Sample Chapter

Scott Gray

“If you want a person to really be able to take what life brings them, you’ve got to make sure that they feel power over their own lives, control over their own lives from day one.” 

Hanna: Scott, you came to the school when you were ten years old. Why did you come here?

Scott: Like so many people, I came here because I had trouble, because I could not stand school, and they could not stand me. So I think it was to everyone’s benefit for me to come here.

Hanna: Was it difficult for your parents, philosophically?

Scott: I think so. I think it was very difficult. Part of it is that the school philosophically is deeper and harder to understand than it can appear. I think my father thought he knew what the school was about, and he didn’t really. And it took him some time to be comfortable with my being here. My mother had the sort of wisdom to say that she didn’t need to know what it was about if her little boy was happy.

Hanna: I know this will embarrass you, but you were obviously very intelligent and quite precocious in understanding the world around you. And especially sensitive to other people’s coercion or trying to get at your life. You’re pretty confident about your own self. That’s probably the way you were raised: you didn’t lose your belief that you can be the master of your life within your family. But it’s interesting to me that other parents, who have a kid who is not so successful academically, worry because they think the way to success is to succeed in school. With you we have parents who worry about their successful kid. So you were so unhappy they just let you come here.

Scott: Well, partly because it was in the early ‘80s, and partly because of who they were individually, I don’t think that it was as hard for them to accept that this would be okay. My father was, without question, an academic superstar but most of his life he was in humble surroundings in small towns—in Minnesota, and in Vermont—working-class areas, and he never had any discomfort about that. I think that to the extent he cared about academia, he had no concerns about learning academics according to one’s own likes on one’s own. Because that’s what he did, his interests drew him when they drew him.

Hanna: So, you came here, and you think you understood the school as a ten year old?

Scott: Well, certainly not. I understood what it wasn’t. And that was enough. It was not a place where I was going to be made not only to do what others were telling me but made to thank them for it.

Hanna: What did you do all day when you were ten?

Scott: When I first came to school, in 1980, I remember very vividly that this school made one big mistake back in those days, which we have since corrected—we corrected, actually, the first year I came to work as a staff member; but I remember very vividly that when I came and for years after that, the staff at the start of the year would post signs and sign-up sheets that said: here’s the class I’m able to teach if people want it.
Most staff had something like that on the bulletin board. And I remember I was here in the school that all I knew for sure is that this was better than the place that I left, and I had to hang onto it. I had to find a way to fit it and make my way here. And when you see a big list from the adults and leaders in the community that you’re joining, you say: well, that’s how you do it. And I signed up right away for four classes, including Hanna Greenberg’s chemistry class. I’ll take this opportunity to say thank goodness we got rid of that, because it was misleading, it was frightening, it was not what the school was about. It was the wrong introduction to the school to walk in and see those signs on that board.

Hanna: Why do you think we did it?

Scott: I think you did it for a lot of reasons. For one, the school was young, and it had not quite shaken out in the culture that everyone really, really, really does get to know each other and know what they are capable of and do. For another, I think that it was done because it came from the idea of sort of the open community in which academia could be pursued as an aside. In a town of 30,000, someone would have to post it somewhere who’s able to be a tutor in this or that or the other thing.

Hanna: So you are ten years and you signed up, how long did you survive classes?

Scott: Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I was I think two or three weeks on, I was doing all my homework and studiously taking my notes and devoting an hour each day to sitting with those notes, seeing them as the price to be here. And one day, I’ve got all my papers laid out, and a staff member, Joan Rubin, came up to me and posed a simple question. I wish I could match her tone because this question was not just the word, it was the tone. She just looked and said: “Why?” There was a presumption in her tone that said: There’s nothing wrong with it, but presumably you have a reason, you wouldn’t do it without a reason—that told me that external reasons, this idea that I’m going to fit into this society, that this is how you get along here, was not true. And that it was okay to just drop it. I never went back to any of those classes. That was the end.

Hanna: So, what did you do? Did you play outside?

Scott: Yes. Also the first year I spent a lot of time sitting in every corner of the school, trying to understand what the different groups of kids were doing I formed friendships but I liked to know what other groups of people were doing. So, when I wasn’t playing with the guys that I sort of saw as my buddies, I would go somewhere else and be on the fringes of the conversation and sometimes join it to a greater or lesser extent.

Hanna: Did you enjoy the age-mixing here?

