Norm: And against the way others see things.
Dan: Right.
Norm: I see. Yes. How do you go about though, assuring yourself or assuring the kids if they are engaged in learning, say mathematical concepts?
Dan: I don’t. I don’t worry about it one bit. I don’t think it makes a bit of difference. I think that 99% of what people learn in school, they never use again. And the other 1% I would doubt about myself. I’m really convinced about that. I’m not saying this to be facetious.
Norm: Let me just interject here. Tom who came with me here, and I, have been talking about this on the way up, and we were talking about the thousands of things that we were made to learn that we never used.
Dan: Well, it’s even worse than that. In the early days when I would talk about the school, and of course I’ve been talking about it for 20 or 21 years by now, I used to ask my audiences, what if you had the entire map of knowledge, the entire map of human knowledge, and you marked down on that map of knowledge, what—I’m saying this to the audience,—what it is that you never look at?
I’ll wager with you that it corresponds to what you did in school. There are very few things that they choose to teach out of the sea of knowledge. They pick out some trivialities that they consider important, but most people never look at them again. Most people never read. Most people would run away from Shakespeare, would avoid it like plague. Most people never look at a math book. Most people think science is horrible. You know what I’m talking about?
Norm: I know.
Dan: Most people find history boring. It’s the most interesting thing in the world. I cannot relate at all to curricula or to anything that is picked out by the present educational system as being important. Even in history, which I teach a great deal of. Why are the few subjects that are picked out in the schools more important than others? We never learned far eastern history, we never learned the history of India in our schools, we never learned the history of the Balkans. Why? Are those people less important or less interesting than the people we learned?
Norm: That’s an epistemic question of the first rank. What you’re saying is that there’s a political act in choosing what things are to be taught.
Dan: Of course. And that political act narrows the scope that would normally be available to these children on their own. It doesn’t broaden it, it narrows it.
I hear a lot of people say, if you don’t make children learn certain things, they’ll never be exposed to them. And it’s of course just the opposite. What you make them learn, you drive them away from. If you leave them alone, they will seek to expose themselves to more. These kids are exposed to a hundred times more than I was at their age.
Norm: Now you do have a faculty, you’re a member of the faculty. You call yourself staff?
Dan: We call ourselves staff. And that’s very deliberate because we don’t want to project the image of being teachers in the traditional sense of the term. We are here to serve the School Meeting and the needs of the School Meeting. And in that capacity, we respond to the request of children, not only for instruction, but for conversation, for companionship, and for keeping the school together. I pick up trash, I do the garbage along with everybody else. I clean along with everybody else.
That’s important to us. There’s no ranking of administrative staff, clerical staff, teaching staff. It’s a very important part of modeling. That is directly related to the fact that we don’t have anything like tracking in this school as well. We have kids who turn out to be carpenters, doctors, Ph.D.s in mathematics, rock musicians, chefs. They’re all sitting together many years after they’ve graduated. They’re still all friends. Now, that did not happen to me. I went to the Bronx High School of Science, and the only people that Bronx High School of Science graduates wanted to consort with is other Bronx High School of Science graduates. We never thought of mixing with vocational school graduates. They were beneath us.
In fact, physicists hardly mixed with biologists. It’s a miracle I married my wife, she’s a biologist. That’s not a joke. And that kind of thing wouldn’t occur to the children in this school. People are people in every interest, as long as it’s pursued for its excellence and for its own value, is just as legitimate in their eyes as any other.
Norm: Yes. And one interest presumably can lead to another one as you’re working through it.
Dan: Exactly.
Norm: You mentioned something about a meeting. Would you elaborate on this meeting that you said the staff members are a part of?
