Lenz on Learning

“It’s an ‘unschooling school,'” is what someone told me when I first heard about Clearwater School, and Sudbury schools in general. How appropriate is that characterization?

Similarities

Both unschooling and Sudbury schooling value the concept of self-directed education. Proponents of both share common insights and make some of the same challenges to traditional schooling:

• People are born learners. Children are trusted to have the desire and ability to engage in—and learn how to operate effectively in—their world.
• Coercion creates resistance. Forcing people to learn something tends to spoil it for them. It becomes something they have to do, not something they might choose to be interested in. Force takes away that possibility of choosing. Done systematically, you can spoil a whole range of subjects. Consequently, force in the form of required curricula is eschewed.
• Conversely, people learn best when they’re interested in what they’re learning. A high value is placed on what children are interested in. Supportive energy is directed to helping them succeed in the goals they choose for themselves.
• People are different. They have different interests, aspirations, and passions. Consequently, children aren’t expected to learn the same things as everyone else.
• People grow at different paces. Consequently, children aren’t expected to, for example, learn to read at a specific, pre-determined age.

Differences

Despite all the similarities, I can think of two ways in which Sudbury schooling differs fundamentally from unschooling:

• Kids at a Sudbury school are regularly separated from their parents for a significant period of time each day. They pursue their interests in a context that’s free from any form of (subtle or overt) parental influence.
• The social structure of a school is necessarily different than the social structure of a family. Sudbury schools are run democratically, where School Meeting is the single authority within the school.

The aspects of separation from parents and formalized democratic process make Sudbury schooling look quite different from unschooling, as it turns out.

I think I’ll explore what’s significant about these differences in a future article.

Chip responded to my recent post on how Sudbury students learn self-discipline. To do his questions justice, I’m responding with another full post.

I quickly point out that I know little about the Sudbury approach so please forgive me for feeling like your answer is incomplete.

I think you’re right. There’s more that should be said about this.

“Sudbury students, by necessity, learn self-regulation, because no one else is there to regulate them…”

That’s it? Taken out of context, that sounds like great potential for chaos. If there is no one there to regulate them, is there someone there to teach them how to regulate themselves? Does anyone there give them guidance? Kids don’t often have the same value system.

Each school has an implicit shared value system as reflected by their community agreements. All school members are held accountable to keeping those agreements. The Judicial Committee (JC) is essential in this regard. It provides a structure for the school to compassionately address complaints one member may have against another. The reality is that chaos does not reign at Sudbury schools. Stated more positively, the reality is that Sudbury schools are phenomenal examples of people being civil and respectful to each other. I think one of the key reasons for this is that there’s no one to rebel against. There’s no “us vs. them” mentality. There’s only “us.”

Chaos sometimes erupts in traditional schools because of an underlying pent-up urge to break out of all the externally imposed controls. When there are so many people (kids) controlled by so few (adults), there’s an imbalance in the system. Remove that imbalance and there’s nothing to drive an eruption, or to cause chaos to ensue. To assume otherwise is to assume that kids are chaotic by nature and that, if kept unchecked, kids will—I don’t know—self-destruct? Proponents of the Sudbury approach don’t share that assumption. And many, many years of experience haven’t given them any reason to think otherwise.

I’ve always felt that teaching kids self-discipline and respect for others should begin at home and be supplemented by the school. The two efforts should be complementary.

I agree that respect is learned (or not) both at home and at school. But the question should be: How is respect for others best learned? Should it be taught from without? Modeled by example? Coerced by threat of punishment? If a child acts “respectful” simply in order to avoid punishment, how genuine is that respect? Do we care if it’s genuine? Or is the respect afforded someone potentially related to the respect they will in turn afford others?

In this case, if the effort at home is lacking, it sounds like there isn’t a back-up plan at school.

