Sample Chapter

From Kingdom of Childhood
Edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg,
from interviews by Hanna Greenberg

“If you’re doing one hard thing, it’s not that different from doing another hard thing.”

I came to Sudbury Valley the first summer we were open. I was seven. I was really surprised when I saw the school. The picture I had before I came was nothing like what it turned out to be! I had imagined it to be a place with rooms that had labels according to what you did inside the rooms a room that said “Science,” and a room that said “Reading,” and I don’t know what else. My picture didn’t look like the public school I went to, but it also didn’t look like a house; it looked institutional.
The school is such a great looking building to a little kid, big and old and kind of mysterious. It was exciting to go there and find out that it looked like some old mansion, where you can get lost or hide from people if you want to and not be found, and things like that. I remember just feeling joy at being at this place where I could do what I wanted where I wanted. The school was physically beautiful, and to be around this beautiful place and not be constrained was wonderful. The grounds were also incredible, and walking around on the rocks the rocks were really frightening! They were big. They were several times higher than I was, and people were jumping around on them. It amazed me that people were just going up there to this far away, scary place and nobody was attempting to make them not do that.
I had gone to public school the year before. I had ambivalent feelings about it. I liked learning how to read. That was fun, and the teacher I had was a nice woman. When fall came and I was at Sudbury Valley instead of in public school, I started to get worried about whether I was going to be learning enough, and whether I was going to be missing things; so I went back to public school at the beginning of second grade, for maybe a week. That was long enough for me to realize that I had made a mistake. Second grade in public school was horrible, boring, and incredibly tedious. So I came back and re- enrolled at Sudbury Valley.
The whole time I was enrolled, I wasn’t concerned about my education. I never felt I needed to create a “program of studies” for myself; I didn’t ever again feel that was an important thing to do. I knew enough people outside of school to feel like I wasn’t any worse educated than they were! I never asked myself, “Am I satisfied with the way I’m being educated?” I usually just came to school and tried to figure out what was going on, and if there was something going on that I was interested in, then I would do it. If there wasn’t, I would go read. In general, I don’t remember thinking, “Is what this person is doing ok?” I had the idea that it wasn’t really my business what someone was doing. He was doing what he was doing and that was sort of the beginning and the end of it.
The first thing I remember clearly spending lots of time doing was the Plasticene Village, a table in the art room taken over for full-time use for plasticene. On some days, I would do it from the moment I got there to the moment I left. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it seems like it went on forever! We made houses and people; those were pretty basic. The more complicated things were machinery and stuff like that. You had to convince people your machinery worked, so you needed some superficial knowledge of how it ought to work, and you had to be able to point to where the different parts were. It was wonderful fun.
All of us graduated many years ago, and it turns out that it wasn’t a bad thing at all to be doing plasticene all day for a year or so! But I don’t know how I would have dealt with that if I was a staff member then, and a parent said to me, “I can’t believe it. My kid is playing with plasticene for a whole year. This is terrible.” It’s hard. I’d have to tell the parent, “Look, what’s wrong with your kid doing this? He’s having fun, he’s probably learning stuff, although who knows what.” I don’t know how the staff dealt with it.
Until I was thirteen or fourteen, I read a lot of science fiction and not much of anything else. At thirteen or so, I started reading other things, like Russian literature; that was because everybody was interested in Solzhenitsin. His books had just been coming out in the West and people were reading them and talking about them. That was the first Russian literature that I read. I read The Gulag Archipelago, Part I and I think I may have read Part II sometime, but I was much more interested in his novels: The Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life. Then I started reading a lot of other Russian literature too, because in his novels there are references to other things and that always made me curious to know what the other things were. I was always reading at school, sometimes a lot. Just like there were days when I would play with plasticene all day, there were days when I would come in and read all day.
Outside, I played a lot of soccer. The soccer games were really great, mostly because of Mitch. Everybody would play, people of all different sizes. Mitch always made sure that all the little kids got treated fairly and that nobody got left out. He was gentle, and I think he held the other big kids who may not have been so gentle in check. I thought of him as sort of a role model; he was the only older kid who I looked up to.
The other thing I did outside a lot was play war. We used to go off either to the area around the barn and stables or behind Dennis’ house [no longer there ed.]. It was always an all day thing. You would go out mid-morning and you wouldn’t come back until it was time to go home. This was a problem because people weren’t ever sure when they were going home and parents would come looking for them and they just wouldn’t be there; and their mothers would have no way of finding them.
The game involved dividing the group into two teams, and then everybody would have a stick and you would kind of tramp around hiding in the jungle and in the forest and trying to shoot people on the other team with your stick. If you got shot you had to walk, usually to the parking lot, and then come back, and then you could be alive again. This was a big incentive to stay alive, because that’s a long walk!
People always argued about whether they got shot. Somebody would be running from one tree to another and say, “You couldn’t have hit me,” or “What kind of a gun do you have?” and things like that. We played that mostly in the spring or fall, because in the winter it’s just too cold to sit still behind a tree for hours and hours.
During the winter sledding was the thing. We used to sled down to the millhouse, which was kind of bad because the millhouse was at the bottom! If the ice was frozen, we used to sled down the hill toward the pond instead, which was much more fun because we’d go sliding across the pond. You could go from one end of the pond to the other on the speed you picked up on the hill.
At one time, there was a fort that some kids built, that I used to go to. It was a secret for a while. Frank hit me once when I tried to follow him there, but somehow I ended up going anyway. It was kind of neat because it was made out of tree limbs, draped over a frame, with pine branches on top of the tree limbs. If you were inside of this thing, I doubt that you would stay dry in the rain, but you felt pretty sheltered. There was also a “well” there. It was this big hole that they had dug, and it wasn’t really a well. It was just a deep hole that would fill up with rain water all the time.
My favorite room in the school was the sewing room, and the place that I particularly liked sitting was near the solarium. I can read in a noisy room, but conversations sometimes bothered me, and then I’d go to a quieter place; or if I was in a quiet room, I would try to get people to be quiet, which was sometimes not so easy.
When I first got to the school we all had the idea that the school was going to be a raving success and that pretty soon we were going to have 1,000 students and lots of buildings and things. This sounded great, and it was something I thought would happen. Later on, when the school wasn’t that big I was conscious of there not being many people around, and I would really have liked to have a lot more people to talk to. There wasn’t anybody else interested in things like algebra and I felt it would have been fun to talk to somebody else who was interested, not to get help, but just to talk about it.
While I was there, I desperately wanted the school to be bigger. I think for me as a student there, it would have been much better if it was bigger. Most of the time I was there, the only friends I had my age were Gabriel, Judy, and Rudy, and that wasn’t because I wasn’t friendly. That was because there wasn’t anybody else my age. The people who were my friends were really intelligent and interesting, but it would have been great to have more. I have to add that I don’t remember feeling that individual friendships were that important. What was important was being able to join a group of people that I liked.
I did math sometimes during those years not generally at school, but usually at home with a mathematics book written for adults to learn elementary mathematics. Everything that I learned before I started to learn algebra I learned out of that book, or by asking one of my parents to show me.
After I had sort of figured out all the elementary things to do, I wasn’t very interested in it. Then, at some point, I became interested in understanding why and how nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors work. So I would go and pick up books that I couldn’t understand. The first thing that was identifiable as being incomprehensible was the mathematics in the books. It was easy to see that one of the reasons I couldn’t understand anything was because the mathematics made no sense to me whatsoever, because it was algebra and I had never thought about algebra at all. There were other things too, but that was the first problem. So I decided to learn algebra so I’d be able to figure out things more easily. I looked at the algebra textbooks in the library until I found one that seemed OK and I just read it and did all the problems. It was something I did on my own. I didn’t need any help with it. When something puzzled me I just worked at it until I figured it out. There were people I could have turned to, but there was nobody that I did turn to.
The algebra took me something less than a year. There were two books, Algebra I and Algebra II. The thing that was really stupid was that I did all the problems in the book. I didn’t realize until a long time later that this was not the way anybody ever learns anything out of a textbook! It just takes too long. Then I found that I still couldn’t understand the things I wanted to read. I figured, well, the thing I should do now is try to understand more elementary physics, and so I asked Danny to help me with that. I had a physics textbook, and I just started at the beginning and read it and tried to work out problems. When I would get confused, I would go find Danny and make an appointment to talk to him sometime and ask him questions. I enjoyed it until I got to studying something that I couldn’t make any sort of sense out of, the part about how gyroscopes work, which was somewhere in the first quarter of the book that I had, and I just couldn’t get that to make sense to me, because the way gyroscopes work doesn’t make any intuitive sense. So I stopped doing it because I was frustrated, and I was tired of trying to think about it and not having it make sense.
My learning algebra was more or less goal oriented, although I never reached the goal I was aiming for, which was to be able to read papers and books about nuclear physics and understand them; but it was still goal oriented. It’s just that it was for a goal that I wanted instead of a goal that somebody else told me I should aim for. I think this is how people make themselves miserable: instead of living their lives according to what they want to do, they try to use some other standards to live their lives. I think people are supposed to be happy. They’re not supposed to be unhappy. It’s selfish, but I also think it’s right.
I didn’t think about math and physics very much after I stopped learning physics. Actually I didn’t think about math much until I started teaching some people at school. When I was twelve, I probably would have said I wanted to be a zoologist when I grew up because I was interested in animals.
I started taking piano lessons when I was thirteen. I just wanted to be able to play some songs I liked. After a few weeks, my piano teacher tried to get me to play classical music and I soon found that I really liked a lot of the things she was getting me to play short, easy pieces by Haydn or Beethoven, people like that. Also, I started to listen to a lot of music after I started taking piano lessons. Before, I didn’t listen to much music at all.
I practiced mostly at home for a couple of years, and then after that I practiced some of the time at school. There were days when I would practice a lot more and days when I would practice a lot less. I kept it up for ten years, practicing progressively more and more hours a day. I would have a vision of wanting to be able to play certain pieces, and then I’d get to the point where I could play those pieces and I’d want to be able to play other pieces that were harder. I didn’t think about what it would do for me. I just thought it was something I wanted to do. I believe that everything you do helps everything else you do, because if you’re doing one hard thing, it’s not that different from doing another hard thing. It may take different physical skills, or maybe different mental habits, but it takes the same kind of concentration and requires the same kind of thinking.
For some reason, I fell in love with the way a harpsichord sounded and I really wanted one. It seemed like it would be fun to build one, and it wasn’t that expensive. I had been working part time so I had enough money to buy a kit. I made it in school, and I got a lot of advice from Sam at various stages. The directions were reasonably explicit. A lot of it was tedious and time consuming, but there were only a few things that were hard. The beginning was especially fun; what you’re doing is putting the case together, gluing big pieces together and trying to get joints to come out right and stuff like that. Then later on, there’s a lot more stuff that it’s easy to mess up on and you have to do over again a bunch of times so you get it right.
During the years that I was doing music, I still played outside. Maybe less, but the things I did outside were a little bit different. I still played soccer a lot. I played Capture the Flag some, but the problem was that by then I was too much bigger than everybody else. It’s no fun unless you’re more or less the average size. Everybody’s too scared of you and you can’t be invisible. If you’re small you can slip behind the line and nobody notices you. I also went cross country skiing and walking and digging in the woods for bottles and riding my bicycle around the area, usually with a friend.

