The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts is an amazing place. If you’ve never heard of it, prepare to be astonished.
In a recent issue of New Republic, Mark Oppenheimer explains the school this way:
The school was founded in 1968, and it currently has about 150 students, ages four to 19. The students aren’t grouped by grade level—there is no first grade, second grade, etc. There are also no grades in the sense of marks: A, B, C. There is no curriculum, and no required classes, although sometimes students organize to ask a staff member to give a class on a certain subject. Nobody is required to be anywhere at any given time. School opens at 8:30 in the morning and closes at 5:30 in the afternoon, and students are expected to be present for at least five hours during that time; they may stay longer if they wish. There are eight staff members (they aren’t called teachers), whom students may seek out with questions, for help, or just to chat.
Now before reading further or making any judgments, I would urge you to read Oppenheimer’s article in its entirety here. It’s extremely enlightening.
Currently there are 35 Sudbury-model schools in 15 states and six foreign countries and each of them operates on basically a not-school-as-we-know-it paradigm. Yes, students do learn how to read and write. Yes, they do understand what school entails and yes they do leave with knowledge of many, many things and a hunger for education. And over 80 percent of them go on to college.
So, if it works for them, why can’t it work for us? What if some higher education institutions followed the Sudbury model? Yes, I can hear the readers of this blog gasping.
It could never work. What about majors? What about grades? Are the students mature enough for this? How would they graduate?
Again, according to Oppenheimer, here’s how Sudbury students graduate:
Students may enroll at the school until whatever age they like, at which point they may petition for a high school diploma. To get it, they have to explain, orally or in writing, how they are prepared for adulthood.
WHAT! College couldn’t do that. Parents would not think they were getting their money’s worth. Students might actually do very little. Discipline would be a nightmare. (Read the article to see how discipline works at Sudbury.)
Yes, a university using this model would need to have requirements for a degree that are considerably more rigorous than just an explanation about maturity because students are, we hope, considerably more mature. But these requirements still could be very open-ended, couldn’t they?
Would/could this actually, really, honestly work? In the last post, I posited the sad fact of students not even wanting to learn. Now I’m positing the possibility of no actual curriculum or courses. Have I gone crazy?
I think that thinking about drastic models for change in any area, particularly education, is good for society. Education is rooted (and some would say stuck) in the methods and practices and ideas of the distant past. But higher education is changing in numerous ways.
Not only do we have online learning, but we also have schools that teach by reading the great books, and schools that concentrate on cooperative learning, and schools like Evergreen State College in Washington, that offer innovative interdisciplinary, collaborative and team-taught academic programs.
So why can’t one more of those ways be Sudbury-like universities? They wouldn’t be for every student, but they certainly could benefit some.
Pondering change is easy though. Enacting change is, unfortunately, very difficult. But it can be done.
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