Dan: It’s called the School Meeting, and in that sense it’s taken its name from A.S. Neill, who founded Summerhill School, in England, in 1921. The School Meeting basically runs the entire school. This is one of the sore points, I would say for us, because so many schools flirt with democracy and have organized student participation in part of the decision making process. As far as I’m concerned, democracy is like pregnancy: you can’t be a little bit. If people in a democratic society know that there are certain crucial areas of power that are reserved to an authoritarian elite, they know that when the chips are down, it’s not a democratic society. Now, one of the beauties of this country, as far as I’m concerned, is that there are no such reserved authoritarian niches. I mean, our democracy is far from perfect, but the fact is that the voters can throw out. The school is democratic. All the decisions are made by the School Meeting. How to spend money, who to hire, who to fire, how to run this, what rules apply in the school, how the rules are to be enforced.
Norm: How often does this meeting take place?
Dan: It meets once a week.
Norm: Where does the agenda for the meeting come from?
Dan: It gets published. Anybody can put any item on the agenda. They put it in the secretary’s folder, and the secretary publishes every item that’s put forward. It’s printed before the meeting. It’s posted. You’ve may have seen it posted on the bulletin board. Every single week, a full printed agenda is posted. All important decisions undergo two readings as they’re called, at two successive meetings. So people have a chance to mull them over. This school has run that way from the beginning. And the interesting thing is that our increase in expenditures, for example, is way below that of public or private schools in the country at large. Over a period of 20 years, we have hardly had an increase in our budget in real dollars. And of course, you know, in regular schools, the real dollar increase in budgets has been some like three or fourfold.
Norm: Yes.
Dan: The reason for that is in order for you to get an expenditure through the School Meeting, you’ve got to justify the need. People don’t just go out here and buy a microscope because they think it would be nice to have a microscope in the school. People say we want a microscope. And the question asked in the School Meeting is who needs it? Who wants it? Why?
Norm: Yes. The question is justifying.
Dan: That’s right. And if they can’t, it’s not voted in. Because that’s a long tradition here, people don’t even bother to ask anymore if they can’t justify it.
Norm: Yeah.
Dan: And that’s why our budgets don’t go up. I used to teach in a physics department at Columbia University where I could buy anything I wanted, whether people needed it or not. I had beautiful equipment. I might as well have flushed it down the toilet. It was useless. Here, things get used. If they don’t get used, they’re not here.
Norm: I see. As a practice of thinking and doing things normatively, that’s a really important lifetime practice.
Dan: They get trained from age four.
Norm: A staff member that I talked with was telling me about corporations. Would you elaborate on that?
Dan: We have a phenomenon here called school corporations. It’s our substitute for departments. And what happens is when a group of people get interested in a certain area and feel that they need more continuity, more consistency in supporting their work in that area, they get chartered by the School Meeting as a school corporation. For example, you have a school corporation for photography, a corporation for music, a Sports Corp., a Woodworking Corporation. Every interest area where there’s a group of people who sustain an interest form a corporation. The corporation is an entity to which the School Meeting delegates the responsibility for managing that interest. And so they’ll get money and perhaps they’ll get a room. But the nice thing about corporations is that unlike departments, they die. The problem with the department is it never dies.
Norm: Mm-hmm.
Dan: You have a department and it goes on. It has people, it has rooms, it has material long after the interest has died. Here, when the interest group dies, the corporation gets unchartered. So we had a leather working corporation for four or five years. Tremendous activity when leatherwork was the fad. Then the fad died, and we just didn’t have any more students interested in it. So all the leather equipment was put in the attic very neatly. The Leatherwork Corporation disappeared. That room became the room of the Woodworking Corporation. That would never happen in another environment. And that keeps the place up on its toes, viable. We’re constantly asking, are these people still active? And if not, goodbye.
Norm: In a traditional school, they talk about these kids having to learn some basic skills. They would talk about reading, writing, arithmetic, perhaps a little computer science or computer capability. But generally those would be the basics in a traditional idiom. In your school, what would be some of the basic things that you would want your kids to be acquiring?
