Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness[1]
Daniel Greenberg
I. The Setting
I
would like to begin by placing the whole question of schooling and education in
a broader historical and cultural context.
This is essential to understanding where Sudbury Valley comes from,
because the establishment of the school in 1968 was not an effort to reform the
current educational system, but rather an attempt to go back to first
principles. Since then, weve had a lot of time to refine our thinking about
those principles, which we feel have been amply validated by what weve been doing for 34 years.
If
you look up education in
the dictionary, this is the definition that you find: The act or process of imparting knowledge or skill;
the obtaining of knowledge or skill through such a process. Those are two
different sides of the concept education, and when you think about that its obvious that the definition describes activities
common to all human beings at all times and of all ages. Theres
no way to be alive and not to be either imparting knowledge or skill or
obtaining knowledge or skill. In fact,
the absence of these activities is probably the best definition of death! One of the biggest mistakes people make is
associating learning almost exclusively with formal instruction. In reality, when youre vegging out youre
learning. When youre wasting time youre
learning. When youre getting up, brushing your teeth, making breakfast,
youre learning.
If you keep that in mind as you go through life, itll give you a different perspective on the nature of
the activities that youre involved in, because youre always acquiring or imparting some kind of
skill or knowledge. Always. Theres
no way not to be. Its part of who you are.
Now,
the whole idea of learning and imparting knowledge and skills can only really
be appreciated within a broader context, because education is only one part of
the overall content of any culture.
Other parts include such things as family structure, world view,
government, and economy. To understand
any of these parts, you have to understand the nature and goals of the culture
that youre talking about.
You cannot talk about any one of them in a vacuum. First you have to understand the culture,
and then you have to ask what role education fills in the culture.
This
is all very abstract, so let me give you some examples. Suppose were dealing with a hierarchical culture, where everything is stratified
and everybody knows their place, the way the vast majority of societies have
been for the last 5,000 years. What are
the goals of such a society? A key one
is the maintenance of its structure.
Similarly, theres no way to make sense of medieval philosophy without
understanding that one of the functions that it serves is to justify and
explain the structure of the society within which its written.
Once you start reading about the
great chain of being and how everything has its fixed place in the grand
scheme of the universe, you understand that it all fits into that culture.
Another
example, quite relevant today, is theocratic societies, which are based on the
idea that they are ruled directly by God, and that their function is to be in
the service of God. Thats something thats
alien to most modern secular people.
But you cannot understand the religious wars of Europe in the 16th
century if you dont understand how completely important religion was to
their lives. It doesnt make sense otherwise. It just looks like a bunch of people killing each other for no
good reason at all. But they werent. They were
doing something central to their lives, and everything else was built around
that.
There
are other different kinds of societies based on other goals. There are societies based on warlike
principles where the ideal is to be a warrior.
You cant understand Sparta if you dont understand the basis of their culture.
So
you have to really comprehend whats
at the heart of a societys culture before you can talk about education. Im
going to focus on America because thats
where we are. Were not talking about education in Saudi Arabia and were not talking about education in Central Africa. Were
talking about education in America, and in order to understand that we have to
understand that America is unique historically in two very fundamental
ways. First, America is a conscious
creation. The whole non-native
American population has no roots here; all came here relatively recently from
somewhere else. Think about this. French people trace their roots back to the Gauls. They look at Caesars Gallic Wars and they relate to that: Its us Caesars
fighting against. Everybody in
Europe has roots. America, by contrast,
is the result of people coming over here through a decision to leave their
country of origin and go to a completely different location. That decision is to make a conscious break
from the traditions and the cultures that they and their families were born
into. You cant even begin to understand this country if you dont keep that in mind.
Its always said that were a country of immigrants, but that doesnt really convey the full import of our peculiar
origins. What we are is a country of
people who consciously decided continuously,
to this day! to break off from their origins and go to a different
place and start out anew, which means that they have something that no other
national group has: the opportunity to
consciously create a society with new goals and new purposes, unlike any that
they came from.
The
second unique feature is related to the first.
Not only was America settled by people who came here and broke off from
their roots individually and consciously, but America as a nation the United States of America was a conscious creation of the people who lived in
this country in the 1780s. This was a
restatement of who they were, in a manner totally unparalleled in history. As we
the people they deliberately decided to create a nation, and
articulated what this new entity is and what its goals are. One of the
keys to understanding American culture is understanding whats behind that creation. What were they thinking?
What were their goals? What did
they see as the essence of the new American society that they spelled out and
passed on to us?
In
America the beginning point is the individual every human beings
desires and worth and dreams. One of
the things people who came over here were doing was saying, I am going to do something I want, and not
something that my culture has programmed me to do. So the very
act of coming over here already has the seed in it of the concept that this is
a country based on the individual as the starting point. Now, to see how radical that was and it is still radical to this day you have to juxtapose it with what virtually every
other nation and culture has done throughout history. The starting point has always been the reverse: that the nation is the primary
important entity, and the individual is there to serve the greater good of the
nation, however that nation is conceived.
