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Daniel Greenberg

     We always felt that Sudbury Valley was the best place to develop each child's unique potential to the fullest. That was a given for us from day one. The question is, how does this beautiful concept relate to setting up a school? It turns out that, when you think of the notion of developing each child's unique destiny, you realize that it connects directly into the great debate of Nature vs. nurture. And the fact is that, at least in this juncture in human history, no one has an answer to the question of which of these is the determining factor, or the most important factor, or what relative weight can be given to each one. Both factors seem to play a role. So, for us, the question became, how does the school environment relate to each of these two factors, assuming that they both play a role? How does the school environment help each child to realize their own destiny, whether you consider that destiny to be determined by Nature or by nurture?

By  KATIE COLEMAN

The European Democratic Education Conference, 2017, seems like a lifetime ago now but it has taken the last two months to fully process everything we took away from it.  For those of you unfamiliar with Eudec, it is a yearly event held in Europe, bringing together democratic schools and projects, as well interested individuals from all over Europe and further afield too.  The conference is incredibly intense, where enthusiasm runs wild and is both utterly infectious and impossible to contain. In fact it was almost impossible to remember that democratic education is not widely known about in the UK.

I'm not sure I have experienced 'community' quite like it.

Exclusive to AERO, by teacher and AERO member 

Amy Kuphal

High school students spend much of their day feeling and being useless. I know this because I teach these wildly creative, intelligent, and hilarious group we call "teens." Sadly, though, day after day these kids shuffle from class to class, only minimally engaged in the course material and very rarely, if ever, using their knowledge to benefit the greater society.

As a society, we expect our young adults to spend 13 years of their lives being taught to (more if you count college years) as they passively take notes on all the things that they will "have to know" in order to possibly be able to become a fully functioning and respectable adult. Only after numerous years of collecting knowledge will they be given permission to get to the work of bringing meaning to their own lives and the lives of those around them.

Daniel Greenberg

Everyone has heard the aphorism, "To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions." Much energy has been expended on trying to discover how to formulate "right questions" in any field of endeavor. But people seldom give much thought to the obverse dictum. At Sudbury Valley, it has more significance than the original.

No matter how much people read or hear about the school, no matter how many students or parents they meet, no matter how many graduates they encounter, they inevitably come around to the same old query: "What courses do you have?" In an era characterized by the quest for simple, unambiguous solutions, "courses" are thought to cure ignorance much as penicillin cures bacterial disease. They are the magic bullet, the universal panacea. In high school, a certain specified number of courses means a diploma. In college, the right mixture produces a degree. In the professions, course credits mean financial and career advancement. In business, they mark the road toward the Executive Suites. Do you want your car repaired properly? The TV ad tells you to go to the dealer whose servicemen have course certificates on the wall. Courses are the rites of passage, everywhere. It hardly makes a difference what the contents are, or whether they are retained for any length of time. (When I was teaching Physics at the university level, I remember sitting around with colleagues on the faculty who would laughingly admit that they couldn't come close to passing the courses that were being taught to their students.)