Like Water

About Sudbury Valley School and the Sudbury Approach to education:

“(Personal pursuits) gave him something missing from most classrooms today—a passion for pursuing challenges and inhaling the skills and information (to say nothing of the confidence) to master life’s complexities... It’s every modern parent’s worst nightmare—a school where kids can play all day. But no one takes the easy way out, and graduates seem to have a head start on the information age. Welcome to Sudbury Valley.”

— “Class Dismissed”, Psychology Today, May/June 2006, p. 95

“I’m sure my level of comfort [dealing with people] starts completely at the school—starts out with this notion of being comfortable in non-hierarchical situations where everyone puts in their own contribution and makes the whole thing a community. I think the idea of a community, being as important to me as it is, definitely has to do with the fact that I grew up in a community. I grew up with this huge group of people that I felt were my friends; some personal friends, others just friends in that we were all at this same place that was important to all of us. That’s a community: it means that you all agree that this thing is important and worth working towards.”

“I’m like water. If something doesn’t work, I figure out another way to do it. I go around the rock.”

— Two Sudbury Valley alumni interviewed in “The Pursuit of Happiness: The Lives of Sudbury Valley Alumni”, pages 284, 286

About Freedom in Education

“People who exercise their freedom to choose expand that freedom. People who fail to exercise their freedom to choose will find that it withers until they are literally ‘being lived.’ They are acting out the scripts written by parents, associates, and society.”

—Andrew Covey

“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”

— Booker T. Washington

“It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and sense of duty.”

— Albert Einstein

“I had more than one teacher tell me, ‘That’s very funny, David, but you can’t joke your way through life.’ So blllpphh!”

—Dave Barry