The
Significance of the Sudbury Valley School Diploma
Daniel
Greenberg
The Question
For as long as I can remember, Sudbury
Valley School has stated that its reason for existence, in a nutshell, is to
provide an environment, suitable for our place and time, in which children can
take responsibility for preparing themselves to be effective adults. Our writings seek to explain how the school
fulfills this goal, from the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines –
developmental theory, political philosophy, psychology, evolution, history, and
philosophy of education. When children
seek to leave the school with our high school diploma, we focus the procedure
for obtaining a diploma on their ability to prepare an exposition on how that
goal has applied to their lives.
There is one part of this goal that has received scant
attention: the meaning of the phrase “effective adult.” We usually ask diploma candidates what they
mean by that phrase, but attempts in a thesis defense to explore this phrase by
questioning the diploma candidate more deeply have usually caused discomfort in
the community; such attempts have been viewed as digressions into vague
philosophical analysis which deflects the thesis defense from its key purpose
of finding how the student went about preparing him/herself. In general, I have the feeling that just
about every person associated with the school thinks it’s pretty obvious what
it means to be an effective adult, and each attaches their own common-sense
definition to the phrase.
Yet, I have concluded that the words “being an effective
adult” contain within them the most profound aspects of our raison d’etre,
and that exploring them in depth opens up whole new avenues for understanding
what Sudbury Valley is about. I would
like to set out in this essay some of the reasons I feel this is so.
Self-Organizing
Systems
The concept of a “system” has been explored in depth. Briefly put, a system is an entity that
performs a certain function, and consists of a number of parts that work in
conjunction with each other. None of
the parts, alone, can perform the function that they perform together, nor is
it possible to describe the function of the system as a whole just on the basis
of knowing how the parts work. In other
words, when the parts work together, they become an entity with new properties
that are not visible or knowable on the basis of knowing each of the parts
separately.
All systems (with the exception of the universe as a whole)
are themselves parts of one or more larger systems.
A simple example makes it easier to visualize the everyday
reality underlying these abstract definitions.
Consider a standard gasoline engine, that delivers power to a rotating
drive shaft. This is a system whose
function is just that: providing power to a drive shaft. It is made up of many parts – pistons,
cylinders, cams, valves, etc. None of
these, working alone, can execute the function of a whole engine; no one of
them can deliver power to a drive shaft (which is, itself, a part of the
machine). If these parts were laid out
in front of someone who did not know where they came from, and who never saw a
disassembled engine, it would be impossible to deduce the function of the
engine which a mechanic could put together from them.
The engine, in turn, is a part of another system: an
automobile. The function of that system
is to provide people with transportation.
A car has many other parts in addition to the engine – transmission,
axles, wheels, clutch, etc. Once again,
none of these parts, alone, can provide people with transportation; nor would
anyone not knowledgeable about cars be able to picture these parts acting
together as a car.
For the purposes of this discussion, the important thing to
realize about a system is the fact that it has characteristics, and functions,
that emerge only from the system taken as a whole, and do not appear in the
parts of which it is composed.
A “self-organizing” system is a system which has an
additional important feature: it is capable of modifying its operation in response
to changes that take place either from within it or from without. This feature is commonly referred to as
“feedback”; it increasingly became the focus of industrial designers from the
late nineteenth century on. Going back
to the automobile example: cruise control is a feedback mechanism that changes
the response of the car’s accelerating system depending on the road conditions
(uphill, downhill, flat). A car using
cruise control is a self-organizing system (with respect to its speed). Automobile designers are busy working on
cars that will drive themselves from one destination to another, without human
intervention – the ultimate self-organizing automobiles of the future!
Living things are, one and all, self-organizing
systems. Even the simplest ones are
hugely complex, have a staggeringly large number of components that scientists
have identified (and doubtless many, many more yet to be named), and have an
amazingly large variety of modes of response to internal changes and to changes
in their external environment. Their
ability to self-organize – to adapt themselves to change – is one of their
distinguishing features.