In my teens, I became interested in the administration of the school. I don’t know why, really. I remember thinking that it was fun to be involved with certain things, like the judicial stuff and the trials. I also thought that the more people that were involved with administration, the better. I felt some sort of civic duty to be involved with it to a certain extent. Everybody felt loyal to the school, but people did different things about it. I don’t think I felt more loyal to the school than my friends who were not interested in administration.
I was Building Supplies Clerk for a while. That was just somebody who went around and kept the toilet paper and the paper towels and the soap in stock. I had to get somebody to take me to the store to buy cases of paper towels and toilet paper occasionally. The soap we had then was terrible, a powdered soap that was so abrasive you could hardly use it. If you had to wash your hands more than three or four times in a day, you’d have running sores.
I was Building Maintenance Clerk one year. I really wanted to know about these things and I wanted to do them and see what they were like. But I never felt I was doing a good enough job at it. It wasn’t as big a job the year I did it as it is most of the time, because there wasn’t anything major going on. There wasn’t any money to spend anyway. All the little things that came up, I could easily fix, like if a doorknob fell off someplace, or a window pane got broken or something like that. Also, I liked fooling around with electrical and electronic things that the Audio Visual Corp. had, so I would keep them going.
I was Law Clerk when I was thirteen. The work was awesome. The judicial system is streamlined now compared to the way it was then. We kept track of everything by hand then. There was a listing of each trial by trial number, and there was a listing by charge, and there were listings for each individual too. So there were all these records to be kept, and the first time I had to do it I was overwhelmed; it took getting used to so I wouldn’t forget to put something down some place. I remember sitting at the table with all this stuff and just trying to figure out what to do with it all and where to find what I needed and where to put everything.
I can remember the first time I had to go around and notify people of trials. The scary thing was talking to a little kid who didn’t already understand what was going on. Lots of times complaints could go through, testimony could be taken, and School Meeting could vote a trial for some kid who was new to the school and still didn’t really understand what was happening.
I also ran the mimeograph machine for years and years, and collated whenever we had something long to do, like a long newsletter or when somebody would publish a long article. I can remember collating with Gabriel. We’d put down long planks on a table so you’d get more pages on them. We had a lot of fun doing that. We would just walk up and down talking to each other and collating these long things. It would sometimes take hours to do. It’s funny, I don’t think of myself as being talkative, but I guess I talked a lot, to a lot of people. I talked to Gabriel probably more than anybody else, and I talked to Margaret Parra a fair amount when I was older.
For years there were water fights and nobody ever made a fuss about them because they were always done covertly, and nobody was aware of them or nobody knew exactly who had done them. The best ones were with paper towels which we would soak in water “gloppies” and throw at each other. The best times were at night in the winter, when it’s dark at 4:30. The staff members would all be up in the office and there wasn’t anybody working in the kitchen, so the downstairs of the school didn’t have that many people in it, particularly the art room, the main lounge, the library workroom and then down the stairs into the basement. The basement was the main area for the water fights. You had to be careful running from the art room (where you usually got the paper towels and water) to the basement, but once you were in the basement, there wasn’t likely to be anybody there. It felt really neat to be in the building when there weren’t very many people around and it was dark and mysterious. Actually, at the time, water fights weren’t illegal. There was a special law made about them later.
I liked the pot luck dinners at night a lot, but wasn’t so crazy about the spring picnics because I liked to be in the school after dark, running around outside. That was fun and different, whereas when I was a little kid the picnic was always just a pain in the neck. You’d go to school and there would be your school, but you couldn’t really do the things you wanted to because there was way too much stuff going on and there were too many people around and the only people you wanted to spend time with were your friends anyway, who’d be there, only it was harder to do things with them because you were at the picnic.