On the contrary, respect for others is supremely valued by and foundational to the Sudbury school model. Kids find that they are respected as first-class people at school, even if they are used to being treated as second-class citizens elsewhere, whether at home or at their previous school. Once this realization sinks in, a wonderful thing happens. They stop fighting against the world. They start to lay down the defenses they’ve built up over the years. And they find a place from which to reach out to others in a loving way. Respect for others as human beings, regardless of differences in age or otherwise, is foundational. But it’s only the beginning.

Here’s a compelling vision. Wouldn’t it be great if we no longer had to ask the question, “How do we teach kids respect?” The Sudbury approach and others like it envision a world in which respect is part of the air kids breathe.

Chip recently asked, “How does the Sudbury model teach self-discipline?” This post is my attempt to address that question.

What is self-discipline? Merriam-Webster defines it as “correction or regulation of oneself for the sake of improvement.” How does one learn to regulate oneself? I’m in my 30s, and I’m still trying to figure out the answer to that question. I run my own business from home, and I’d be lying if I told you it hasn’t been a challenge figuring out how to consistently correct and regulate my own behavior. The Internet is a carrier of so many distractions, and my job involves being on the computer for most of the day. It does take real discipline—and the development of new habits—to resist those distractions and make myself focus on what it is I want to be accomplishing.

One of the chief things I’ve learned is that I need help from other people. I need a support network. In fact, I recently discovered that daily accountability is what really works for me. I have a call with an accountability partner every morning to review yesterday’s wins and challenges and to communicate my goals for today. This has been immensely powerful for me. Just that little bit of support has made it much easier to discipline myself and relax into the schedule I’ve laid out for myself on any given day.

I thrive on structure, but I don’t have a boss telling me what to do and when to do it. Instead, I’ve had to create my own structures, by seeking out help from other people. That alone has been immensely empowering—knowing that I can evaluate my own weaknesses and accordingly seek out the help I need from others. I’ve learned to regulate myself using whatever means I can.

Faced with gobs of time by myself, I am forced to consider what is important to me. If I care about something enough, I will figure out what I need to do to make it happen. I’ve gone through periods of discontent and boredom, passing the time, trying to figure out what I want and what works for me. At various times I’ve been tempted to go back to a “normal” job, where someone is there to tell me what to do all the time. But then I realize the deception. In my line of work (and in most people’s these days), it’s never that simple. You still have to figure out how to manage your time, boss or no boss. And I remember all the freedoms I’d be giving up if I were to do that. So I re-focus and find the resources to make it work.

This is similar to the plight of a Sudbury school student—with the major difference being that Sudbury students already dwell in a richly supportive and stimulating community of people. (I’ve already confessed my envy over that.) But the gobs-of-time component is the same. Time is the clay of life, and it’s their responsibility to figure out what they want to sculpt. Structures and support are available, but the onus is on them to request help in creating them. Sudbury students learn that if they want something to happen, they’re the ones who are going to have to make it happen.

Sudbury students, by necessity, learn self-regulation, because no one else is there to regulate them—except insofar as they are held accountable to keeping community agreements, i.e. rules. The Judicial Committee (JC) is the school structure to ensure that all people (staff or students) are held accountable for keeping community agreements. (You can read more about JC here.)

In a traditional school, discipline is externally imposed. Students learn to do as they are told. They are taken to account for deviating from their prescribed activity. Figuring out what to do with their time is not something that students in a traditional school have to worry about (at least during school hours). These decisions are made for them anew every day. Of course, there are certain freedoms, and learning definitely takes place. Students learn how to cope with externally imposed schedules, and they learn to make choices about what attitudes they want to bring to school. But it’s a narrow form of freedom and it doesn’t require the kind of decision-making that Sudbury students are, in effect, forced to engage in.

When I think of the Sudbury school experience, I think of it as a crucible for learning. Without handholding, without smothering, students are forced to look within for the power they need to find their place in the world. That’s hard work. What results from that hard work? As an adult who has been engaging in that kind of hard work, I can say that it has deepened my understanding of what’s important to me, and it has increased my ability to regulate myself—to discipline myself—toward achieving goals that align with my highest values. Sudbury students are given the opportunity to learn this early on.

