The Meaning of Education

From Worlds in Creation

By Daniel Greenberg

The Meaning of Education

I believe one of the key reasons Sudbury Valley has had difficulty giving parents a sense of security about sending their children here is the inadequacy of people’s grasp of the primary goal of education and how it relates to children and to society. This is also the reason mainstream schools have had trouble understanding their continuing failure, despite repeated efforts at “redefining goals” and “reforming education”. Virtually all the innovations in schools have been, and continue to be, in such areas as curriculum, administration, pedagogical methodology, and other such secondary levels, all of which depend in their essence on the fundamental goal of education which they serve. This deficiency at the most fundamental level of understanding cannot be remedied by any amount of exertion on other levels. Comprehending the primary goal of education seems to me to be well worth considerable effort. Let’s proceed, then, from the beginning.

A child is born, and ultimately grows into a mature member of the community. What is it that society expects to develop in the child during the transition? Or, put differently, what is the basic nature of the transformation that converts a child into an adult? The answer to these questions is that maturity consists of the ability to cope independently, continuously, and successfully with the demands of life.

The ability to cope is a multi-dimensional, open-ended entity. It includes a great number of cooperating processes, the known ones not fully understood, unknown ones yet to be discovered. A partial list contains such activities as sensory perception, observation, model-building, integration of data, analysis, problem-solving, contemplation, action, reaction, remembering, and learning. This is an impressive, almost daunting, array.

The requirement that adults be able to act independently does not mean that they must be loners, or even be “able to go it alone” in life. It means, rather, that they have the wholeness to deal with life without being dependent on others for their basic decision-making processes. Because man is a social animal, it can be taken for granted that independence implies and includes the skills necessary for cooperation with other people to attain aims that are mutually beneficial and better achieved in conjunction with others.

That adults must be able to cope continuously means that they have to be able to sustain themselves day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, for the balance of their lifetime. Biology books like to point out the almost miraculous nature of the heart, which beats without fail millions of times in the span of a person’s life. Much more incredible is the ability of the adult mind to cope with life’s myriad challenges without fail year after year. Billions of inputs are processed, billions of exigencies taken care of, not just now and then, but for the entire period the person is alive.

The need for adults to be able to cope successfully means that they must find ways to survive, to be mentally and physically healthy, to have their basic physical, emotional, and spiritual needs met, and to have a sense of self-worth that makes them feel that there is a point to their existence.

The demands of life are each and every one of the numberless stresses and challenges that life places on the organism as it fights to survive intact. These range from the profound and intricate (such as the search for meaning, the need to make a livelihood, the yearning for sustained and meaningful relationships with family and friends) to the simple and mundane (such as what to have for breakfast, how to get to work, what to wear).

Even with the brief explications above, it can readily be seen that making the passage from birth to adulthood is a gigantic undertaking. One question immediately presents itself: How on earth did Nature provide for this passage to take place effectively, so that the human species could survive? And, more particularly, given the current insistence that a huge investment in presently-conceived school systems is absolutely essential for the preservation of the world’s future, how did humanity make it through its first million or so years without the benefit of ever-improved curricula, standardized tests, advanced teacher training, psychological counseling, special education, subject specialists, coordinators, administrators, superintendents, teacher’s aides, and all the other equipage we can’t seem to be able to get enough of?¹

I shall proceed in reverse order to take up each segment of my definition of maturation, and try to shed some light on how the natural order has dealt with it through built-in mechanisms that govern the process of growing up from childhood. We start, then, with an examination of the demands of life.

Biological survival dictates that every species is innately endowed with the tools necessary to recognize the demands that life will place upon it. For the most basic needs of life — water, food, and shelter — this should be too obvious to require comment. Even a newborn infant knows when it is hungry or thirsty, and actively seeks the comforting shelter of its mother.