Scott: Oh absolutely. One of the most important realizations for me came from your son, Michael, who was probably seventeen. I asked for his help to certify me for the darkroom and to show me how to use it. Over the course of working with him, he showed such genuine interest in me and my opinions and my thoughts, while sharing his opinions and thoughts, in a way that can be described by no other word than friendship. The reality that my age had nothing to do with our conversations, had nothing to do with his attitude towards me, had a huge impact on me: to realize that he was ready to take anyone seriously, including this new kid who was just over half his age, and treat them as human. That was really an education in this school.
It was not necessarily that I did not like adults, it was that I assumed that adults always had an agenda; no matter how hard they tried to bury it, they had it somewhere.

Hanna: But that did not extend to the teenagers.

Scott: No. I never felt that was an issue.

Hanna: When you left you were ready to go. Were you then thinking of maybe one day coming to be staff?

Scott: I was. I wrote about it in my thesis (when we had theses). It was mentioned as an aside. I wrote at length that I did not know what to expect in my life, that I understood that life unfolds in so many ways, and there’s so much to discover about yourself and the world, and so much change that happens, that there was no reasonable way for me to say what job I might get. But that among the jobs I listed, I said I could picture myself coming back here.

Hanna: That’s very interesting. I was thinking that you wanted to study neuroscience or some kind of psychology based on biology.

Scott: I actually attended college for political science with an interest in the historical angle, but Boston College was the wrong place to choose for the historical angle. Boston College prepares people for pre-law and local politics. But by dabbling in the theology department and the history department I worked it out.
I learned an awful lot about Jesuits. One of my best friends is a professor and was a middle-aged priest named Father Madigan who I felt very close to. I still remember one semester he complained to me: “I don’t know why no one does the reading.”

Hanna: So between the age of ten and eighteen you didn’t do any academics—not at home or here—at least no taking of tests, preparing for tests, no writing unless you wanted to do it on your own, no having somebody critique your writing and probably not doing algebra, etc. Did you take SATs?

Scott: I did.

Hanna: Did you do well?

Scott: Well, I did not aim to do better than the university I was applying to. I admit I had a very direct aim. I took the sample SAT books, gave myself a sample test, and said okay how do I compare to the high end of the range for acceptance to the university I want to attend. I discovered my verbal was great, I don’t need to worry about that. My math, I could see exactly what kinds of questions that were really foreign to me, so I saw what to do. I circled the questions I had problems with, I talked to David Gould.
He was a staff member here, and I said, “I’ve got a couple weeks till my test and I’d like to learn this. I’ve taken the sample test and I’ve got some questions. How is one expected to calculate this, or what is that asking?” He kind of went through it with me. Between his advice and a math book, I was able to look everything up with direction about what I was looking for, really mostly trigonometry. And then I took another sample test, it looked fine and I went back to David and said: what can I spruce up here?

Hanna: Do you remember Peter Shirley? Peter Shirley told me I want to take the SATs, and I said “Peter, you have to really study for a few months.” He said, “I don’t.” I said, “How come?” He said, “The answer is in the question.” I said, “That’s usually not the question they ask you.” A few months later he took the SATs. He called me on a Saturday night. I said, “Peter, what happened?” He said, “I think you’ll be very happy to hear that I got a very high score on my math.” So, what is it about you kids who go to Sudbury Valley? Is it confidence, is it arrogance, what is it? What is it? You never do any math, and you think in two weeks you can just learn what you need?

Scott: Other alumni and I have had this conversation a lot. I’m pretty convinced there’s a few things at work. The first is they don’t take it too seriously. If you go in to any test thinking it’s the end of the world, you’re never going to be able to pass it. You’re going to be shitting bricks, you’re going to be so full of anxiety that you’re not going to be able to do it. You’ve got to be able to face it with a degree of seriousness but with a degree of humor. Just understand that it is what it is, and it’s nothing more than that.

Hanna: And at the age of seventeen, kids have that wisdom?

Scott: People develop that wisdom naturally any place they’re not treated like animals in a cage. When you spend your whole day without any time that’s your own, without any power over yourself, it’s hard to take anything as a joke. If you want a person to really be able to take what life brings them, you’ve got to make sure that they feel power over their own lives, control over their own lives from day one.

Hanna: That’s what the little kids feel.

Scott: Absolutely.

Hanna: But you came when you were ten. How long did it take you to get there?