I noticed that right now on the Sudbury Valley School website that Dan Greenberg is going to be giving a talk in March, called “Sudbury Valley – the easiest school? Or the hardest?” I think I know what his answer is going to be.

It’s amazing how many points there are on the educational philosophy spectrum. On one hand, you have the ultra-standardized-testing approach, and on the other hand you have something as radically different as the Sudbury school approach. My bias is clear: I see this spectrum in a sort of vertical fashion. In other words, the more a school looks like a Sudbury school, the better.

Another Trillium parent alerted me to a recent New York Times op-ed piece by Susan Engel, entitled “Playing to Learn.” It contains a lot of good insights. If I cherry-pick a bit, I can make it sound like she’s arguing for the Sudbury model. And in some ways, she is (even if she doesn’t realize it).

[E]ducators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does.

This is a big one. How many of you parents have ever noticed your child pick up a skill (such as reading) seemingly overnight? What if I told you this is how things usually happen? In other words, we can’t see the learning. It happens under our noses. One of my favorite quotes from Voices from the New American Schoolhouse, a documentary about Fairhaven School, is this: “Learning is what happens when you’re doing something else.” (Check out the YouTube trailer for a sampling.)

And conversation is one of the main things that happens in a Sudbury school. Why? Because that’s what people do, it’s what they thrive on and learn from and grow from. So it sounds like Engel could be arguing for the Sudbury approach.

She also writes:

What they [students] shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

This will resonate with a lot of people who are looking beyond traditional education. People (including kids) learn through experiences that matter to them. Knowledge is best retained when it’s relevant and has some practical application or at least some inherent meaning for the student. To demonstrate this, all you have to do is ponder this question: How much do you remember from your least favorite subjects in high school?

And:

Research has shown unequivocally that children learn best when they are interested in the material or activity they are learning. Play — from building contraptions to enacting stories to inventing games — can allow children to satisfy their curiosity about the things that interest them in their own way. It can also help them acquire higher-order thinking skills, like generating testable hypotheses, imagining situations from someone else’s perspective and thinking of alternate solutions.

Once again, play is huge at Sudbury schools. Why? Because play is huge for children. It’s amazing to witness, on those days that I’ve volunteered at The Trillium School, the complex, drawn-out games and types of play that kids will invent when they’re given a chance. They’re constantly figuring out the world around them, in concert and camaraderie with their friends. There’s no stopping them.

To me, and to Sudbury proponents everywhere, these insights clearly support the Sudbury approach to education. In a nutshell, kids are great at learning. They want to learn, and will learn. They’ll pursue what they’re interested in, which—convenience of all conveniences—turns out to be exactly what they’ll be best at learning too. Among the most important things Sudbury students learn is self-efficacy, a knowledge that they can learn, which serves them well in just about anything they choose to pursue later on, whether it be in college or not.

Ultimately, Engel is not arguing for the Sudbury approach. She’s looking for a new kind of classroom, and she has particular ideas about how to prescribe the children’s use of time:

In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.

So it’s an incremental step toward what her insights ultimately point toward: an environment where children truly are free to explore what interests them without external prescriptions. The Sudbury model is based on several principles that go beyond what she suggests. I’ve listed some of these below, along with the methodological consequence of each:

• Principle: Each person’s education is their own responsibility.
• Methodology: Teacher-directed learning only ever happens at a student’s specific request.

• Principle: Children learn best in interaction with people of all different ages.
• Methodology: Students are not segregated by age. Think “one-room schoolhouse.”

• Principle: People are different and shouldn’t be expected to learn the same things, or at the same time.
• Methodology: There is no required curriculum in a Sudbury school.

I heartily welcome Engel’s op-ed. It’s great to see more awareness of and attention paid to the fundamental problems of traditional schooling. Her prescriptions ultimately don’t go far enough; the logical consequences of her insights, and of the science that she alludes to, ultimately point to something that looks more like a Sudbury school. But it’s definitely a start.