I think I always knew, as long as I can remember, what the School Meeting was: the place where things got done and decisions got made. Before I started going regularly, I did what most little kids do; they go when something germane to them comes up. At some point I can remember feeling maybe that wasn’t right and maybe everybody should go all the time, and then at some other point I decided that, yes, it was ok, it was alright for me to let other people decide things that I wasn’t interested in. The image I had was that somebody else was taking care of most things and I didn’t have to worry about it very much where “somebody else” was staff members and older students, but mostly staff members. But the thing that went along with that image was that I felt I could complain if there was something I thought wasn’t right or something I thought should be changed.
When I was older, I got really impatient at meetings. I remember thinking that it takes people so long to understand what other people are saying and people miss the point of what other people are saying, and then say things that are way off the point themselves. More recently I’ve learned that people do these things a lot less at School Meetings than they do in almost any other setting, and the School Meeting works as well as any democratic meeting that I’ve ever seen.
Once I started going to School Meetings, I went to Assembly meetings too. I never thought the Assembly had much role in what went on in school and I was usually perfectly happy with that. As a student I always felt a little bit resentful about the Assembly, as if it was the School Meeting that should be deciding these things and the Assembly was sort of beside the point. I’m not presenting that as the truth. I’m just telling you how I felt.
Everybody was on the judicial committee, so we were aware of the functioning of the judicial system in a much more intimate way than the other parts of the school. I think as a little kid, it’s more a part of your life than the other functions of the school. Not only are you using it, but you’re also taking part in running it at some point.
The judicial system was an interesting center of conflict in the school. Especially trials. All the time that I was involved, trials were very rare, so that having one was kind of a special occasion. There would be a lot of buildup and people would talk about it, and then there would be people arguing their cases and trying to convince each other, and it would come down to what the jury thought at the end, so that was always really fascinating. I think the drama of it was very interesting to me. I mean, the justice of it was nice, but I don’t think that was interesting in and of itself.
There was no way not to get fair treatment if you got brought up. The committee investigated and they made some kind of report, and if the report was wrong, then it was not that important because it could get cleared up in the trial. There were enough checks and balances. It was quite difficult to get convicted of something that you weren’t guilty of.
This was important to me because I took advantage of it sometimes. I was a real stickler, and if people brought me up for things that I knew were wrong, but weren’t against the rules, I wasn’t about to let myself get convicted of breaking a rule that I know I hadn’t broken. As a defendant, I wasn’t scared, but I was nervous. It’s more like the fear you experience when you’re going to talk in front of a group of people, than the fear that you experience when you’re afraid of bad things that are going to happen to you. I was always more afraid of being embarrassed than being convicted. In general, it was important for me to learn that I could defend myself and convince people that I was right.
The major interaction I had with the staff was talking to them. They meant something to me because of who they were. I grew to feel really emotionally attached to most of the staff members who were around the school a long time, because they were people I really liked and respected not necessarily because of things they did for me, and not just because of things they did for the school, although that was important too.
My relationship with them individually was always good. There were certainly times when I was really irritated with Danny, particularly, but I don’t remember anything that was a long term irritation. It was just always about small things that were happening in school. And it didn’t adversely affect the real relationship that we had. In general, I liked the staff to be friendly and I liked them to be there, but I didn’t want them to come seek me out, particularly. I certainly didn’t want them to try to get me to do things, but I didn’t even particularly want them to talk to me unless they had something specific they needed to talk about. I was much happier being able to seek them out if I wanted to. It wasn’t usually a matter of wanting to arrange to do something that was large scale and time consuming with them. It was mostly just getting help with individual things, or wanting to ask somebody a question about something. An example is woodworking, which I did for a while. When I wanted to make something out of wood, I wanted to be certified to use the tools and sometimes I’d want help doing a particular thing, but I wouldn’t want somebody to do it with me the whole time.
If I was somebody who was less determined not to ask people for help about most things, then the staff might have had a larger role in doing things with me or teaching things to me, or trying to help me figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted to be left alone, and in retrospect nothing has made me think that I was wrong to have wanted it. I wasn’t going to go start a class if I was peripherally interested in something; I would just go read a book instead.
I was always worried a little about staff elections. There have been periods when individual staff members were temporarily unpopular and there would be really bad election results which always seemed sad to me. Most of the staff had been there a long time and had put so much into the school that it always seemed horrible when they would get a rash of fifteen “no” votes one year; it must have felt horrible to them. The other thing was that crazy people would come and want to be staff members sometimes, but we were always too smart to elect them, so that wasn’t really a problem. I think it’s a good idea for children to choose their teachers. Everybody makes wrong decisions and I’m sure that we’ve occasionally elected people for staff who probably ought not to have been elected, though I don’t know if we’ve done the reverse. But I think that chances are we’ve made better decisions than any other method. The problem is, who’s going to make the decisions if we don’t do it ourselves? Whoever is, they’re probably not going to do as good a job. I don’t know any good alternative. The alternative of the students not being the ones who decide who works at Sudbury Valley would undermine one of Sudbury Valley’s main points, which is that the students decide what’s good for them. To have everything the way it is and to change that one thing would be really two-faced.
That’s one of the things that makes Sudbury Valley easy to talk about. In a lot of ways the school’s hard to talk about because it’s hard to get people to believe you when you start trying to describe it, but one of the things that makes it easier is that it’s really honest, so that when you say something you can really mean it; and when you say that the school is controlled democratically and the students essentially have the power, there’s no lie there. There’s no lie like, “Well, they have the power except that there are certain decisions they can’t make.” I was saying this to somebody recently: “The students can do anything they want.” She said, “Oh, it sounds like a Montessori school,” and I said, “Well, not exactly, because if you want to go outside and play soccer all day in a Montessori school, that’s sort of hard.” And she said, “You mean, you could go outside and play soccer all day?” I said, “Yuh, the students can do anything they want.” And she said, “Well, I heard you, but I didn’t really believe that.”
People would ask me about the school sometimes, but nobody ever tried to convince me that I shouldn’t be going there. I was probably more obnoxious about it than the people who asked me about it, because I would try to convince them that everybody should be doing it. I thought that it was completely obvious that this is the kind of education everybody should get.
I think my parents worried about me a little bit. I’m not sure about my mother. My father said that he worried some about me, but he was also able to leave me alone, which was good. I imagine I would end up doing the same thing. I would probably worry about my children, but that’s the way it is. One worries about one’s kids. Everybody I know worries about their kids, no matter what, and no matter what their kids are doing, so I’d worry about it, but I hope I’d be able to leave them alone. If I can’t do it, I don’t know why anybody else should be able to do it, because I’ve got better reason than anybody else to leave them alone.
Recently somebody was asking me if I was well prepared for college. I was telling them about Sudbury Valley and they kept asking me, “Was this hard for you when you went to college?” and “Was that hard for you when you went to college?” and I finally said, “Look, nothing was hard for me when I went to college. I did some hard things there because I tried to learn things that were hard to learn, but college wasn’t hard for me.” Yes, I was well prepared. I think that people from Sudbury Valley are, in general; not necessarily because they have exactly the skills that are expected of them, but because they have the skill of knowing how to take care of themselves in a general way, so that when it comes time that they have to do certain things, they can do them. The people I knew in college who had problems were all people who weren’t used to trying to figure out what to do with their day, what to do with their month or what to do with their life.