The primary purpose of all living systems, a purpose for
which all of the components work together, is to survive. Each and every living thing is a system that
has as its primary goal survival. The
goal of individual survival is the key to evolution, which is the name given to
the self-organizing system of the biosphere as a whole. Evolution describes how different species interact
and evolve within the biosphere. A key
factor in this process is the struggle of each individual within a species to
survive, and through that struggle to ensure the survival of those individuals
who, of all members of a species, have the best likelihood of ensuring the
survival of the species as a whole.1
Every self-organizing system has tools that enable it to
fulfill its purpose. For example,
machines have sources of energy to power them.
Living things need chemical sources of energy to help them take
responsive actions for survival. In
addition, a variety of other tools are at the disposal of different living
beings – such things as the means for incorporating information from their
surroundings, the means for taking offensive action against attackers, the
means for identifying nourishment to keep them alive, the means for initiating
movement away from danger or towards nourishment, and so forth. The tools are built into the system. All living things have some such tools; some
have many such tools.
One particularly important built-in tool
is the ability to communicate with other living things. Communication allows for collaborative
action to enhance individual survival, including cooperation in acquiring nourishment
and in combating enemies. The means of
communication among living things that we are currently aware of include
chemical signals, body movements and audio signals, all of which can be
extremely complex.
The Effect of Human Consciousness
Human beings have an additional faculty that complicates and
enriches their situation: they possess consciousness. Humans are consciously self-organizing entities; they are
aware of themselves, of their actions, and of the purposes which they act to
fulfill. While we do not understand the
origins or nature of consciousness, we are conscious that we are conscious.
The implications of this faculty are far-reaching. We not only think, but we can think about
what we think; we not only strive to fulfill our naturally predestined,
hard-wired purpose of survival, but can analyze how we go about fulfilling that
purpose – and we can analyze that purpose itself. As human beings, we know that we can control our actions, and are
not automations wholly managed by forces beyond our control. Most important of all, we can think about
the very concept of purposeful actions, and create for ourselves other purposes
(in addition to survival) which we then can organize ourselves to fulfill.
Indeed, because all self-organizing systems are organized to
fulfill a purpose which they function to fulfill, and because all human beings
are consciously aware of being self-organizing entities, it is a basic fact of
human life that each person is aware, at every point of their lives, of some
purpose (or purposes) around which they organize their activities. This does not negate the possibility –
indeed, the likelihood – that there will be purposes which a person strives to
fulfill, of which he is not aware, such as those residing in his subconscious
and not yet accessed.
This is what we mean when we say that
people seek to live a meaningful life: we mean that all human beings seek to
fulfill conscious purposes (“meaning”) which guide their actions.
Innate Human Faculties
Human beings have several tools that
enable them to create, find, identify, and analyze their purpose for
living. These tools, while existing in
some form in many other animal species, have reached a level of refinement in
the human species that sets that species apart from all other species.2
The tool most commonly noted and discussed is language. Language enables people to represent a huge
variety of experiences in highly condensed form, as symbols (“words”), and to
apply thought (“analysis”) to these experiences. The use of words makes it possible for people to organize, and
re-organize, all the almost infinite factors that contribute to their daily
lives, by reducing the multiplicity of factors to manageable proportions. The condensing power of words also enables
much more than raw experience to be stored in a person’s memory. Perhaps most important of all, language
makes it possible for people to share their experiences and thoughts and,
through sharing, to dramatically increase their individual ability to think. Words connect each individual mind to the minds
of all other people with whom they communicate, giving each person the
potential to tap into the collective consciousness of the entire human species.
A second tool available to human beings is music,
which gives voice to a wide spectrum of emotions and moods. Music, by bringing forth feelings from the
depths of each person’s emotional makeup, creates a whole new array of
potential purposes for human existence, purposes which would remain buried in
the recesses of the unconscious if not thus liberated. Furthermore, music not only affects the
individual creating it, but also serves to connect people to each other across
a bridge of shared feelings. Music is a
language of sound rather than word symbols.
The third tool is visual art, another medium for expressing
feelings directly, without the intervention of word symbols. Art is a language of sight – of form and
color. It too not only expresses the
feelings of the individual who creates it, but also serves as a bridge among
people, connecting them directly through an emotional bond3.