“Industrial Era Thinking” has not, however, omitted even such basic areas from its revisionist scrutiny. Not satisfied with allowing infants to fully develop their own senses of these needs, which would allow these senses to function in a natural way throughout life, Industrial Era Thinking intervenes and dictates specific times for infants, and later children and even adults, to drink and eat, and creates unnatural shelters — cribs, playpens — to substitute for those the children are designed to crave. I have discussed elsewhere the reasons the Industrial Era had for intervening in these natural patterns². But whatever the reasons, the results are clear: people raised to ignore their inborn recognition of these needs lose their native orientation to them, and develop both a dependence on substitutes, and all sorts of disorders associated with these substitutes.

A healthy upbringing gives free reign to children from the very beginnings of their lives to recognize and express their basic needs. The earlier this begins, and the longer it is allowed to develop without intervention, the more likely it is that such children will go through life with a firmly established set of inner-directed guidelines that enable them to distinguish clearly between needs that are real for them, and needs that are artificially introduced by others. Indeed, the worst excesses of our consumer economy can be traced directly to the inability of people to make this distinction, which is a result of being raised according to the principles of Industrial Era Thinking.

Life places other, less obvious, demands on a person, from the very earliest age. The most important of these is the complex of behaviors that I shall call “the need to make sense out of the environment”. Every living being is an organized collection of molecules that relates to its environment by means of a myriad of physico-chemical interactions. Humans are, in addition, endowed with a self-awareness that enables us to think about these interactions, and to strive mightily to give them form and meaning. Such thinking is an activity from which people cannot escape; the human race does not have the option of existing in a non-thinking mode. From the moment of birth, children are designed by nature to employ all their resources in developing a sense of the order of existence.

The most obvious means employed by people in making sense out of the environment are the use of our sensory apparatus, and the processing of data by our brains. Both of these come into play from the moment of birth.

The amount of information a person has to deal with at all times is truly staggering in quantity and in variety. We do not have the slightest inkling of how the processing takes place — how systems are created by the brain to identify, represent, symbolize, organize, and give significance to all this material. All we know is that this happens, and that people are given by nature the tools to make it happen. The simple fact is that if we want people to develop their potential to recognize and deal with life’s demands as fully as possible, we must give them every opportunity to use these innate tools, and refine their abilities to render their environment comprehensible.

The converse of this proposition is also true. Every outside intervention in the ongoing efforts of a person to make sense out of the world makes it more difficult for that person to develop the inner confidence needed to forge ahead. Interference by others can bring about permanent disabilities in cognitive development. Indeed, the more intense the effort to put children through the Industrial Training Process, the more likely is the outcome to be the emergence of a variety of personality, behavior, and learning disorders.

Watch children growing up in an intervention-free home, or attending an intervention-free school such as Sudbury Valley. Watch them closely, and you will see that at every moment, they are determining for themselves what life requires of them at that time. Recognition of these requirements is virtually instantaneous, and sets in motion the complex of reactions that consists of successful coping.

Put in down-to-earth terms, at Sudbury Valley we see children decide for themselves what to do each moment of the day, without any reference to an externally imposed agenda. They figure out when they are hungry and thirsty, when they are warm or cold, when they are energetic or tired. They come to grips with chores they have taken on themselves, and with activities they have arranged. They are at all times directed from within, searching without prompting for harmony between their inner spirit and the world around them.

The requirement that mature adults cope successfully with the demands of life raises a very complex issue — namely, the meaning of “success” as applied to human life. As we shall see, the answer to this is, at the least, paradoxical.

There is not much of a problem in this regard from the vantage point of Industrial Era Thinking. The whole industrial milieu is built around the production of material goods. In such an environment, success is measurable almost wholly by the value of goods accumulated and/or produced. A successful culture is a wealthy one — one that has eliminated “poverty” and has created large reservoirs of productivity. Successful people are individuals who have wealth. Even in those areas where success has other indicators — such as honor, prestige, admiration of peers — these are usually translated into monetary measures, so that people who have a rating by these other indicators are expected to be rewarded with financial and material benefits as well, as a true sign of valuation.