I was really nervous about defending my thesis. I was seventeen. People usually talked about their last several years of school, and what they were planning to do in the immediate future. I didn’t really want to do that. This was a leftover from when I was a little kid. I had the idea that you should be somehow specifically defending the thesis that you are ready to be responsible for yourself, and I didn’t want to do it by telling what I had been doing recently and what my plans were. So I decided to talk about what I felt responsibility meant and explain why I thought I was ready to live my life in accordance with that. I was a little bit nervous because I hadn’t seen anybody do that before and there were weird questions people could ask me. As it turned out people did ask some weird questions. It was certainly meaningful emotionally, as a rite of passage, getting up in front of all these people who I’d known for a long and telling them that I was ready to leave and why.
I decided to leave the school when I did because I felt there wasn’t anything I wanted from the school anymore. It didn’t take any time at all to decide to leave. I suppose in a sense it took me eight years, but when I felt I was ready, it didn’t take much time at all.

From Kingdom of Childhood
Edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg,
from interviews by Hanna Greenberg

“We were a small group of people bouncing ideas off each other.”

Plasticene was probably one of the most intense things I’ve ever done. There were days when we’d show up, go right to the art room, work steadily at it until lunch time, eat lunch at the table, and keep on going until we had to leave that night; and we’d never, never leave the room once. The villages would evolve. Sometimes you’d be building a gold mining community. Sometimes it would be a bunch of towns with hotels and saloons. It usually involved a lot of buildings, a lot of vehicles, a lot people, and you’d make all this stuff. Then you would enact various scenes with it. You would drive your cars around and have certain battles and blow them up on occasion. But for the most part, you were building. You’d be building tanks and airplanes, just one thing after another. I did it at home too; you could bring them in already built.

I think about it every now and then, and I did exactly what I’m doing now, except I’m doing it now in real life. I’m building a factory and making machines and talking to people all day long. Same exact thing. And very intensely. Day in and day out, the same exact thing I was doing in plasticene. Except that when you’re a kid you don’t really have as many of the same complications you have when you’re an adult. If you’re working on a plasticene village, the worst that can happen is you can lose your razor blade or something like that. And maybe you can find another one pretty quickly. There aren’t setbacks like you would have in real life, later on. You won’t run out of bricks for your building, because you’re making the bricks yourself.

With the plasticene, I was making businesses. I made a lot of factories. I had a cannery at one time. I had a still. I had a bottling plant attached to the still. I could picture it — I had seen films and gone through books that would show you pictures of bottling plants and such things. It had to be realistic.

It was the fascination of creating. You were creating things that you couldn’t have yourself, maybe, but you could still make them, and by making them, you could have them. And if you were going to do it and have it, you might as well have it as realistic as you could make it.

We only had so much clay and the fun was in the creating. Afterwards, the only thing you could do with it was to smash it and start over again. It was a constant build and smash. Sometimes we would decide to change modes. For a while everything would be Western. From there, it might go to a battlefield. From there it might go to factories. Western was probably the biggest thing.

