Impressions on Sudbury Schooling

One of my main regrets in life is getting a bachelor's degree. I've sometimes wondered if I would've had a better experience if I went to the University of Washington instead of BYU, but honestly I think my beef is more with formal education in general. I was homeschooled and got used to having a lot of flexibility in what I spent my time on, and being buried in coursework all the time just sucks in comparison. Especially when "coursework" is just a euphemism for "fake work."

I've often thought over the years about how I think education should be done. One K-12-related thought I had a while ago was to have classes for only the core subjects—reading, writing, and math—and let students spend the rest of their time on whatever interests them. Even for reading and writing, students should pick the topics. I had an English 101 class at community college where they made us write papers about poems and short stories and other things that I wasn't interested in and thus had to fake it. So dumb.

Anyway, fast forward to a few months ago. I stumbled across a few articles by Peter Gray, a researcher who's spent a lot of time studying the importance of play in child development. I read his book Free to Learn which basically just talks about how awesome this place called Sudbury Valley School is. I'd never heard of it, but in a nutshell, they basically take my idea above and say "why stop at reading, writing, and math? Why are those subjects so special that we have to force kids to learn them on our terms? Huh? Huh?"

So yeah: it's a school without classes, homework, or exams. They've got several acres about half-an-hour west of Boston, and kids just have to show up for 5 hours a day. The rules—including budget, hiring, and firing—are all decided by students, democratically. And apparently it works—well enough that several dozen "Sudbury schools" have been started in other places (the OG Sudbury Valley School started in 1968, so there's been a decent amount of time for the ideas to spread).

More about the "apparently it works" thing. There are tons of anecdotes; a lot less data. I'm still reading up on a couple studies that have been done on the graduates but haven't gotten far yet. My current mental model of the school, speaking in generalizations, and mostly based on the anecdotes, is that:

• students end up with strong self-motivation and interpersonal skills
• they learn less math then they would have otherwise
• but they're usually able to catch up quickly on math or any other subjects that they decide they need (e.g. while preparing for the SAT)
• they know what they're interested in and care a lot about pursuing it; they're less concerned about money
• they attend college in high rates, and only when it's actually helpful for a career path they want to follow
• a lot of graduates go into entrepreneurship
• graduates are almost always glad they went to Sudbury

Overall I'm really interested in the model. I do have a couple concerns, one articulated by a mustachian who visited a nearby Sudbury-style school (but not the original one):

In watching videos and speaking with some of the students, they seemed very confident -- a real plus. It also seemed like they took the students who were into drama from my high school and gave them their own school. Nothing wrong with that per se, other than that I question whether it is truly "open learning" if so many of these kids are gravitating to the same interests.

In other words, intrinsic motivation isn't. The things we end up being interested in are influenced by our environments. Imagine a particular kid being put into two alternate universes:

• In the first universe they attend a Sudbury school and learn a bit of math (perhaps some algebra). They could learn more math if they wanted to, but they don't really want to and instead go into a non-technical field.

• In the second universe they also have an educational experience with lots of freedom, but they're given more encouragement of some form to learn math. They end up getting more interested in technical things and have a career in STEM.

It seems plausible to me (1) that these different outcomes would indeed follow some of the time from whether or not the student had a Sudbury education, and (2) that the student, if they could observe both universes, would prefer the one with the STEM career.

Second, I'm also interested to see if the studies have any info about graduates' life satisfaction after they have kids. Becoming a parent really flips the equation around in terms of do-what-you-love. You can live cheaply when you're single; life gets much more expensive when you have dependents. Money is freedom.

To some extent this is all a moot point because there isn't a Sudbury school near where I live (there used to be one until it shut down a few years ago—dang!). I might be down to try to start one up at some point... but I won't be in the financial position to do that any time soon (did I mention that money is freedom?), and honestly, I really wonder whether all the time and energy of being a founder again (ugh) would really be worth it over just homeschooling my kids.

The Sudbury founder Daniel Greenberg has some choice words about "unschooling", which is a type of homeschooling similar to the Sudbury approach in that there's no curriculum. In an interview, he said the core point is that children have evolved to learn by being embedded within a community. In terms of education, the family is there mainly to get kids into the community. i.e. kids learn better from each other (especially from kids of other ages) than from their parents.

That seems really plausible to me! Some people say poo-poo to that idea, but I'm not one of those people. I just don't think that the downsides of homeschooling/unschooling are as inevitable as Daniel Greenberg seems to think they are. For sure, one of the main failure modes of homeschooling is when the parent(s) are too controlling, and perhaps one of the main benefits of a Sudbury school is that it forces parents to not be that way. But that's not how my homeschooling experience was, and I'm pretty confident I can homeschool my kids and still have them be "embedded in the community" so to speak rather than just, like, being home all the time.