In an industrial society, the patterns of successful living are as routinized as the patterns of production are. There are formulas for success, and anyone unable to follow these faithfully is threatened with failure. An industrial system of raising children and teaching them must impart the proper formulas to them, and make sure they perform accurately. The only thing you get from a mistake in the industrial milieu is a nasty setback, one that could have been avoided by not making the foreseeable error in the first place. In Industrial Era Thinking, one doesn’t learn from mistakes; one learns from successes. Mistakes are signs of ineptness. The educational system that serves an industrial society stresses avoidance of errors, and perfect correctness.

In a post-industrial setting, the goals are entirely different.³ The routinized production of material goods is of minimal interest to people; for the most part, this is relegated to automated machine processes. There is no longer any need for a person to behave in a robotic fashion in order to create material wealth. The whole issue of production of material goods fades into the background. Survival is almost assured in a post-industrial setting, and people find themselves absorbed in an altogether different set of activities.

The focus in post-industrial societies is on creativity and innovation, on finding new ways of looking at things, on inventing a large variety of world models, subject to constant revision and replacement. “What is correct?”, the theme of the linear industrial age, is replaced by “What is interesting?” in the post-industrial setting. The sense of freedom pervading the post-industrial setting is threatening, even terrifying, to people from an industrial society who come into contact with it.

The entire history of the human race shows that people are endowed by nature with the innate ability to use their brains for the creation of a virtually infinite variety of models of reality. The flow of history, and before it of pre-history, is nothing less than the saga of man’s constant innovation, based on past experience and present needs. By the same token, both history and psychology make it evident beyond dispute that creativity demands the pursuit of an endless array of variations, the vast majority of which are rejected as useless. A healthy mind learns virtually from birth to experiment with different world models, and to expect only a tiny fraction of them to pan out. Success, as specified by human nature and as re-invented in the post-industrial era, involves the ability to treat failure as commonplace, and to continue unhampered in the quest for workable models.

The brain is designed to form models of reality from the flood of inputs it receives; and, like every other human activity, this main work of the mind improves with practice. It follows that children allowed to grow up following their own agendas will wage an endless struggle against mental chaos, without any outside intervention. Success therefore is defined for the child, as for the adult, as the ability to continuously form new and better world models, and to reject ones that are no longer useful to the person in meeting the demands of life.

Maturity implies the ability to cope continuously with the demands of life. It is not enough to engage in sporadic bursts of activity; life’s challenges are constantly confronting us, and we need to be responsive to them always if we are to function effectively as adults.

Children are born with the ability to engage in continuous action without being aroused by artificial outside stimuli. There is no such thing as a bored newborn. If children are allowed to pursue their innate drives to master their environment, they will never be bored with this task, since it is inherently endless and fascinating. I cannot stress enough the basic fact that children who are free to use their minds without externally imposed restrictions, will from birth onward engage unceasingly in the activity of model building.

The ability of children to focus and concentrate for extremely long periods of time is dependent on their being free to follow their own internal agendas. Once their attention is diverted to mental tasks imposed on them by others, they begin to lose this ability, as the task at hand is no longer connected to anything that they perceive to be vital to their continued functioning. This phenomenon is commonly observed in all walks of life; it is universally acknowledged that people of almost any age have difficulty in maintaining interest in subjects or activities imposed on them by outsiders. Attention wanders, memory fades, exhaustion rapidly sets in.

This problem has plagued industrial-era schools, which are still committed to enforcing the industrial agenda on their clients. Schools based on Industrial Era Thinking could not afford the luxury of allowing individual variation in activity, since the very existence of a functioning industrial society required a high degree of standardization and dehumanization of the people in the society.

Because such schools had to knock a curriculum into the heads of their students, and because the students perforce had a short attention span, the entire framework of industrial-era schools was built around repeated short doses of indoctrination (or “teaching”, as it was called), chopped up into small segments of time and little chunks of information, and administered with numbing regularity over a long span of time. Even such a carefully designed attempt at mass brainwashing (or “training”) could succeed only as long as the children accepted the basic premise that industrial society required the outcome in order to function effectively.