It lasted two or three years, on and off. Probably more. We were not being influenced by any outside source. We were a small group of people bouncing ideas off each other and leading ourselves wherever we took ourselves. We learned from what we could get out of books and from our own interests. We took all kids in, and let all kids be part of this.

My parents were supportive of me during the troubles I had in public school. I was in sixth grade, and I was doing anything I could to rebel against the system. That’s not a good way to learn. It’s not a good way to go forward in life. I noticed as soon as I got to Sudbury Valley that I no longer had anything to rebel against, so there was no reason to do all those other things that I was starting to do, like starting to smoke. If nobody’s telling you to do things that you want to rebel against, there’s no more point in rebelling. So we just played.

I was a little nervous about coming to Sudbury Valley because it meant leaving conventional types of schools. But I was encouraged by my parents, and from the interview it seemed like a much better sort of school. The philosophy of it made so much sense. Basically you could do anything you wanted as long as you didn’t break any laws or infringe on anybody’s rights. You could pretty much write your own rules because you knew, instinctively, that if you were going to throw a handful of gravel at somebody, that was going to infringe on their rights. You didn’t have to look up in the rule book whether it was a violation to throw gravel or not. You already knew.

I think maybe for me it would have worked to stay at home. My father was very helpful on weekends, and at night when I came home from school. I had a very nice workshop of my father’s I could use. I would work in there, do things, and then go out and play.

But I’m a relatively social person as well and, as a kid going to school with all these other people, having somebody else to talk to, to bounce ideas off of, was very important. If I was all by myself, I would not learn how to relate to other people, and also not learn one of the most important things Sudbury Valley taught me: nobody at the school knew much about what I wanted to know, but they all could teach how to find the information. So if I needed to find something, they might show me how to use a card catalog, or how to talk to somebody who did know. I think the school taught me how to learn better than if I was just at home.

What was important to me was seeing how other adults acted and related. I picked up a little bit here and a little bit there. Nothing that I could say, “Well, I had this great revelation. I learned this from so and so.” It was just nice to be amongst adults, seeing what they do. And other kids too. Everybody had different interests, but in a small school like that, it was more a matter of age and interests combined, so if there was only one other person your age you were probably going to be friends, and if somebody was not at all your age and had the same interests, that would also make you friends.

We went on walks into the woods right from the very beginning, building little forts. It wasn’t too much later that we started playing with little race cars and plasticene. Then we had projects. We’d try to make go-carts out of old wheels and things. We used to go down into the “morgue” in the basement and fix up old stuff people had donated — bicycles and things like that. There were so many places at school to explore: the barn, the stables, the basement, the attic, you name it. We also found old dumps in the woods, and we started collecting “antique” bottles. Then there were trips to the Sudbury town dump, getting people — staff members or other students — to take us. There were certain items we always looked for: anything that had anything to do with a bicycle or a tricycle. We’d take those parts back, and build new ones. It was like a little business. We’d fix them up, and sometimes we’d paint them. We put price tags on them — 50 cents, 75 cents — and we would sell them.

We’d experiment a lot. At one time we wanted to crash-test the tricycles we were selling, so we took one and went up to the top of the fire escape to drop it down and see what would happen. It was a good long drop. Usually not much happened; tricycles are pretty durable. That was something one of the staff brought us up on. We told him it was a study and we had a safety person at the bottom to make sure nobody would run out and get conked on the head. We were very apologetic. We said we didn’t really realize it was bad and we wouldn’t do it again. We talked to him quite at length — at least I did, because I was named on the complaint. So he dropped the charges. We never wanted to get brought up if we could avoid it.

I felt that for the most part the things that I was doing around the school were innocent, although a lot of them maybe were wrong. Take the case of throwing a tricycle off the fire escape. I had gone to the dump many times, picked the tricycle parts up, built it right from scratch, every little nut and bolt, fixed it all up. We had done that to so many, that we had an extra few tricycles, so I dropped it to see what parts would break first. Now, you take somebody who built that tricycle right from scratch, knows every part of it, and then drops it off — the act of dropping it seems quite harmless. But if you take somebody else who runs and grabs some other kid’s tricycle and hauls it up there and throws it off, all that person is doing is trying to break a tricycle. It seemed that people at school, including the staff, watched me, and saw that I had built that whole tricycle. So even though they might not have understood what I was doing then, they let me get away with it. Because in every case where I did something like that, I was doing it as part of a learning process. An act that might have been considered bad, or something that somebody else would get censured for, was just one part of the whole picture for me. For example, if I had alcoholic beverages on school campus, it was because I had made a still. To me at the time, it really did seem a learning experience and innocent. There’s a big difference between a kid who smuggles a fifth of whiskey into his lunch box and a kid who, over a period of three or four months, makes a still, grinds his own grain, makes some whiskey; and the fact is I never even drank the whiskey I made. What fascinated me was how to make the stuff. So I made whiskey at the school, and I possessed it at the school because I had made it there, and I was allowed to, because I had gone through all those steps. If I had just said I want to have whiskey at school, everybody would have said, “Forget it, that’s against the law. Kids can’t have whiskey at school.” But I said I want to make a still, to see how whiskey is made, and then it was ok.

In general, we knew a lot about what we were doing. We had a whole series of books on science and technology, at school mostly, and in my house too. I would read at school all the time. I spent hours and hours and hours reading, and going through the school’s library. I knew every book in the library, upstairs and downstairs. I’d crawl into a corner and read. People usually didn’t notice me. There’s something about a kid at school reading that doesn’t attract attention. A staff member walks by and sees some kid reading: that’s a kid who does not need any help at the moment.

A lot of times, I read was when the weather was really bad. Or there were times when I just wanted to be alone, so I would go off and read. Those library rooms upstairs were usually the rooms I would be in. Not many people were up there. I read a lot of books on what other people had done, people who had gone off and lived in the woods, people who had invented a lot of things. Biographies. And then I read a lot of “gee whiz” adventure books — Tom Swift’s and Nancy Drew’s. I could go through a Nancy Drew book in about an hour and a half, and I read them all. There were a lot of books in school that I didn’t like reading but I still knew where they were, and I knew that there was nothing of interest in those books because I had opened them to see.