In comparison with verbal language, much less attention has
been paid to music and visual art as core aspects of human existence, central
to each person’s ability to function effectively as a consciously
self-organizing being. This is
understandable, since we can use words to analyze and describe how words affect
us (“philosophize”), while it is much more difficult – indeed, impossible – to
use words to fully analyze and describe how music and visual art affect
us. But it is also regrettable, as this
relative neglect of the centrality of music and visual art to effective human
functioning has meant that many people lack an appreciation of these important
avenues to finding and creating purpose in life. This neglect is most evident in schools – both at the elementary
and high school level as well as at the university level – where music and
visual arts are given short shrift.
Just how important these two elements are to the human spirit can be
seen clearly in a place such as Sudbury Valley School, where children who are
allowed to develop freely according to their individually created
self-organizing principles can be seen to engage in music and visual art freely
and extensively.
These three tools – verbal language,
music, and visual art – are used by all people, consciously and unconsciously,
to design purpose for their lives at every moment, and to act in fulfillment of
that purpose. Furthermore, these tools
make it possible for people not only to strive to fulfill their primary purpose
of survival, but also to create for themselves additional purposes beyond bare
survival4 – purposes which they try to organize their lives to
fulfill. As Aristotle first pointed
out, the more people succeeded in organizing themselves efficiently to further
their bare survival, the more time they had on their hands to create for
themselves additional purposes, the sum total of which constitute the cultural
content of human existence (philosophy, art, etc.). And the more purposes created by a person for himself, the more
likely it is that these purposes will make conflicting demands for action on
his part – demands that lead him to act at “cross purposes” and to live with
inconsistency and a sense of unfulfillment.
People As Social Beings
These tools also serve to connect people – in particular, to
connect people who have shared purposes and who, together, find their
individual purposes enhanced through joint endeavor. The social aspect of human existence is not only a matter of
joint action for the sake of survival, but also a matter of joint action for
the sake of fulfilling purposes that have been consciously created by people –
purposes to which their individual lives are devoted, and for the furtherance
of which their actions and thoughts are organized.
Thus people are drawn to social groups for a variety of
purposes. Individuals will become
members of different groups, with different constellations, depending on the
purpose. A person can be a member of
one group for the purpose of survival, others for the purpose of fulfilling
intellectual or ethical goals, yet others for fulfilling various artistic
goals. This fact alone guarantees that
every person will contain, within himself, factors that will promote internal
conflict and conflict with others, and will thus provide him with a life filled
with pain and distress.
Furthermore, every group organized around
the common purpose of its members becomes, itself, a consciously
self-organizing entity. The group
itself acts to fulfill its purpose for existence. There is, however, little likelihood that the evolving nature of
the group’s purpose, and the group’s means of fulfilling it, will at all times
coincide with the precise view of that purpose that each member has, and the
precise actions that each member would like to undertake. The fact that there is a large overlap in
the sense of purpose among members of the group – an overlap which created the
group in the first place and keeps it going as long as it continues to function
– does not mean that there will be agreement between all the views of all the
members. On the contrary, such
agreement can never occur in groups that have more than one person! Consciously self-organizing groups built
around a common purpose have built into them a virtual certainty of perpetual
internal conflict among their members.
The Eternal Tension in the Human
Condition
The human condition, then, is by its nature one of perpetual
conflict in a number of areas. Within
each individual reside conflicting goals.
Between individuals there are struggles involving survival, and
conflicts surrounding incompatible goals.
Within groups there are conflicts between various individual views of
the common group goals, as well as conflicts between the group as a whole and
individual members. Among groups there
are conflicts involving incompatible groups goals.
This is also the condition of the biosphere as a whole. The normal natural state of the biosphere is
one of constant conflict. Humans do not
differ from other species in this regard, but they differ in being aware that
they find themselves in this condition.
Given this rather bleak situation, it is
no surprise that from earliest times people have asked, “What can be done to
reduce the perpetual state of conflict, internal and external, in which I find
myself, which threatens my ability to achieve the purposes to which I am
devoting my life?”
The Search for Ways to Relieve the
Tension
In every era, people have existed whose lives have been
devoted to finding a way to enhance their ability, and the ability of their
fellow human beings, to lead meaningful lives in which their respective goals
are advanced. From the dawn of history,
there have been individuals who declare that they have found the key to
maximizing the ability of each person to realize their life purposes, and
minimizing the extent to which internal and external factors interfere with
that process. To the extent that other
people developed an interest in “the key”, these individuals gained a following
– and a self-organizing group came into being for the purpose of putting “the
key” into effect.