Once the industrial era began to fade into history, an ever increasing number of children came to realize that the standardization imposed on them was an anachronism. This realization has been more intuitive than analytical, but it is nonetheless widespread. As a result, industrial era schools rapidly have been losing their ability to succeed at all in forcing a standard level of competence on everyone in the limited industrial subjects, no matter how many variations they introduced in the process.

Post-industrial people are called on to give continuous attention to dealing with the highly individualized patterns of their lives. As children growing up, they must accumulate a wealth of experience in applying themselves tirelessly to this task. An effective post industrial education must be entirely free of the tyranny of segmented time. The task becomes the focus. Children in post-industrial schools must learn the exact opposite of what they had to learn in industrial schools — namely, they must be allowed to develop their innate persistence in doggedly pursuing projects until they are satisfied with the results. All attempts to intervene in this development by introducing time slots, semesters, labelled years, timed tests, are destructive to the natural maturation of the child.

Maturity involves the ability to cope independently with the demands of life. This characteristic is one of the most poorly understood of all those I have been discussing.

One of the fundamental realities of existence is the separate individuality of every living being. This atomisation of life is a great mystery, and is no better understood than the essence of life itself. We do not know how the sense of self, of uniqueness, of wholeness, of individuality is developed in a person, but every writer, poet, and philosopher has written copiously on the subject. It is the root cause of the universal loneliness that afflicts mankind, and the starting point for all human social interactions that ultimately lead to cooperation and community.

Life gives people no choice in this matter. We are individuals, and we must act as individuals. Nature provides us with a key tool that enables us to function singly: the personathat each of us is, as defined by self, by character, by personality. A newborn child has it, but it takes years for the child to develop a full awareness of individuality, and it is this long process of development that is the key factor in reaching maturity.

Whatever society people are born into, they must act as independent individuals all their lives. A key difference between one era and another, one culture and another, is the extent to which children are allowed to act uniquely, as determined by their own inner calling and spirit. Industrial societies are constrained to invest a huge amount of energy in playing down the boundaries between one person and another, and in trying to impose a high degree of conformity on the total group of individuals that make up the society. To do this runs entirely contrary to human nature, and therefore takes an extraordinarily harsh and long-lasting period of coercion, often lasting through adulthood until death. The industrial-era schools are but a small cog in the process of industrial homogenization, but they are splendid examples of the cruelty and relentlessness of the application of force to mold the maximum possible degree of uniformity. Industrial societies are not the only ones to act this way, however. Other cultures have sought, and continue to seek, ways of downplaying individual variation, and these too must do so by the application of pressure, especially during childhood.

Post-industrial society depends entirely on the uniqueness of each individual, and hence on people’s ability to define themselves with confidence and self-esteem. For children to grow up with a strong sense of self, they must be free of all the elements of fear that accompany the application of coercion. Terror is the great enemy of independence, and freedom from fear is the great promise that a post-industrial society devoted to liberty holds out to its members.

For a post-industrial school to achieve its goal, it must have no trace of autocratic structure, whether in administration, legislation, or learning. Every individual in the school, regardless of age, must be given equal respect, and an equal voice in expressing his/her needs. A successful post-industrial society, rooted as it is in the concept of individual creative freedom and mutual respect among co-equals, will of necessity be based on democratic principles for adults, and on the consistent application of these principles from the earliest age at which interpersonal communication and independent action can be achieved.

Independence for individuals in no way precludes, or contradicts, community of action among individuals. People seek each other’s cooperation all the time. Independent people work together by choice, and hence forge ties that are important to each of them, as well as to the collective group. Indeed, the degree of community participation that people with a sense of inner wholeness achieve is infinitely greater than that achieved by people who are forced to work together. For the latter, the community is a symbol of coercion, to be avoided and subverted in every way possible; for the former, the community is a source of inner joy at all times, since it fulfills personal goals as it is fulfilling group goals.