Probably one of the best early moves the school ever made was to get all those books. Where they ever got them, I don’t know, but getting them and cataloging them was really good. I was usually too impulsive to want to use the public library loan system. I wanted it now.

For the most part, I did stuff in big blocks of time. I would start each day by continuing what I left off on the day before. So if I was building a tree fort somewhere, I would start again on that tree fort. I would work on the tree fort until I got hungry enough to come in for lunch or, if I was smart enough, I would have brought the lunch to the tree fort in the first place.

Certain times I would leave the tree fort and go and do other things for a while and then maybe come back later on and spend another day at it. After it was done, I’d only go there every now and then. Once a tree fort was done, it was no longer as interesting. Building something, like making a tricycle, is more fun than once you have it. That’s why breaking a tricycle after you have it is not that big a deal, because the fun was in building it.

In general, we were everywhere. During good weather, we were mostly outdoors; in pouring rainstorms and stuff, we would be inside. There’s only so much time you can spend outdoors in the winter, even if you’re skiing. But we were always building snow forts and there was a lot of outdoor activity.

We would occasionally go off on bicycle trips and we’d ride around. Nobody knew we were going. We’d just take off. We had bicycles we had fixed up, also from the dump. We’d go up to the Primate Center. We’d go to the Wayside Inn. We’d go all over the back, northern woods of Framingham on the road system.

One day we found a car on one of our trips through Callahan State Park. It was abandoned and had crashed into a tree. We took it back and fixed it up a bit, got it running, and then whoever had originally stolen it (or whatever they had done) found out that we had it and they stole it back again. Then they rammed it into a tree again. These neighborhood kids were just into smashing things up, obviously. So this time it was really wrecked. We towed it back somehow. We got it back in one piece. It was too wrecked to use so I stripped it, and made what parts were left into a tractor. That was my winter project. Once it was all done, I remember not having too much more to do with it and I sold it. I spent more time futzing with it than actually using it.

Then there was the mini-bike. I pushed certain rules and got the school to actually buy me a mini-bike. They bought a bunch of parts and it took me a solid year, because I didn’t know anything about welding at the time and it was a pile of pieces. It was a big challenge to build, but I did build it and I learned an awful lot from it. I also learned a lot about how not to be frustrated because the thing wouldn’t start. I used it for a few years, but after a while, I realized that I had to sell it because there wasn’t anything more I could learn from it. I never used it that much. It was one of those things — the dream of having a mini-bike was greater than the reality of having it. The freedom of a mini-bike is not the same as the freedom of a bicycle. A bicycle you can ride on public roads. They don’t break down all the time. You can go all sorts of places, be free. A mini-bike is never that way.

Once I got a Hillman that was beyond my abilities to fix. I never got it running, but it was my car. I would have kept it until I finally got the thing to work. Getting parts for it was hard. I really didn’t understand too much about what I was doing, but I kept on working on it, getting the brakes to work, getting the fuel system to work, getting this or that to work. But I needed a new fuel pump for the car, and it cost $30. That was more money than I wanted to spend. I had very little money. You have to work and I didn’t work. I was too busy playing, I guess. There were very few things I really needed money for. We had a small allowance, and there was work we could do around the house to get money. Or I would sell a tricycle for fifty cents or a dollar. I always had what money it seemed like I needed.

I did find something funny out though when I had that car. Some local kids ruined it one day. I had to have it towed away because they smashed it. But the funny thing was that after they did that, that day I had a type of stomachache which I had not had since public school. I used to have some really painful stomachaches, but I wouldn’t let on that I had them. I would be quite miserable to the point of practically fainting. Sometimes I’d go home and just lay down and they’d go away. But for the most part, I’d lay down at recess time and it would go away, so I could live with it. After that car was wrecked, that stomachache recurred, and I realized that it was all stress. I finally understood what those stomachaches were caused by: school.

Somewhere in these books I was reading, the idea of farming as a way of life, self-sufficiency, homesteading, became a real interest. With that interest came raising some animals. We talked it over, my friends and I, and decided that we were going to raise goats. We got permission from the school. We built a fence, made a pasture, got everything ready, bought the goats, raised them, had them bred, and had the kids. We had them about four years. They were purebred goats, so we could always sell the kids. With the goats came other rights. We could now stay at the school after hours, because there was always something that needed to be done with the goats. That was nice. We had a whole bunch of us to take turns on weekends. There was always one of us who could go over and take care of the goats at the school. That was no problem during the school year. During the summer vacation, we had a garden at the school, so we were coming over all the time anyway.

I never really got used to goats’ milk, but there were the goats: you’re going to drink the milk and like it! We could sell some of the milk, but basically very little. Overall, the goats were a financial loss. So was almost any agricultural thing I ever did.

We ate one goat, once. We had a goat that we had castrated, and the vet didn’t do the job right; it also wasn’t dehorned properly. So we could not sell it as a companion for a horse, which is usually what we did with all our male goats. Around this area there are a lot of people with horses who can’t afford two horses, and a goat is a super horse companion. A goat isn’t afraid of anything. A horse is afraid of everything, including its own shadow. So if you have a goat, which is a very sociable animal, and a horse, the two will become friends. If anything is going on, the horse will look at the goat and the goat’ll look up and say, “Yuh, that’s just a truck driving by. No big deal.” — and the horse stays real calm. So not only does it give the horse company, but it calms the horse down. That’s why a lot of people buy a goat, and they might as well get a fixed male goat, because they’re cheapest; that’s how we would sell ours. But we had this one that wasn’t going to be useful for that, so we butchered him and had a big feast at the school after hours.

The rabbits were also part of the farming. I had an interest from a long time before. I had sent for some material from the American Rabbit Breeder’s Association and became a member. I always had in the back of my mind that I’d like to do that. We raised them for a while and it was a lot of work, particularly in the winter. It was also quite expensive to feed them. We bred them according to the scientific process, the right bucks with the right does, trying to keep track of the pedigrees and making out papers on them and trying to sell some of the kits. It was an awful lot of work. We butchered them for meat, but for the amount of work it was to butcher a rabbit, you got such a small amount of meat! At this time I could already make more money per hour fixing somebody’s car than I could butchering a rabbit that I’d put all this energy into raising. But we had some good rabbit meals at the school after hours where we would cook a rabbit as part of our agricultural experience!