Scott: I was helped a little bit by the fact that, as my friend Hanna Greenberg likes to say, this is a relatively easy school for rebels because they’ve managed to maintain their person over incredible odds.
So, I came having protected myself. But what really did take me time was to trust the adults. I remember very vividly that my first year in this school, I wasted so much time attending School Meetings that I had zero interest in because I was watching for when the staff pulled the strings. I was sure that was going on there. Really it took over a year before I said okay, I guess that this is for real, that this is an actual debate—no one’s pulling punches, no one’s hiding their opinions. The staff certainly have opinions on things and share them but they’re not overbearing. And that was very significant.

Hanna: Scott, did you read any of our literature, or when you came to the enrollment interview, did you listen to the answers? How does a kid come here and figure out the philosophy?

Scott: Every kid is different, obviously, but I think for most kids it’s hard to walk into this place and not feel a calling—and also for most adults who have not already killed whatever remains in them of their infancy, I think it’s hard to come here as a young person and not feel something tugging at you that you’ve missed, and you haven’t had for a long time.

Hanna: Did it help you that the staff were on a first name basis? Was that significant to you?

Scott: What was significant is not that they were first names, but that we were all on an equal footing. If I had been Mr. Gray and you had been Ms. Greenberg, it would have been equal. It’s not the fact that it was casual: that it was the same standard either way is what made it good.

Hanna: Did you feel respected?

Scott: No question. That was vitally important. I’m not alone in that. This is what any kid I’ve ever met hungers for in this society.

Hanna: How do you define respect?

Scott: Respect is faith that the person can handle their own affairs.

Hanna: How long do you think it takes a kid, just from observation? A year?

Scott: I think a year’s about how long it takes, but I’ve been here now for 38 years, and I still learn more about this school and what it is to be here.

Hanna: You were a young man of eighteen. Your father is a professor, your mother is extremely well-educated and intellectual and a poet, I believe. And she had a great influence on you. You were very close. All I had to do is meet your mother, Anita, to know that she was a power intellectually, right? You began going to college; did you enjoy it?

Scott: Well, no. I was in a funny kind of position. I sort of knew I wouldn’t enjoy it. My terms for going to college were: I was not going to pay for the privilege of going to college. And I was not going to ask my parents for money. I was going to get a full scholarship.

Hanna: But you didn’t have to because your father was a professor in the college that you went to.

Scott: That’s right. So I was not going to look at any other school than the school that I could go to without paying. They certainly offered to pay. But I wanted to be in control of my own life to the extent that I could. And if I went to college, this transformative moment in so many people’s lives, on my parents’ dime, at the point in my life that I’m claiming I can take care of myself from here on, it just would not have felt right to me.
That’s a peculiarity in me. I worry about being indebted to people a lot. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, I just couldn’t picture myself putting my parents in debt for something that was supposedly for my future.

Hanna: But they probably had a college fund from the day you were born.

Scott: Well, if they did, then they should have saved it for something more useful.
I went to college believing that I could, with the expense of the room and board and everything else that it takes to go to college, have educated myself better in four years on my own. Let me put it this way: I was not going to ask my parents to pay for something that I didn’t believe in, that was the problem. I went to college saying to myself—I guess it was out of pride—that I always want to be clear of this style of education, but I don’t want, as I go through life, to have people say: oh, sour grapes, you didn’t go, you couldn’t understand. So I went.

Hanna: Was it all the school’s influence, or you had your own perception?

Scott: The school certainly strengthened and gave me more practical arguments in terms of what I saw in my day-to-day life for what my gut said when I was a kid.

Hanna: At that age, what did you want to do when you grew up?

Scott: There were endless possibilities, but I thought that the likely idea was to be a professor of political history. In particular, I was very interested in the politics of the ancient world, of the Bronze Age, of the actual political dynamic in the Mesopotamia Valley in between them and the kingdom of Egypt.

Hanna: So you might have gone to college because that was a secure idea. Did you make friends in college?

Scott: Yes.

Hanna: Was that an important part for you?

Scott: Probably not that important for me, actually. Which is one reason that college wasn’t that important for me. For a lot of people, going to college is very important because they want to be close friends with a lot of people going through the same things they are. For me, I felt I had a lot of friends in college but some of my closest were not people at all like me. They were professors.

Hanna: You were born a good writer. Did you improve your writing in college?

Scott: My writing has certainly improved over the years, but I think the four years I was in college it basically stayed at a standstill.

Hanna: Did you feel like you were wasting your time?

Scott: I did, but I feel like I signed up to waste my time.

Hanna: What did you do after you graduated?