The “keys” have fallen into several major categories. Perhaps the first to appear is religion, in
its various manifestations, all of which claim to be the recipients of
supernatural revelation that provides a detailed guide for living a good
individual life and for creating a good community – where by “good” is meant
“in conformity with the will of the supernatural being(s) that rules the world
and determines the fate of the human race.”
Observation of the precepts and commands of the religion are, in
themselves, the primary purpose prescribed for every individual and community,
the fundamental source of meaning and worth in human existence. Religion purports to provide the specific
means and actions required for each person to realize the purposes for which he
is consciously self-organized, and for each community to realize the purposes
for which it is consciously self-organized.
Every religion, each according to its own light, provides a ready answer
to the question, “What is the meaning of my life, and the lives of my fellow
human beings?”
Another category of “keys” is political theory, which
provides guiding principles for the conscious self-organization of groups, with
an eye to satisfying the purposes around which their individual members
organize their lives. For example, the
emergence of monarchy as a principle of political organization is a result of
people’s desire for clear lines of authority in resolving internal community
conflicts, for unified leadership in facing external conflicts, and often also
for individual inspiration arising from devoting oneself to a clear cause
defined by the ruler. No better
expression of this situation can be found than in the pleas directed to the
prophet Samuel by the ancient tribes of Israel for the anointing of a king to
rule over them: “We wish to be like all other peoples – to have a king who will
be our judge, and who will lead us in fighting our battles.”5
As in religion, so in monarchy, having someone define a
purpose for you around which you can consciously self-organize your life avoids
a lot of the angst associated with creating and finding your own purposes in
life. You get to live a life of
fulfillment, without the need to do the hard work of defining for yourself what
you want to fulfill. Many people enjoy
getting this advantage from joining a religious group or a political
entity. At Sudbury Valley School, we
see this same process occurring in school-age children who prefer the world of
traditional education, where the purposes are laid out for them, to a world
where they must define their own purposes and self-organize to fulfill them.
In both of the instances mentioned above, the primary
purposes around which each person’s life is organized are defined by the group
– or, more precisely, by the group leaders – and the individual’s idiosyncratic
purposes, where they exist, play a secondary role. A different key to solving the problem outlined above is offered
by the political principle of democracy, that focuses first on the individual
and his life goals, and invents a way to form a collaborative group whose very
purpose it is to further the ability of each individual to realize those goals. Democracy does this in two ways: by calling
on each member to participate in defining the group’s purposes, and by creating
a rule of law, which guides behavior and resolves conflict in a manner that
enhances the freedom of action of each individual.
Democracy for a community larger than a tribal unit was
first instituted in ancient times. It
foundered on its failure to balance the purposes of the group and those of the
individuals who made up the group. Its
critics accused it of being “mob rule”, by which they meant that, in all forms
of ancient democracy, the group’s will rode roughshod over the will of
individuals (where the two were in conflict).
Nor were adequate means ever developed to assure continuity and organic
change, as opposed to the sudden and often radical shifts to which groups (like
individuals!) are often prone. The
political system of monarchy (or similar autocratic rule) offered the same
defects as democracy, but turned out to be easier to live with, overall, and quickly
became the prevailing system throughout the world.
Among the six billion people who populate
this planet, there are a countless number who claim to have found the “key” to
a better, satisfying, and fulfilling life for all; and of these, thousands have
succeeded in gathering around them groups of followers who have accepted their
teachings. Sadly, the very purpose for
which a “key” is sought – maximizing the ability of each person to realize
their life purposes, and minimizing the extent to which internal and external
factors interfere with that process – is the one that ultimately is almost
always most poorly served by the creators of their “key”, for the various
groups devoted to their various “keys” have been in constant conflict with each
other throughout history. At best, each
“key” has provided, for the individuals in its group, a measure of internal
peace, but this is rarely matched by peaceful coexistence with groups devoted
to other “keys”. Overall, the natural
state of conflict continues to prevail.
