Trust

Would you actually turn back the hands of time and be a kid again if you had the ‘sus’ power to shape shift or time travel? Or would you want to just simply go back to the ‘kid’ version of who you have become and re-live it, feel it all again, one… Read more ›

There is a myth out there, a false idea called the “real world”. “It’s not like that in the real world.” “When you get out there in the real world, you’ll see.” The idea fed to children and students is that they must do unpleasant things to prepare… Read more ›

Children Are Like Locs by Anika Prather  The Living Water School, Alexandria, VA This has been the year for me personally, as a mom and as a school founder, to fully mentally and emotionally grasp that kids do not need our help to… Read more ›

There is a stigma against people who are perceived to be “doing nothing". The greatest fear that most adults have, vis-a-vis children enrolled in Sudbury Valley, is that those children will do nothing. These fears arise from the failure to see… Read more ›

Take One by Daniel Greenberg If you happen to be sitting in the large front room called “the sewing room", you might notice that every day at 11:00 a.m., eight people walk into the adjacent book-lined “seminar room". What you are seeing… Read more ›

What is the justification for trying to guide children and tell them what they need to be successful adults? Does anyone have a right to interfere with their process of finding out who they are and what their purpose in life is?

Reading for pleasure and knowledge has always been a meaningful part of my life. So when my three children started SVS at young ages I couldn’t help but wonder how they would learn to read without the direct instruction I had experienced as a child… Read more ›

It isn't always easy to take the road less traveled. When my daughter first started attending Sudbury Valley School, she was five-years-old. Parents, friends and colleagues didn’t understand the school when I told them about it. Their questions… Read more ›

For 50 years, Sudbury Valley Schools, and other schools inspired by its model, have been providing children with a place to grow like no other. Our starting point is treating children who enroll at school, from age four and up, as human beings… Read more ›

All too often parents, educators, and even students ask us why we are so adamant about not offering any courses at SVS, and why we only teach in response to the students’ initiatives. They wonder why we don’t just offer a few “required” subjects and… Read more ›

This article is reprinted from The Field, the newsletter of Fairfield School. There is a debate among educators regarding the best way to teach reading and writing. In one camp are the whole language proponents. They believe that reading and writing… Read more ›

Sudbury Valley has just begun the 2017-2018 school year – and an exciting one it is! This will be our 50th year of operation, the half century mark for what was once a “far-out” experiment. Born in the tumultuous 1960s, SVS was destined to outlive… Read more ›

An Introduction, by Hanna Greenberg “In Israel, where I come from, there are two “Sudbury” schools, and both are thriving.  One is in the heart of the city of Jerusalem, and the other, Kanaf (which means “wings”) is in the Golan Heights,… Read more ›

When talking about the school, we all find others confused about what we believe, and about what we do. As with most confusion, much of the confusion can be reduced to language. People casually use certain terms loosely and interchangeably as a… Read more ›

Children are born with one overriding drive. They seek to grow up and to gain mastery over their own lives. Any child who grows up in a wider culture that values freedom is naturally jealous of what s/he feels to be her/his right to pursue happiness… Read more ›