Dan: The one and only thing that we care that they acquire is the ability to be responsible for themselves. That is to say, to make decisions that affect their lives, to understand how they affect their lives, and to be able to carry them through in an effective way. That’s why we accentuate their freedom to make decisions, but their need to live by them as well. We don’t bail them out either. (I’m going to get back to the basics. I haven’t forgotten what you’re asking.) So if a child has made a certain decision to engage in some activity and then comes back a year later and says, you know, I really wasted my time in that and that was wrong. Our answer is, that’s right. If that’s what you concluded, you did waste your time. Now you learned from that next time your decision probably won’t waste your time as much. If they walk out of here at the age of 17, 18, 19, whatever it is, having learned the art of weighing alternatives, making reasonable decisions based on projected outcomes, and then living with the outcomes and self-correcting for the outcomes, they’ve got something that you couldn’t buy for all the riches in the world. Now here’s the point. The so-called basic skills of the traditional schools are trivial. A person says, I want to be a doctor, of course he’s going to learn how to read. That’s absurd. It’s trivial for him. You know how long it takes them to learn how to read? A month.
He doesn’t sit for six years going through stupid little reading books. In fact, reading books hardly ever get used. He reads, he wants to read magazines, he wants to read the latest... Same with mathematics. We have kids who never learn mathematics. My own son, who is now a very successful photographer in Chicago and runs a successful business of his own, and is 26, does things that I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing until I was in my mid thirties. But he doesn’t know much math. He doesn’t need it. I don’t know if Mozart needed math either, and I don’t care. Do you see what I’m saying?
Norm: I understand exactly.
Dan: It’s not important that everybody have the same set of basics. And when you come down to the nitty gritty, like reading or writing, they figure that out on their own.
Norm: Yeah.
Dan: You don’t have to tell them. If you tell them they’ll avoid it. You don’t tell them they’ll go after it.
Norm: But what did you say? There’s one thing that your school, that the kids have in common with you and me and with all people. And that is, they are all engaged in problem solving, weighing alternatives.
Dan: Absolutely; that’s the key. They’re setting their own problems. That’s another thing. I mean, we can go on for hours on this. The so-called pseudo art of problem solving where people sit kids down in classrooms and give them fake problems means nothing to them. It’s just a meaningless game, and the results don’t ever amount to anything. Here, their problem solving is always in real life. And if you walk around the school, you’ll see what I mean. All their games are problem solving. All of their human interactions are problem solving. An 11 year old kid trying to figure out how to relate to other friends, how to get this one to be a friend rather than enemy, how to play this game, how to get in—that is solving real life problems. It may not sound very important to you, but they’re important to them. And because they’re important to them, they’re going to employ all of their creative skills to solving that problem at that time. They’ll later transfer this ability to focus, concentrate, weigh alternatives, to any other problem in the world.
Norm: Dan, have you read Dewey’s, “How We Think”? He wrote it in 1906 or so? It is coming right out of what you’re saying.
Dan: Yes.
Norm: And of course, he was resisted. You referred earlier to the fact that the progressives wanted happiness. I want to stress this fact that Dewey refused to take on the progressive association’s presidency because he saw a great difference between what they were advocating and what he was saying in his theory about how people learned.
Dan: Yes. I know that.
Norm: That’s a very interesting thing about the basics. How do the kids relate to you and to the staff members? I hear them refer to you using your first name.
Dan: Always. Everybody here is on a first name basis. But much more important than the first name basis, which could be pseudo affected, is the fact that staff members here don’t have any latent authority or any hidden authority that they can exercise institutionally over the children. They relate to us on a really human level.
Norm: Yes.
Dan: The fact is that I can’t look at a kid, no matter how angry I am at what he’s doing, and say you have to stay after school today. I can’t say you have to sit in this room and be quiet. I can’t do it. I can’t send them to the principal. I can’t send them to somebody’s office. The only thing I can do if I’m angry at somebody who’s broken the rules, is what every other person in the school does. I can take a piece of paper called a complaint form, file a complaint with the Judicial Committee, which is an arm of the School Meeting, and let the Judicial Committee, which consists almost entirely of students, review the case. If the student has indeed broken a rule, they will charge the student and they will sentence the student. I don’t even come into this.