The Place of Liberal Democracy
The Founding Fathers of this country were presented with a
unique historical opportunity: to
create a new political system for a brand new country with no burden of
historical tradition to weigh them down, but with the collective experience and
wisdom of human history to guide them.
They were keenly aware of the fact that every person, as a consciously
self-organizing entity, requires purpose in order to define his self-organizing
principles; and they knew that, regardless of the nature of the community in
which a person lives, he will, of necessity, devise a purpose that enables him
to carry on with life.
The great historical innovation of the Founding Fathers was
to understand, as no political leaders before them had understood, the
tremendous power of freedom, both on the individual and collective levels. For an individual, they grasped that
offering freedom to choose among a wide variety of purposes around which to
organize one’s life creates a significant benefit: it enhances the likelihood
that a person will find the purposes which best fulfill his potential and his
destiny, and it thereby increases the value of the contribution that person
makes to the community in which he lives.
The founders made this realization the cornerstone of the political and
cultural structure they set out to build in the United States.
They were not subtle about their position; rather, they
stated it openly and clearly. They
singled out as key “unalienable rights” of every human being the oft-quoted
triumvirate, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – in other words,
the threefold right of each person to live as a free person and pursue the
purposes for which he, as an individual, has chosen to live. It is instructive to compare this to the
slogan of the French Revolution, which followed so closely on the heels of our
own War of Independence: “Liberte, egalite, fraternite” – “liberty,
equality, brotherhood” – which accentuates the dominance of the community
(“brotherhood”) over the individual.
In case anyone missed the point, the
Founding Fathers follow up immediately with the statement that “to secure these
rights governments are established among men,” so that there could be no doubt
that, in their eyes, whatever purposes the group develops, by whatever means it
chooses, the advancement of the goals of each individual citizen is the first
priority of a healthy society. To be
sure, to make this happen in the real world, they struggled mightily to write a
convoluted Constitution, which is still evolving, in which they strove to
embody the principles they enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
Ethics
So far, no mention has been made of morality. I would like to explain why this is the
case.
A code of ethics is the system of rules set up by any group
to regulate the behavior of its individual members, in furtherance of the goals
of the group. Individuals either accept
the ethical principles of the group to which they belong – whether or not they
have some personal qualms about some of these principles – or they leave the
group and seek another with which to associate, with ethical principles that
are, overall, more congenial to them personally. Since there are innumerable different groups in existence, it
should come as no surprise that there exist in the world a wide range of
ethical codes, which offer rules of behavior as varied as the groups which
spawn them.
A glance at the record of human experience from ancient
times to the present would seem to make this statement a simple truism. Nevertheless, for reasons which I will now
address, there is a persistent tendency on the part of most people, and most
groups, to consider their ethical code to be the only “right” one.
This tendency arises from the universal human practice of
objectivization: people seem to insist on endowing their perceived world with a
reality that transcends the uniquely personal world that they have created out
of their experiences. Here is how this
happens: I form a world view – a picture of what exists around me – based on my
perceptions of my environment. Rather
than say, “This is the way I see the world, whatever the world may actually
be,” I prefer to say, “This is the way the world is.” “That is a chair,” not “I perceive a
chair,” or “As I see it, I am interacting with something that I choose to
identify as a chair.” In fact, we are
so accustomed to this process that we look askance at someone who uses the
circumlocutions that objectivizing avoids.
Groups engage in this process as well, and they extend it to
the rules of behavior they establish for their members. What starts out, perhaps, as a tentative
exploration for a rule – “We think that it makes sense for people to behave in
this way . . .” – often becomes a
declaration that the rule specifies a behavior that reflects an objective,
unchallengeable truth – “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ”The
Declaration of Independence is an excellent case in point. The founders could have said, “We, the
colonists, have decided that it makes sense to behave in a way that treats all
people equally, etc.”, which would have opened them, naturally, to the
objection from their British rulers, and perhaps from most of the rest of the
world, that “We, the British Government, along with all other civilized
governments of the world, have learned from long experience that it decidedly
does not make sense to behave that way,” and so forth. Such a weak statement, had it been made by
the founders, would certainly not have inspired action in the same way that the
ringing objective statement made in the Declaration did.
