Ben B. Day (bday@cs.umb.edu)
Fri, 4 Feb 2000 23:42:35 -0500 (EST)
As far as I know, SVS has only one criteria for admitting students:
that they actually /want/ to go to the school. In other words, free
schooling has to be chosen, and chosen by the student. The notion that
Sudbury isn't for everyone is true to the extent that not everyone wants
to go to a Sudbury model school. To what I extent of students this
applies, I could only speculate. We might choose to say that those who
prefer traditional schooling are simply unable to think around the
institution that they have always known and grown to accept as a
necessity, and that they would certainly see the light if only they
could see such a school in action for long enough, or spoke to enough
graduates, or simply ceased clinging to certain pedagogical-didactic
predispositions. This approach to other people is incredibly problematic,
though, and I can think of a number of disasters in the course of
history that have arisen from one group that was certain their fellow
citizens were deluded on a mass scale, but all of whom would certainly
recognize the error of their ways if only the minority's vision of the
world could be forcibly implanted.
Let us not be proselytizers or evangelists of unstructured education.
In a democracy, it is ultimately the people who will chose their own
education and that of their children, and so it is not public education
that needs to be altered, but rather it is our fellow citizens who we
need to /talk/ to. Discourse is an exceedingly slow method of bringing
about change, but the change it does bring about is willed by those
whom it affects. Every year that the old SVS mansion continues to
stand probably speaks volumes more than any one of us could produce,
and every graduate who can honestly tell anyone who cares to ask them
that they couldn't have asked for a better education (as I can certainly
say) is a living testament to a "legacy of trust."
Let us engage others in respectful conversation and respect their freedom
to choose, whether it is what we would choose or not. But no one needs to
be "converted."
----Ben
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