Because I have no authority, punitive or evaluative, I don’t write report cards. We have no reports, no grades, no written reports, no oral reports. There’s no hidden power. I don’t write something to the parents every year that says, Johnny’s doing very well this year, he’s really coming along. I don’t tell them on the phone either. The only person who tells the parents what Johnny’s doing is Johnny. And if the parents do call me up as they sometimes will and say, oh, come on, tell me how’s Johnny doing? I say, ask Johnny. I have no complaints. Ask Johnny if you want to know how he’s doing.
Norm: So the only evaluation is what the parent gets through the child.
Dan: Because I don’t have any of those powers, I become human. I’m not 12, but I’m somebody a 12 year old can talk to. Age means nothing. That’s the way it is with these kids from four and up. You can have a conversation with a four-year old in this school—literally, I’m not exaggerating—which is a mature, ordinary human conversation. You may not be that interested in the subject he’s talking about at this moment, but he may not be that interested in the subject you’re talking about either. That’s luck.
Norm: Yeah. I did have a conversation with a four year old or a five-year old at the doorway. And he asked me what we were doing, what we were in here for, what we were going to do.
Dan: You were a person. That’s all that counts here. The only way people can relate to each other is as people. There’s no hidden power that one has over the other. The minute they understand that, all the barriers are broken away.
Norm: Let me ask you another question related directly to this, although it won’t appear to be at first. How do you view subject matter? Do you view it as compartmentalized subject matter? How do you see subject matter?
Dan: I find it difficult to even answer that question because we don’t have periods, we don’t have time schedules.
Norm: I asked the question to get people who are reading this to conceptualize because they see things compartmentalized. So what you’ve done is broken down the walls between subject matters too, so that things are fused together and they’re used in terms of how they achieve ends.
Dan: That happens all the time. Now, it may be that children on occasion will ask for private tutoring or tutoring in small groups in a compartmentalized subject. That will sometimes happen. And we will accede to that because that’s what they want to do at a particular moment. In the early years, I got into a lot of trouble because I said I would never do anything like that unless the kids came to me on bloody knees.
That was a bit harsh, but you get the gist of what I’m talking about. If they’re really motivated, on narrow subject matter they go very quickly. I have to tell you a story because this is a key story. It’s typical of everything that happens in this school. One of the earliest experiences I had in this school was a group of about a dozen children, age eight to twelve, who came and said they want to learn elementary math. They had never learned addition, subtraction or anything else. And I gave them the whole story that I wasn’t interested unless they were ready to work. They came and they did it with me. I gave them homework. I said, if you’re not willing, just get out of my class. I taught them out of a book, and I’m an old hand at teaching math. That’s my field. I gave them a book that was written in 1899, which was drill, drill, drill. They ate it up and in twenty contact hours, they went through the first six years of math and knew it. Back then,
I still had friends in the regular educational community. All my friends then said, Hey, that’s no surprise. These were specialists in math. We’ve known it all along. It’s just that they don’t want to learn it so we have to force it down their throats over six years. But we know that inherently this stuff doesn’t take more than about twenty hours to learn. So when you do deal with a traditional subject that for some odd reason the kids want to learn, if they want to do it, it goes easily.
They can think straight, they’ll listen to you. Their minds aren’t closed. This is real knowledge. That they all pick up like sponges.
So you break down the walls of the subject matter. You break down the walls of the hierarchy and people are really seen as being a part of an indeterminate rather than a determinant world. A world where they’re working out uncertainties.
Norm: Exactly. And they learn to live with that kind of uncertainty, comfortably, which is what prepares them for the 21st century. That’s what people are not used to doing. Now how do you go about getting faculty members to handle working with you in an environment like this?