A school that fosters independence can do so only in one way: by granting independence. Freedom cannot be subdivided. A person is either a free being, or not. Children understand this with exquisite clarity. It takes but one little corner of authority in an allegedly democratic environment to give the lie to the concept of democracy, and children detect such corners instantly. A post-industrial school must be one in which children learn the uses of freedom and independence by being free and independent at all times.

We are now ready to look at the heart of the matter: what it means to be able to cope. For it is coping that is the key to successful living, in any environment, and an educational system that does not provide children an opportunity to learn how to cope cannot produce functional adults.

What coping means can only be ascertained relative to the object of the activity. In the Industrial Era, the requirement was to be able to cope with life in an industrial society. This implies that adults must be able to accept without protest the dehumanization of industrial culture, and all that goes with it: regimentation, robotic activity, limited independence of action, obedience, and the possession of a small number of specific low-grade skills that are needed to run the industrial machine. The schools of the industrial era, and the family values promulgated by social and religious thinkers in industrial societies, all cooperated to create an environment for children in which they would grow up to be adults with the required industrial characteristics. Indeed, to promote a school like Sudbury Valley, based on post-industrial concepts, in an industrial society can be downright subversive to that society. There is a time and a place for everything.

On the other hand, when we examine what meaning “coping” has in a post-industrial setting, we find something quite different and new on the world scene. In this setting, into which the United States and the rest of the Western world is rapidly moving, coping first and foremost means finding creative solutions to a never-ending stream of new challenges, that have no limitations in space, time, variety, or complexity. This, of course, is what the human mind is designed by nature to try and do, and what it does best when it has practiced from early childhood.⁴

The important thing about post-industrial coping is the unanticipated nature of the problems being posed from day to day. This is in marked contrast to Industrial Era coping, which deals with a relatively small and well-delimited range of concepts and actions. In the world order of today, information flows in to each individual from every corner of the globe, without respect for distance or national boundaries. An effective adult must be ready to deal with new cultures, new value systems, new language structures, new philosophical systems, almost effortlessly. The post-industrial mind has to be comfortable and adept at building and modifying world models, and understanding other people’s models.

Now this is the very activity that children in a school such as Sudbury Valley engage in throughout the duration of their stay at school. They do it not only by trying to figure things out themselves, but by intensely interacting with other people and learning how to “get into their brains”. In fact, one of the most prevalent activities at the school is personal interaction, with a wide variety of people of various temperaments, cultural roots, and ages. This interaction is wholly misunderstood if it is seen as “making friends”, or “socialization” (i.e. “learning how to get along with people”). Such nomenclature debases the process and misses the essential point. The central function of social interaction at Sudbury Valley is an intense probing by each child of the world view of other children, whether friends or merely acquaintances. One need only spend time watching (from a distance) as these interactions unfold, to learn that the parties involved are intensely probing each other, finding how to construct a common language with which they can understand each other’s idiosyncratic models. Over and over again, people who have been at Sudbury Valley point to these interpersonal interactions as the most important contributor to their growth during their school years — and they identify getting to understand other models of reality and learning to flow in and out of them in harmony as a primary and utterly beneficial school activity.

Interpersonal interactions aside, the main work of students while at Sudbury Valley has always been practicing the construction of working models of the world. These models are not merely static structures, but also include within them the means of dealing with change, of solving problems, and of inventing new challenges. To be sure, industrial-era schools also have become adept in recent years at talking about “problem-solving”, “teaching children how to think”, etc. But these schools always view such activities from the vantage point of Industrial Era Thinking, as routines that can be taught, much as any other mechanical skill. Thus we find in the modern curriculum such absurdities as training or testing for creativity (as if this can be defined and measured), or an algorithm for solving problems (a contradiction in terms, since a problem is not a real problem if an algorithm exists for solving it, but rather a tautology).