Ethical rules thus tend to become absolute, objective
statements defining the good and the bad for groups, endowing the
earmarked behaviors with meaning that transcends mere opinion. Often, this process is strengthened by ascribing
them to a source that is supernatural and hence presumably authorized to
prescribe human behavior here on earth.
In such cases, ethics becomes subsumed under religion.
This process of objectivizing ethics leads groups to
demonize other groups that approve of “bad” behavior. If it is an objective truth that all people should be
treated as equals, then those who treat people unequally are bad people,
and should be reproved, removed, dealt with somehow. Any group that is exercised enough over another group’s ethics is
thus liable to whip itself into a frenzy of righteous action to eliminate the
offensive behavior – and, if necessary, the offending group – from the scene,
in the same way as groups, in determining their ethical rules, grant themselves
by implication – and in practice – the power to eliminate offending behavior,
or people who engage in offensive behavior, from their midst, one way or
another.
This way of thinking leads directly to
ideological or religious wars, fought to eliminate heresies that pollute the
human environment.
Digression: Science
The birth of modern science introduced an interesting twist
into this scenario. Science, otherwise
known as Natural Philosophy, has from ancient times been viewed as a way of
understanding the world. Greek
philosophers early on believed that, through a combination of close observation
and disciplined analysis, the rules governing the way the world works can be
uncovered. Implicit in this belief were
three beliefs:
- that
such rules existed (the world must behave as if it were governed by strict
rules);
- that
human beings can uncover those rules (the rules are not beyond human
comprehension);
- and
that the world we observe is the real world that must be explained
(objectivization).
Greek science was a bold statement that there exist truths
about the world (“we hold these truths . . .”) and that these, once displayed,
are beyond dispute. Indeed,
Aristotelian science was held in such high repute that it remained the measure
of all scientific thinking for over a thousand years.
Modern science departed from this ancient Greek model in a
significant way. It basically abandoned
the link between the real world – still assumed to exist – and direct human
experience. Modern science was based on
the notion that ideas about human experience have a reality all of their
own. Theory was objectivized, in
addition to direct perception, and statements about human experience were
endowed with truth-value on a par with experience itself.
Thus, when Isaac Newton declared that all massive bodies
attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, he stated
this as a truth about reality, on a par with the truth that the bodies
attracting each other themselves existed.
The latter statement was an objectivization of experience (I perceive
massive bodies, and I declare them to exist separately from my perception); the
former statement, about gravity, was an objectivization of an idea, a theory
(gravity exists, it is real).
Modern science became the province of a
group of people called “scientists”, who formed their own set of ethical
principles and who, in turn, decried all those who rejected their current set
of accepted ideas as “unscientific” people whose view of reality was wrong.
The Ethics of Liberal Democracy
Liberal democracy holds that there is a rule of personal
behavior that trumps all other rules:
that any person or group may hold any beliefs or opinions concerning the
world, and adhere to any set of ethical rules, so long as these beliefs,
opinions, and rules do not interfere with any other person or group’s ability
to hold their beliefs or opinions concerning the world, and adhere to their
preferred set of ethical rules. This is
a meta-principle of universal tolerance, which is the defining characteristic
of societies characterized as liberal democracies.
The purpose of this new principle is to promote peaceful
coexistence among all people, a condition that (as we have seen) is in direct
conflict with the imperatives of natural evolution, and that has always been
regarded as unattainable and utopian.
There are historians who claim that human history has, on
its own, moved inexorably towards a universal human society based on such a
meta-principle. Western liberal
democracies have been organized according to it, and have managed to comprise
within themselves individuals and groups with strong opinions about the nature
of reality and truth, while avoiding intramural violence deriving from
disagreements concerning these opinions.
Whether the rest of the world will follow suit, or whether these liberal
democracies will manage to survive, is still open to question.
At any rate, the present lack of
widespread agreement, even within this country, about the content of a code of
ethics makes it pointless to include a moral dimension in the discussion of the
meaning of “effective adult”. Every
person acts at all times within the boundaries of what he considers to be appropriate
rules of behavior for himself. Every
person considers himself to be “ethical”, given his own interpretation of the
word. It would seem reasonable to
expect that a person defending the proposition that he has taken responsibility
for preparing himself to be an effective adult should, among other things, make
mention of the ethical framework within which he is formulating that defense,
and respond to questions and challenges about that framework.