Dan: That’s another thing. To me, the school’s a succession of miracles. And that’s another miracle. Because when we first were founded, one of the wisest people associated with us was the moderator of the town meeting of Framingham, who was a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, and a wonderful, wise man. He looked at me and he said, I understand your theories. I don’t know whether I agree with them or don’t, but I will tell you one thing, the real test of this school is going to be whether you can attract new staff. He said, you have twelve people now that have founded the school and they’re wonderful people. I knew he was right back then. I worried about it in the beginning. Over the years, people have come from all over to join the staff. It’s the hardest school to be a staff member that you can possibly imagine because you cannot have an ego. So many people are trained in schools of education who are genuinely interested in teaching, view themselves as people who have so much to give. They’re sincere and they’re genuine and they really want to. But if you come to this school with that and there’s nobody out there who wants what you have to give, you’re shattered.
You have to learn to put your desire to give completely aside and to respond to what someone else wants to take. That’s the first big step. But you see that means a complete eradication of your own agenda for the children.
That’s why it’s so hard to be a staff member. We’ve been lucky though. We’ve gotten wonderful people. Half of our present staff members have been here for twenty years. Half of them are new. This year in this staff election, for the first time ever, we have three new people who have come, who have visited and who have tried to get themselves elected.
The staff here is hired on a yearly basis by the School Meeting in a secret ballot, conducted in the spring for the next year. Every single student and every staff member can vote because they’re all members of the School Meeting. Of course, the students outvote the staff that way. So it’s a political process. And there’s no tenure. I’ve been here twenty years and I have to get reelected every single year. I think the children are basically very understanding. I may have a bad year, and I don’t think they’re going to boot me on one bad year, but if I don’t keep on my toes? We constructed it that way on purpose, because I lived through departments and universities where tenured teachers were a disaster.
Norm: Would you say that over the course of time the kids are relatively fair in their assessment of faculty? Would you say that they have an objective view?
Dan: You know what Winston Churchill said—it’s our favorite saying, of course: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Norm: Yes.
Dan: And that applies here. I think that by and large, the kids have made good decisions. Of course, I don’t always agree with what goes on. And I often lose votes on the School Meeting floor. I often propose things that get knocked down. When I lose the vote, I’m not enthralled. But the fact is that the school is a strong, vigorous institution after twenty years of enormous struggle. And that could not have happened if we didn’t have the kind of real grassroots loyalty that only a democracy could produce.
Norm: When the kids graduate from here, many of them will go on to higher education. Many of them will go on other directions. But in any event, they will have to have some standard which they can carry with them to another institution. You don’t have credits, you don’t have courses per se. You don’t have formal units of work. I understand that you have a thesis process for people who want to graduate.
Dan: People who want a diploma have to defend the thesis that they’re ready to take responsibility for themselves in the world at large. They have to find a way to convince the hearers, which consists of the entire school community, that they have matured enough to be responsible adults.
Norm: Would there be an age that they’d have to reach in order to do this?
Dan: No. We’ve had people do it at 16, and we’ve had people do it at twenty. It’s a brutal self-selected process because the kids know that they’re not going to go up there and make a claim that they can be responsible adults unless they can convince the audience.
Norm: Can anyone in the audience pose a question?
Dan: Anybody. And the questions are tough. Now, let me answer another question related to your standards, which is a little puzzling. So you have a diploma procedure like that and if they get go through it successfully, they get a high school diploma. That still doesn’t get them into college, for example. Our batting average on students getting into college is essentially a thousand in the sense that any student who’s wanted to go has gotten into college and usually the college of their first choice. This without transcripts, without records, without any kind of school recommendations. Every one of our kids has to sell him or herself to the college admissions officer or committee. And they do a heck of a job with it, because they walk in there and first of all, they know why they want to go to college. They don’t go because it’s the next thing to do. They go because they have a goal in life.
Norm: Now Dan, are you telling me that you don’t write a recommendation for anybody?
Dan: I may write a personal recommendation. It’ll be on my own stationary, not on school stationary. And I may say I’ve known this person personally and so forth, but that doesn’t hold much water if you know anything about admissions. The school itself, as a matter of fact, has a formal letter that it’s been sending for twenty years saying, we don’t write recommendations, you have to talk to the student and let the student explain to you why they think they’re qualified to attend your college.
Norm: Again, justification.
Dan: That’s right. And the students have to do it. And believe me, we’ve gotten into the whole spectrum. Everything.