Scott: I went on to a lot of things. I started a couple different small businesses. In sequence. I think it was at the same time, actually, when I was doing computer consulting for a lot of people, and I also started a retail store—a game store.

Hanna: Aren’t you one of the kids who introduced the computer to the school?

Scott: A number of kids in the school had some access to computers here and at home—or in my case at Boston College where my father worked. I worked with the big machine there. And with the personal computer kind of exploding on the scene, it was something that a lot of the kids were very interested in. We did a lot of fundraising and we bought an Apple II.

Hanna: So by the time you’re eighteen you’re pretty advanced.

Scott: I was reasonably good at what I was doing with it, yes.

Hanna: Was it all self-taught?

Scott: At the time there were not a whole lot of other options.

Hanna: So you did some consulting. How did people come to you? How did you get clients?

Scott: Word-of-mouth was helpful. After getting a couple jobs, suddenly everyone who I worked for, who I did a good job for, had a friend who also needed help. And sometimes it was personal, getting people’s own computers set up and so forth. But more often it was industrial, getting a business set up that wanted help, initial computer networking, getting cash registers logging in to a local server in some way or another, that kind of thing.

Hanna: But you weren’t thinking of Sudbury Valley at the time.

Scott: Well, I couldn’t stop thinking about Sudbury Valley. I maintained my relationship with the school by joining the Board of Trustees as soon as I left the school. So it gave me an excuse to come on campus when I wanted, and I made use of it. I cared about the school.

Hanna: Did you have a car?

Scott: I did, yes. Working as I was, consulting for a lot of different people, I needed a car. I needed to be able to go to New Hampshire, I needed to go to the western part of the State.

Hanna: You made a lot of money doing your consulting?

Scott: I don’t think I made that much money.

Hanna: Didn’t you make more money than we did here at the school as staff?

Scott: At that time, yes—no question.

Hanna: On one hand you want to be independent of your parents and you also like to buy books and maybe computers, so money was important.

Scott: Money is always important.

Hanna: When did it come to your head that it might be worthwhile to work here, aside from the fact that our salaries were not fantastic?

Scott: Well, recompense comes in all kinds of forms. There were a few factors. It was a concert of things, one of which is that this school and what this school is about has always been not just useful for me, but deeply intellectually interesting for me. It wasn’t just that I was a beneficiary of the way that the school operated, but that I was actually deeply interested in questions of how to let people be independent and how to help people keep their independence in life.

Hanna: Did you like children?

Scott: Yes, absolutely.

Hanna: So you wanted to do it for children?

Scott: Well, I think that I wanted to do it for anyone, which was one reason I also worked at the VA Hospital; I worked part-time with a professor who was working at Harvard in theory of mind studies at that hospital.

Hanna: Injured people or PTSD?

Scott: We studied people who had suffered particular head injuries. And we were measuring the differences in certain kinds of cognitive abilities between people whose damage was in the right hand sphere vs. the left hand sphere. There was only one person I ever interviewed for whom his injuries were related to military service. But the others were stroke patients mostly.
I went into it for the biological question that we were pursuing but I found it very fulfilling to work with people who were trying to capture their independence back. And less heartening for the ones who did not succeed in doing so, but to be sure the ones who were working and struggling and getting somewhere, there’s something very beautiful about that. And I think there’s a lot of the same pleasure in children who from the earliest age are on the incline trying to capture total control of their lives, and wanting to help them do that.

Hanna: I remember, and you can correct me, that you applied to graduate school and probably got in and you were going to study—

Scott: Cognitive psychology, not biologically oriented, more the software, was what I was looking at.

Hanna: Is that related at all to your work at computers?

Scott: Absolutely. When you look at the different branches of psychology that people go into, the only people at that time who were going into cognitive psychology were computer nerds. There was a real overlap there.

Hanna: The fact that your father is a professor of psychology did not have influence with you?

Scott: Well, that’s dinner table conversation. I suspect there is always some genetic overlap in terms of what interests a person. And then you add to that an environment in which so many of the people who crossed my personal life were graduate students in that department.

Hanna: Did you come here in order to support yourself? Did you look for a job?