Being “An Effective Adult”
All of which brings us back to the question with which we
began: what does it mean to be an “effective adult” in American society
today? And what does that have to do
with Sudbury Valley School, which uses that concept as the core of its graduation
procedure?
The dictionary defines the word “effective” as follows:
“producing, or capable of producing, a desired effect.” Every person, as a consciously
self-organizing entity, has purposes which he strives to attain. An effective person is one who not
only has, and is aware of, his purposes, but produces, or is capable of
producing, the desired effect of fulfilling his purposes. He is, in other words, adept at finding ways
to realize his goals, and at devising strategies to overcome the obstacles that
will inevitably stand in his way.
Furthermore, being an effective adult in American society
today means being an effective American citizen. Such a person must be aware of, and in tune with, the overall
purposes for which this country has been establish – purposes that we have
discussed earlier – and must be able to be a member of American society who
helps his fellow citizens pursue those purposes and achieve them.
How does one prepare to be an effective adult in American
society today? How does a child
progress through childhood, and transform himself from an inexperienced and
unskilled infant to a person who is ready to function effectively in the adult
world?
The answer that appears to make most sense is to provide
children with an environment which has the following characteristics:
- It
enables them to discover their unique purposes, by giving them the time and
freedom to look within themselves – to “know themselves,” as the students at
Sudbury Valley frequently articulate this process – and to eliminate
authoritarian intervention by outsiders that seeks to impose on the developing
child life purposes defined by others.6
- It
enables them to develop strategies for achieving their purposes, through
experimentation, trial and error, and unhampered contemplation – strategies
that enable them to produce, or become capable of producing, the desired effect
of realizing their goals.
- It
enables them to grow up and function in a social system whose purposes mirror
the purposes of the social system of America.
Such an environment is the ideal one for
the development of children into effective adults in American society. It describes, in brief, the environment
created and sustained at Sudbury Valley School for the past 39 years, and at
other Sudbury model schools that have come into being.
The graduation procedure developed by the school for the
award of diplomas can thus be seen to be a request made by the school of the
diploma candidate to try to be aware of, and articulate, the essential
elements of the process by which he has taken responsibility to prepare himself
to become an effective adult. The
school believes that all those who grow up in its environment, through long
habit and practice, in fact have done just that. What is asked of a diploma candidate is to put into words, through
self-examination, some description of the process they have undergone
internally as they have grown into effective adults.7
Those who choose to go through the diploma procedure thus
end up endowing the school with a special gift: they leave behind them a
written record of the way each of them has defined their purposes, developed
life strategies to achieve them, and done this all within the framework of a
social system devoted to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
1. Why
should the universe contain self-organizing systems whose purpose is to
survive? From the vantage point of
physics, this is a serious question.
The 19th century saw the introduction of a new principle – namely, the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the sum total of all processes
in the universe take place in a manner that increases the overall degree of
disorder and dissolution; in other word, that things inexorably tend to fall
apart in the overall order of things. That
new principle negated the underlying assumption of physics from ancient times,
that the world was inherently stable, and that the changes that occur in the
physical universe do not affect its overall stability and permanence. (This view of underlying stability still
informs physics today, in the form of various “conservation laws” that are seen
as central to any explanation of reality.)
It is therefore puzzling, from the vantage point of physics, to find
within the universe living organisms, whose cardinal property is the drive to
survive, to adapt themselves to the changes that assault them from within and
from without in such a manner that each of them, as a system, can nevertheless
go on surviving as a coherent whole.
To respond that, nevertheless, the disorder in the universe as a whole increases from the activities of living systems, does not solve the puzzle of systems within the universe that seem to operate locally in defiance of the Second Law.
3. For a discussion of a number of examples of this, see Simon Schama, The Power of Art (HarperCollins; New York, 2006).
4. By “bare survival” I mean the factors commonly considered essential to human life: water, food, shelter and clothing.
5. I Samuel:8:20.
6. Such an environment, for adults, defines what we mean by a “free society.”
7.
The fact that every year there is
a group of students who go through this procedure enables the school to
collect, over time, a written record of the way students have perceived their
development towards being effective adults.
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