In fact, human beings do not have to be taught how to think, or how to build world models, or how to solve problems or be creative. Nature created us with these skills as inborn possessions of each person, and it takes only time, patience, and freedom to have these skills develop to their fullest potential, without outside “help”.⁵ The most striking example of man’s natural propensity for reducing the surrounding world to a meaningful model is the behavior of two-year-olds (“the terrible twos”) who have just begun to gain mobility and verbalization. Children of that age are indefatigable and all but unstoppable in their drive to conquer their surroundings. They need no “motivation” from “teachers”, no “classes”, no tests or progress reports, no unsolicited evaluations. They plow on regardless of the obstacles placed in their way, and never give up unless their will is brutally broken. They may seek assistance from adults, but they need no spur to ask for help — indeed, one often wishes they would desist just for a moment.

At Sudbury Valley, we see this kind of seeking continue in its full bloom right to the moment of leaving — and beyond, into adult life. Children who have been allowed to cope with the world without intervention throughout their early years continue to do so effortlessly, and with clearly growing sophistication, year after year⁶.

I cannot leave this topic without commenting on something even more misunderstood than interpersonal interaction — namely, the activity of “play”. It has become fashionable to view play somewhat condescendingly as a form of preparation for life. The argument basically is that even though play in itself is rather frivolous, it has useful by-products, such as learning how to count, or do elementary math, or read. These side benefits are accidental, and justifiably viewed with suspicion by traditional industrial educators, who point out that if the desired result is a particular skill, it is more efficient to train directly for that skill, rather than to count on happenstance to produce it.

Industrial era schools are correct to downgrade play and consider it a waste of time relative to their goals. On the other hand, play is at the heart of post-industrial education. It is, in its essence, the spontaneous application of all the activities useful in coping with life. In fact, play is coping with life — not “practice” for life, but life itself for those who engage in it.

Children understand this, and all view play as the reality of their existence. For them, it is unadulterated and uninterrupted model-building, problem-solving, socialization, organization, creativity, innovation, the whole nine yards. They are completely engrossed in it, focussed upon it in all its details, excited by its successes and depressed by its failures. Those children who are allowed to grow up without feeling that play is in any way an undesirable activity, continue to play throughout their adult lives, and use play as the chief instrument for their own continued growth.⁷

Play in post-industrial cultures is not preparation for life; it is life itself, as best lived in that culture. To the extent that children growing up have their play interfered with or suppressed, their development into effective adults will be hampered. If a school, or any other environment in which children pass the time, does nothing more than give children the freedom to play as they wish, it will render excellent service to a post-industrial society.

However, the very word “play” is laden with condescending connotations that imply a lack of seriousness, a degree of triviality, indeed an activity that is wholly dispensable in a serious surrounding. No amount of apology or explication can rehabilitate this word, I am afraid. So long as we refer to what we see children doing, at home and at school, as “playing”, we will have to present all kinds of convoluted attributions to make the word carry real significance.

Perhaps it would help to point out to people that “play” can just as well be called “R&D” (Research and Development), a phrase which has an honored place in post-industrial language, and which describes almost perfectly the role that the activity has in the lives of children. What children do at Sudbury Valley most of the day is R&D for real life — serious, sustained, intense, imaginative, ecstatic, sad, variegated, and terribly intricate R&D, which can carry over for days, weeks, months, and years, until they proceed to their next “project”. It is impossible for any careful long-term observer to treat their activities as anything less profound. Indeed, I am sure that serious studies of the multi-faceted nature of so-called “play” at Sudbury Valley will reveal in it every aspect of the adult form of R&D that forms the backbone of a post-industrial culture.⁸

I believe it is possible to communicate much more clearly with prospective parents and visitors, now that we have somewhat more insight into what the goal of education is, and how it relates to the current state of the culture. The root of virtually all misunderstandings of Sudbury Valley is different people’s different conceptions of the meaning of the goal of education — i.e. of what it means to develop the ability to cope independently, continuously, and successfully with the demands of life.