Then there is the story of the squirt. It was April Fool’s Day. I figured that would be a good time to do it. The school had an annunciator control panel in the kitchen. It had been used to call the maids when the building was someone’s private home. It went to all different places, but it rang in the kitchen and a little arrow would show up. I don’t know what happened to that system, but after it was taken out the wires were still there, and some of them went down into the basement. I connected a windshield washer pump to a battery which was downstairs and hooked it through a little squirt nozzle which I stuck between the two stoves, aimed at a certain spot. I would wait until somebody would sit in the seat that the thing was aimed at, and I would push one of those little buttons that was already there, and they would get squirted. I also squirted Margaret, getting her on the glasses, and she found out about it. She wasn’t mad, because she had a pretty good sense of humor that way.

One of the things that I remember as being kind of humorous was when we learned how to make bombs out of caps. There’s a way of folding them together so you could make quite a powerful bomb if you spent enough time. We made one that had quite a bit of power and we waited. We dug it about five feet underground. We waited until Danny was walking by and, when he stepped over it, we fired it off. We knew that he would never know it because it was down so deep. It was great fun for us to know that we had done it under his nose. It was big enough that we felt it, but nobody else knew what it was, because it caused such a little vibration. People were wondering what these kids were doing poking rods into the ground and running wires around and giggling, but they never knew.

I never really took a class in my life at SVS. Say something came up and I had to divide. I would learn how to divide in a matter of a couple of days and that was it. All I wanted to do was learn how to divide. Everything that I learned at public school that I really didn’t have an interest in, I do not have the foggiest recollection of. So if somebody had told me I had to take English literature, it would have been a total waste of my time.

Every now and then I would worry, “Am I learning anything? Sooner or later I’m going to grow up, and I’m going to have to earn money. Is sitting at this plasticene table all day teaching me how to learn?” Visitors would come in quite often and they’d say, “This is a school at which you’re not learning anything and you’re going to be a failure and nobody’s teaching you how to make money when you get out of school. What are you going to do?” There was always that worry. But I don’t remember ever really doing anything about it.

I remember talking to people and they would say, “What do you do?” If it was in the winter and I had just come in from building snow forts all day, that’s what I would tell them about. And they would look at me kind of shocked. That would reinforce that little feeling of, “What am I going to do when I grow up?” That’s how I was always aware that sooner or later I had to grow up.

After a certain time it became obvious that, just like once I had that car and tractor built, I was done with it, after a certain amount of time the school was something I had to be done with. I had to graduate. I had to go on and do something else. That evolved slowly; it wasn’t that I felt pressed. It came from inside and I was ready. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I was prepared to go out and do whatever it was. I don’t think I had the confidence to go out until I was really ready. Whether I knew what I was doing or not, I knew I had the confidence that I was going to go out and try, that I would do the best I could and let things happen the way they were going to happen.

In general, my experiments weren’t done in a dangerous manner like, say, a guy testing a parachute by jumping off a big cliff. I would prefer throwing a brick tied to a parachute. If that brick hit the ground and broke, that was my failure. I would test the waters before I jumped, always. My failures were never catastrophic, they were just, “Well that parachute didn’t work. I’m going to have to build another one — and very cautiously when I do.” So I wasn’t about to jump out into the real world and do something that would cause me to have a catastrophic failure that would crush me to the point where I would say, “Oh, I’m not going to do that again and I’m just going to pump gas.” I still live my life that way. I don’t throw all my eggs in one basket.

I enjoyed being at the school, and I have no regrets that maybe I missed something. There was a lot I could have done, but I didn’t know I wanted to do it, or how to do it, when I was there. That’s why I was at the school, to learn to be who I am now and to learn as much as I could while I was there, every day. I am the same person now as I was then, and I cannot say that at such and such an age, this happened to me and I was a changed person. Did the school make me the way I am now? It’s something I wondered often. I don’t know if it did, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. It certainly helped. It took away those stomachaches, and it kept me from wasting my time doing silly things of protest.

I had the shortest thesis defense ever. There were no questions. I said — it must be on record somewhere — “I believe I’m responsible enough to leave the school and to get a diploma.” That was it. “Any questions?” None. “See you later.”

From Kingdom of Childhood
Edited by Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg,
from interviews by Hanna Greenberg

“Communication with everybody was the biggest thing we did.”

I remember well the first day I was at Sudbury Valley. The atmosphere was “little house-on-the-prairie-ish,” because the building was so homey. The first place I went was into the art room with Joan. I stayed in there the whole entire day. I was painting. I made this yellow sun, and I painted over it with green and I thought, “Wow, I’m gonna get in trouble for this because suns are supposed to be yellow and I made it green.” I showed it to Joan; I guess I just wanted a reaction. She looked at it and said, “That’s very beautiful”. I said, “Yuh, but it’s green”. She said she loved it, thought it was the best thing, and I was so shocked by that.

I was four. My brother who is four and a half years older than me had already been there a year. I felt secure with him at school. It was nice to have him there. Sudbury Valley’s something we have had in common, something private and special, that we can still talk about.

I don’t remember very much of when I was younger. I was just being a little kid. When we were little there wasn’t any one thing we always did. It was always new or different. From eight on, I was always with a clique of older kids, girls and boys. They were not my age, but I used to take the same classes they took. We’d talk about the same things. I just went with everybody else, did what they were doing. We’d sit around and write on people’s shoes and listen to music. That was a big thing, listening to music. We played cards until Danny said gambling was illegal and to get all the silver off the table. The major activity was to sit around with all the other girls and talk. Communication with everybody was the biggest thing we did. We’d talk for hours. About anything. I was always the youngest one, until everybody started graduating. That was actually better for me because then I became more independent and I did things that I really wanted to do, as opposed to doing what everybody else wanted to do! But I missed having everybody there. Of course, I had established new friendships in the meantime, so it wasn’t like everybody left and then there I was hanging out on the end.

When I was younger I never did classes: I did fun things like play in the playroom and cook with Margaret, which was a “class.” I was outside a lot. We used to play on the swings, or play football, or play kickball, or capture the flag, and several of us would go on walks. Between the ages of eleven and fifteen I spent a lot of time in class. After that I slacked off for a while until my last year there. I took French for three or four years. I love the language, and I love being able to speak it, but I dreaded the class. I persisted because I wanted to learn French and I knew that, if I was going to learn, I’d have to do it. My biggest help with my English grammar was the grammar I learned in French, but I just don’t have a knack for grammar.