Norm: How do you go about getting students who will be comfortable in this place?
Dan: I wish I had an answer that I could be comfortable with. The fact is that we make a tremendous effort to publicize our existence throughout the whole greater Boston area. We attract students from 40 and 50 miles away who commute an hour, an hour and a half each way every day. We publicize with school guidance counselors. You buy your legitimacy with staying power.
Norm: Uhhuh.
Dan: And with just being normal decent people. You know, we talk to them, I go to their conferences, I make presentations, papers at the Mass School Counselors Association, at the New England Association for Counseling and Development. I present papers, I write articles, we talk, we mix.
Norm: That is precisely correct. That must go on.
Dan: It’s terribly important. Now, not only with counselors and guidance counselors, we do scattershot mailings to focal audiences and, you know, people who subscribe to certain magazines or whatever. We get on TV, we do a tremendous campaign of trying to get on TV. Right now while you’re here, there’s a camera crew from the local CBS affiliate who’s going to be doing a half hour show on us in the fall. We work hard to get that. That doesn’t come out of the blue. We cultivate the stations, we go on radio, we get newspaper articles written about us. We have a very vigorous promotional campaign, which we put energy into. And we talk in every college and university that we can possibly talk in. We mail to every professor of education in the entire greater area.
Norm: Alright, now here’s a student who’s thinking about this place.
Dan: Open admissions, Norm.
Norm: Open admissions? Alright. But the point is, he says to himself, is this an alternative I should pursue? Would you allow him to come and spend a few days?
Dan: Yes. We have a very interesting program, which we instituted almost the beginning called the visiting Week. For a very nominal fee, they can come and spend the week here as if they were students, you know, treated just like everybody else. That’s been a boon because that gives them a chance to really see whether this is the place for them or not.
Norm: Does your school vote on accepting?
Dan: Absolutely not. It’s basically a hundred percent open admissions. If a student presents himself who is clearly not capable, then it would be voted on by an organ of the School Meeting. But, it almost never happens. It’s a self-selection process.
Norm: Would there be a maximum number that you could handle?
Dan: At this point, I can’t answer that question. I know one thing, every growth in numbers so far has been accompanied by tremendous growth in spirit and energy. And my own personal feeling is, the larger the school, the better. I don’t even begin to question it in my own mind up to 500. I know how easy it is in communities of 500 people to know each other. I’ve been in communities of 500 who after three or four months of interacting, the way the kids interact here, they all know each other. But the point is that when there are a lot of kids, there’s more energy, more stimulation and more chance of meeting other children your own age or interested in the same things you do. And that’s more fun. It’s bleak when you’re alone.
Norm: Is there any overriding problem that your school faces? Any particular problem? For example, is there a lack of receptivity? You mentioned that you’ve been around long enough now to have acquired integrity and a respect from area people and professional people. But is there any overriding problem—financial? Respect by people? Attendance of a selection of students? Identifying students?
Dan: Not really. One can always sit and bemoan the fact you don’t have enough money or this and that, but that’s not really the case. The only problem we have is we’d like to be bigger and that will take time. It doesn’t happen overnight. I do feel that the larger the size at this point, the more viable the community. We’d like to grow more. All the other things are not really problems. The standard community that’s committed to the old ways is obviously not going to wave its arms in joy at something radically different from what they do. But you understand that. If you have any perspective of history, you don’t expect it to be any different. You just have to go on about your business and do your thing.
If you do it well and if your graduates equip themselves well, eventually people’s minds will open. It just takes time.
Norm: There’s one other thing I have to ask in this. I want people to know that teachers ought to be writing. Your school does some writing.
Dan: Prolifically. We write and write and write and write as much as we can. And we distribute our writings as widely as we can. It’s terribly important. At least it gives people a chance to put their hands on something concrete and mull it over and think about it. If you don’t write, you’re anonymous. That’s what sustains us. And I’m sure in the end, people will realize that free kids who determine their own destinies are the way of the 21st century.