Scott: No, no. Actually, it’s funny: the thing that led to my coming here was I had had a little bit of a dry spot in consulting jobs, on computer consulting, for a variety of reasons. Not a small part of it was the tech crash back then. But between that what happened was two things. First, my work with people at Harvard had led me to a certain amount of wistfulness that I was trying to direct, that I was trying to understand. Something was missing. It didn’t take me a whole lot of thinking to realize that what I found missing in the intellectual life at Harvard, was the pursuit of answers to questions and truth and all of these great things that one thinks that one’s pursuing in university—the real pursuit of those things rather than what I frankly found far too often questions being asked not in order to find a real answer, but questions being asked in order to sound smart. And I found myself, I think, edging a little bit towards the depressed: Is this really what life is?
I started thinking wistfully back to the last place I had been in which there really was open intellectual honesty without any fear of being wrong, and that was this school. And that was the kids in this school and the adults in this school. And that was what I missed.

Hanna: So the thought came to your head that you wanted to be staff?

Scott: It certainly was dancing through my mind. Then I was in this period in which I had been sort of between major jobs doing computer consulting for a period of time, and something very specific happened. I got called for an interview and I debated whether or not to go, but I went. The job paid an excellent salary, something like ten times my opening salary offer from Sudbury Valley School.
I went to the interview. It was for managing computer networking for a parochial school on Long Island. I couldn’t believe the amount they were paying; they didn’t even have that kind of budget, but that’s what the offer was. And I couldn’t stand anything about the place. Then of all things, I got an offer.
Without thinking, I said no. Then I thought: I can’t tell Sharon that I said no! But why the hell did I say no? I realized it was because this is too important to me. That was when I decided to talk to my friends, Mimsy and Danny, after the next Trustees’ meeting, about whether they think it would be wise or unwise for me to start working at Sudbury Valley. One of the other jobs I had at that time—and this is not insignificant—was doing some public relations work for the school, just very part-time. So I was in regular contact with the school during this period. But it never quite occurred to me to think about a serious run for staff until then. After the fact, I realized that I was probably being wooed for a staff position when I was asked to do the online PR to begin with.

Hanna: So, Scott, finally you became staff. What keeps you going?

Scott: Everything. There is not a day goes by in which you don’t learn something new in this job, in which you don’t find three things about other people that you didn’t know, in which you acquire two skills you didn’t know you had it in you to get. So many things happen here of every variety. One day we’re dealing with very direct physical challenges of the weather; another day we’re dealing with legal complaints; another day we’re trying really desperately to solve a difficult problem about how people live in the real world. In our School Meetings we’re always debating, trying to figure out the right solutions in a way that lets people be themselves.

Hanna: So is it an intellectual thing only?

Scott: No, but I hope what I’m describing doesn’t sound intellectual. It’s not just intellectual. You’re working with your gut when you’re working with these questions. Obviously, you’ve got to use your head to make sure you’re not doing something that is going to make things worse. But at the same time, to know what’s important, you’ve got to be able to understand what others feel is important.

Hanna: Scott, I think a big motivation for people is finding a line of work that is also a meaningful use of their effort and time, which I think this school is for me. It’s not about a particular skill; it’s more like I’m doing it because that’s my calling type of thing.

Scott: Well, I guess I agree. A calling is broader, although I don’t know what it is exactly. I think that few people have only one job that would work for them, but I do think that it was very important for me to have my ultimate career—the place that I work at—be a place that is dedicated to helping people to take responsibility for themselves. That’s why I could have pictured myself working at the VA hospital and helping rehabilitate people.
Every life is meaningful to someone in some way. I don’t think there’s any job to be done for which there isn’t someone who would not feel proud and pleasure in doing it.

Hanna: I understand that, but there’s a difference between pride and pleasure of problem-solving and being successful in the world than having more of a—I hate the word—a spiritual aspect to what you’re doing, which satisfies more than just material or intellectual needs. But is this an idealistic job?

Scott: We get our hands too dirty for us to call this an idealistic job, I think. It’s a job where you always know why you’re doing what you’re doing. You can hear them showing it right in the next room—the joy, the life force.

Hanna: So it fits your ideology and your everyday pleasure to see people being allowed to pursue their own selves.

Scott: Absolutely. To my mind, it’s not just what I like, it’s what I think is the minimum we can do for each other.

Hanna: So you are very pleased with your job here.

Scott: Absolutely.

Hanna: Do you want to add anything?

Scott: Well, there’s not a person who has spent any time in this school, who’s not learned from Hanna Greenberg the real value of looking for what other people have to say and digging for the gold in helping them find it.

Hanna: And you really think you learned that?

Scott: Oh, not as well as you, but I am a better person because of that. And I mean it. I think that being in contact with a person who has that skill, at the level you do, has been tremendous for everyone who has been in contact with you.

Hanna: Well, thank you Scott. You have succeeded in embarrassing me totally.