Most parents in this country, and most people from other countries, accept this goal as stated, but relate all its parts to Industrial Era Thinking, since for the most part they themselves grew up in an industrial society. Since it almost impossible for people to recognize the dawning of a new era for which they have not in any way been prepared, they simply cannot comprehend that the same goal can mean widely different things when applied to historical eras that differ widely in their essence⁹.

A great deal of energy can be saved by referring at once to the above-mentioned goal of education, to which virtually everyone subscribes, and discussing what it means to the other party. For the fact is that if that person does not grasp the content of the goal of education in the context of a post-industrial culture, there is no way on earth to convince that person that Sudbury Valley makes sense as a school, or indeed is a school at all.

Only people who share with us a commonality of reference for the expressions in the goal statement can engage in a productive dialogue about it. With such people, it is both possible and profitable (to both sides) to explore at greater depth the implications of each phrase in the expression, and help focus their thinking about these issues in a post-industrial era. Such people show themselves open to new models that did not exist when they were young, and reveal themselves as eager to share in the exciting new prospects facing their children in the 21st century.

In fact, serious dialogues with people who share with us at Sudbury Valley a common understanding of the goal of education are very likely to lead to a variety of types of schools and educational experiences that have their essence in common with ours, but have other external structures which we have not yet envisioned. We can expect in the coming decades to see a veritable explosion in the multiplicity of diverse environments that are as conducive to the fulfilled growth of children in the post-industrial world as is Sudbury Valley School today.

1. “The accomplishments of young children up to the age of five is remarkable . . . They learn to sit up, to crawl, to stand up, to walk, to gain command of spoken language (even several languages), among other things, and since almost all babies accomplish these enormously difficult tasks, we are not as awed by their accomplishments as we should be. Rather than recognizing how successful they have been at teaching themselves tasks that would be very difficult for any adult, we have gotten the idea that when they are four or five we can now take over their education and really teach them all the “important” things that they will need to know to be a successful and productive adult. . . . Even if I were to concede that our intentions were good, which is not at all a foregone conclusion, I would argue that we have never been able to come close to doing as well for our children as they have been able to do for themselves.” Alan White, “Learning to Trust Oneself” The Sudbury Valley School Experience, 3rd ed., (Sudbury Valley School Press; Framingham, MA, 1992) p. 21.

2. “Industrial cultures have … all developed methods whereby the survival of their value schemes and of their industrial life style is assured; first, in the period of growing up, and second, throughout adult life. … The primary industrial survival mechanism is overt control of the individual by the community. This control is explicit, and is enforced by the exercise of physical power over the individual. … Industrial cultures … feel a need to control the access of children to alien values, and to direct the interests of children towards activities that are required by the current industrial economy.” Daniel Greenberg, A New Look at Schools(Sudbury Valley School Press; Framingham, MA, 1992) pp. 56-7. In that volume I discuss at length the differences in types of world models that typify the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial eras.

3. As they are in a pre-industrial setting, which is not my focus in this essay. See A New Look at Schools, loc. cit.

4. Compare the following comments by a musician and master improvisor: “How does one learn improvisation? The only answer is to ask another question: What is stopping us? Spontaneous creation comes from our deepest being and is immaculately and originally ourselves. What we have to express is already with us, is us, so the work of creativity is not a matter of making the material come, but of unblocking the obstacles to its natural flow. . . . 
“The creative process is a spiritual path. This adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves.” Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (Tarcher: Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 10, 13.