Ice cream day was always a big celebration. That was something everybody looked forward to. The day before, Margaret would get a bunch of kids and we’d make the base for it, then we’d plan how we were going to serve it. We’d all wear the same thing and make it like a business. I remember one year Jenna, Amber, and I were the only ones doing it and we all wrote up little slips about who owed what. It was like running your own little ice cream shop.

I always used to go on the camping trips to the Cape. I was never allowed to go on the mountain ones. They always said I was too young and that I wouldn’t be able to do it. That was very aggravating to me because at Sudbury Valley you’d be able to do whatever you want, and then all of a sudden there was that restriction. They didn’t let me go until I was old enough that I didn’t want to go any more because I was having too much fun at school!

I could talk about pranks for hours — hiding people’s shoes, or putting somebody’s lunch where it doesn’t belong or stuff like that. I remember some of the boys pulling pranks on the girls, more than the other way around. My brother and his friend used to catch mice down in the basement and take the trap with the mouse in it and run around and scare the girls with it.

One day we were all sitting in the kitchen and Ryan and Jenna were coming down the hill. There was a big joke between all of us that no matter who’s eating what Ryan would want some. Cal was there, and at the time he had a dog and he had some dog food in the school. He was also known for having the best sandwiches, so my brother came up with the idea of making a dog food sandwich and Cal pretending to eat it. Everybody got involved with it, throwing little tidbits in: “Here, put this on, put that on it,” and they even cut out a little bite to make sure it looked authentic. They said, “When Ryan comes down guaranteed he’s going to ask for a bite of the sandwich.” So sure enough Ryan walks in the kitchen and says hello to everybody and the first thing he does is look at Cal and say “Hum, that looks like a good sandwich. Can I have a bite?” Of course he took a bite and everybody in the room cracked up.

When I was younger the School Meeting was boring. As I got older I participated in it more. I was very shy in School Meeting. I never spoke. I would vote and I’d listen, but I didn’t feel what I had to say was important, or I felt it was important but I thought that everybody else would find it ridiculous or not understand the point I was trying to make. I would basically sit there and then discuss it afterwards: “I totally disagree with this,” or, “I agree with this,” and I’d either get really mad or I’d be happy about it. And I’d say, “Ok next time I’m going to say something.” By the time it came to my last years I started speaking, but I had attended meetings regularly from about age eight on! I realized that if I had something legitimate to say, I was listened to. When I was eight I wouldn’t go every week as I did when I was older, but I would go. Sometimes, there were things I was involved with, and I wanted to see what was going to happen, like things with the Cooking Corporation. I was a director of the Cooking Corp. for a long time.

I remember being young and thinking, “OK I’m going to bring this person up. I have a legitimate complaint against them and they’re going to get in trouble for it and they should.” And it would go through the whole judicial process and somebody would come over and say, “Look, let’s mediate this,” or something, and I normally would, but I’d get really annoyed about it because I thought I was proving a point. I felt the staff always wanted to mediate to reduce the aggravation that was going on. But the laws were enforced, and for the most part if you went against them you paid the price, you either were fined or you had to do something. Most kids abided by the rules. Of course, we had our typical trouble-makers, who thrived on going against the rules, but not for the most part.

I was about fifteen when I became a Judicial Clerk. I wanted to know who was doing what, and when, and I figured I should be a clerk and really learn it more because that’s also when I started saying to myself, “Hm, you like this type of stuff. Maybe you could do something with it.” I’ve always been intrigued by criminal justice. It’s interesting to see how people’s minds work against laws, or with laws. When I was very little I found the judicial committee boring because I was taken away from playing on the swings or doing something.

Having a close relationship with the staff was very important for me because I could learn to deal with my problems in school with the help of staff. What I learned from that type of contact helped me through a lot. Margaret was rough on me, which was good. She didn’t let me get away with what I wanted to get away with. I’d be cutesy about something and she’d say, “Hey, you didn’t do it. Do it.” I’d say, “Oh, I’m tired.” And she’d say, “Get in that kitchen and wash those dishes. You cooked with me, you made something, you finish.” That was really good for me.

Criminal justice was something that I was always interested in but I had other interests as well. Biology really appealed to me, but I slowly lost interest in it. Margaret used to say, “You’re a perfect person for the military.” This was intriguing but I never could see myself doing it. Joan would say, “You know, you could be a lawyer someday” or something like that, and I would think, “Yeah, I do like this, don’t I?” I always had encouragement from people saying that I could do anything I wanted to do. Even Mimsy, who I never really talked to much, would say, “Look, you can do it if you want to, and you will.”

People who had nothing to do with the school gave me a hard time about my education because they never understood the philosophy of it, and I’d have to sit and argue. It annoyed me because they didn’t know what it was about. They never had been there. When people said, “What, you’re not doing algebra?” I would say something else I was doing or I would say, “If I want to do it I will do it and I have that over you, because you’re doing it because you have to do it.” It made me very defensive, but it enhanced my confidence. I was confident in school because I was happy there. I also thought I was one step ahead because my friends were older and I was doing the same things they were doing. But I missed a lot of the social aspects of other schools. Sometimes I thought it would be fun and exciting to have proms and the things you could have in a school with a lot more people.

When I was seventeen I decided to leave school because I knew there were other things I wanted to do, and I had done everything I had to at Sudbury Valley. I was at the point where I wanted to travel. I wanted to move on. I was ready for college. I wanted to have a professional education.

It was important to me to defend my thesis because that was something established in school that you did to end it. There was a feeling of accomplishment when it was over with. It was a goal to prepare for. One day, I woke up in the middle of the night and said “Oh, I have to put this down on paper.” And I just started writing. I woke up in the morning and I read it and said, “Ok! I think I’m ready to do my thesis.” I grabbed Joan that day and I said, “I’m ready to do my thesis, this is what I want to do.” It was really scary being in front of all those people. It wasn’t something I was used to. But I thought the questions that were asked were the stupidest questions I ever heard. I’d built myself up for all this and I thought, “Ok, if this question’s asked I can handle it. If this question’s asked . . . ” I got there, and after saying in my thesis what my goals in life were, people asked me, “What are your goals in life?” I said, “Well, not to sound redundant but… this is what I’m doing, this is what I’d like to do.” I thought it was going to be more challenging than it was. But the minute it was over my stomach just dropped and I thought, “Hm, that’s it. It’s over. No more Sudbury Valley for me.”