5. Compare the following excellent summary: “The self is a system of personal integration in perceiving and solving the problems of living, a system that has order, coherence, and openness to change. The self is faced with the task of maintaining stability, coherence, and continuity of form while being capable to transforming, rearranging, and developing psychic structures to permit adaptive and creative responses to environmental and maturational challenges. The self selects a unique pattern of drives, objects, defenses, perceptual sensitivities, and modes of communication that best serves our need for personal integration and individuation. It endows us with an evolving meaning structure that interprets events, unifies elements in the personality, and provides the basis for action. It does this in a manner that reveals a signature, a style of organization, which we recognize as expressive of and true to our essence.” [all italics in original] Leonard S. Zegans, “The Embodied Self: Personal Integration in Health and Illness” (“Advances”, Vol 7, No. 3, summer 1991, p. 32)

6. Here is how one person, who spent his entire school life at SVS, grasped this point in the course of an oral history interview done for the school’s archives: “I feel like I’m in an accelerated development in many ways. I was able to enjoy a period when a lot of people are just waiting for their life to begin. They hate their school or they hate their whole childhood or something, and they really start being themselves when they become adults. I haven’t really fundamentally changed my behavior with the exception of paying bills. I’m doing the exact same thing I was doing when I was six years old except that I now allot a certain chunk of my time for paying my bills and for making money. That’s the only difference. You can say that’s a major thing but I’m not sure that is such a major thing. I mean, I think that’s something you do, but the rest of my life is fundamentally like what it was when I was a kid.”

7. This is what one former student at Sudbury Valley had to say on the subject, during an interview for the Oral History project: “Learning and playing. I’m sure many other people have thought about the process of a kid’s adaptation to his environment. I think it’s important to have fun when you’re a kid in whatever you do. I think it’s part of the growing process. This is all just sort of philosophical conjecture and it’s not really my field, but I suspect that kids when they play are trying out constructs, mental constructs, that they see other people using. They’re not really in a position in the real world to use those constructs, so they play and imitate them and figure them out. If it wasn’t fun, they probably wouldn’t do it. The motivation for figuring out all this stuff around you is that it feels good to do it. It’s kind of like if there were no orgasms, the race would die out very quickly. There would be no sex and therefore no procreation. 
“We have to understand the world around us because certain information that we need to survive cannot be passed down through DNA and genes. So we have a body of knowledge which we gain after we’re born, which is really cultural knowledge. You learn it as an individual, but it’s passed on. That’s really what we need to survive, and if it wasn’t fun to learn that, we wouldn’t learn it. So, for some reason, it’s ingrained in us that play is fun, and play is modelling what we see around us. In school I did playful learning. I think it’s natural.”

8. This point was grasped in its entirety by one former student who spent most of his school years at Sudbury Valley. This is what he had to say during an interview conducted by the school’s Oral History project: “Working in plasticene at Sudbury Valley was a fascination of creating. You were creating things that you couldn’t have in real life yourself, maybe, but you could still make them, and by making them, you could have them. I think it was probably one of the most intense things I’d ever done. Villages would evolve. Sometimes you’d be building a gold mining community. Sometimes it would be a bunch of towns with hotels and saloons. Then you’d have battles and wars. You’d be building tanks and airplanes, just one thing after another. But it always involved a lot of buildings, a lot of vehicles, a lot of people and you’d make all the stuff. Then you would enact various scenes with them. 
“Well, I think about it every now and then, and I’m doing exactly the same things now. Except I’m doing them now in real life. I’m building a factory and making machines and talking to people all day long. Same exact thing. And very intensely. We talk about how to build things, how to talk to the customers on the phone, all that sort of stuff. Day in and day out, the same exact thing I was doing in plasticene.”

9. One of the most vivid descriptions of the post-industrial life style has been written by Stephen Nachmanovitch, loc. cit., pp. 22-23: “A creative life is risky business. To follow your own course, not patterned on parents, peers, or institutions, involves a delicate balance of tradition and personal freedom, a delicate balance of sticking to your guns and remaining open to change. While on some dimensions living a normal life, you are nevertheless a pioneer, venturing into new territory, breaking away from the molds and models that inhibit the heart’s desire, creating life as it goes. Being, acting, creating in the moment without props and supports, without security, can be supreme play, and it can also be frightening, the very opposite of play. Stepping into the unknown can lead to delight, poetry, invention, humor, lifetime friendships, self-realization, and occasionally a great creative breakthrough. Stepping into the unknown can also lead to failure, disappointment, rejection, sickness, or death.”