You
can see this operating in Europe today.
Whats keeping the Europeans from creating a United States of Europe? After the Second World War,
many farsighted Europeans said, Its crazy that were
killing each other. Lets create a United States of Europe so we can have
peace and stability. Yet, half a
century later there still is no United States of Europe. Why?
Because Europe, like most of the rest of the world, is still very much
caught up in the idea that there is such a thing as nationhood to which
you owe your primary allegiance. You
are first and foremost there to serve the British or Dutch, or French, or German national culture.
The idea that the individual comes first and that the social structures
surrounding the individual are secondary and are there to serve the individual,
to help the individual fulfill their needs, is unique in America. And its
closely related to the fact that this was a consciously created culture in
which individuals made decisions to come here independently.
II. Americas Goals
All
of this was nicely articulated by our founding fathers as they focused on three
fundamental goals for American society:
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody had ever said this before. The question is, what do each of these
mean? Well look at them one by one.
Life. This means
that a primary aim of this society is to sustain the individual life of each
and every citizen of this country. That
has come to mean that we wish to enable people to live healthily, to live successfully,
and to live comfortably, and by comfortably we mean not to suffer and not to die at an early age
and not to sacrifice our lives for some abstract goal that has nothing to do
with our personal dreams.
Liberty. That concept
was never used before so openly in an official document. In fact, in 1788, the states were not even
ready to ratify the Constitution unless the first Congress promised immediately
to enshrine the concept of liberty in a set of Amendments that came to be
called the Bill of Rights. They wanted no guesswork about what liberty
means. It was too important. They wanted it spelled out and guaranteed[2].
The
pursuit of happiness. What does pursuit of happiness mean? Its a
very interesting phrase, and you have to understand it in the context in which
it was written. The word happiness
did not mean the same thing in the 18th century in American English
as it means today. Today we relate the
word to the concept of joy or pleasure.
Happiness back then meant the realization of an individuals potential.
This country is based on the goal that every individual citizen should
be free to pursue their dream and to realize it. This is completely antithetical to any kind of autocratic
society. Ours is a society where people
are supposed to articulate themselves and their dreams, and the government is
supposed to support that. We dont go around saying, We need 300,000 CPAs in order to make our country work, so heres what well
do. Well count off 300,000 young men and send them over to CPA school. In this
country, we begin with the individuals
dream.
In
America, the ideal is a culture where each life is a precious entity, where
each life has an intrinsic value that has nothing to do with serving any
external interests. The founding
fathers meant to articulate something that the vast majority of American
citizens felt in the 18th century:
that government is basically a plague.
We need it because there are things we cant do alone, but we always remember that its something that we only want when we really need
it. Of course, for over 200 years the
argument has been about how much we really need, but theres never been any question about the starting
point. We dont start by making a scheme and fitting people into the
scheme. We start with individual people
and then say, What do we have to do to support these people in
realizing the three goals of our culture?
Within
this context it is possible to understand Thomas Jeffersons role in the history of this country. Hes the
person who articulated the three goals
although they met with widespread approval
and he felt passionately about them all his life. He felt that the only kind of culture that really fits these
goals for the country is a rural culture, a culture made up of independent
farmers. He was against commerce,
against cities and all the culture that emerges from cities. It strikes a modern reader as very weird,
until you recall that in the context of the early 19th century,
farmers were the freest people around!
They had their own plot of land, they could grow their own food, they
didnt need anything from anybody as long as things went
well, and in times of trouble they all helped each other out. For Jefferson, the American set of national
goals was most easily realized on a farm.
Indeed,
farmers were the most mobile people in this country throughout the 19th
century. Who settled the country? Often as not, the children in a farm family
would say, I dont want to stay
on my dads farm. Theres four of us, and if we had to divide up the farm, well each get too little. So what did they do? They got up and they went somewhere else Westward HO! and they made their own farm, and they kept
on moving west until they used up all the available farm land, a turning point
that was greatly bemoaned as the end of the
frontier.
The
idea that farmers are the most independent people and the ones who most cling
to these beliefs is something that dictators understand very well. It is no accident that when Stalin took
power in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, he tried to obliterate Russian peasant
farmers, the kulaks. That made perfect sense, because he was
trying to create an authoritarian state in which the goals of his party were
realized. And he could not tolerate
within his country a subgroup that had strong feelings of independence.
III. Happiness
There
are several related concepts that inform the complex idea of happiness.
Theres no particular order to the items Im going to discuss; they are all parallel concepts and
they all inform what human happiness is about.
Ill start with the concept of self-realization: knowing who you are, knowing something about
your destiny as a human being. It is a relatively new concept in the world that
a persons uniqueness and destiny is something worthwhile for
each and every human being to consider, because peoples destinies were not something that they had any
feeling of control over or even knowledge of.
Societies throughout history were rigidly organized. Everybody had their place. You were born to
be a servant, or a tradesman, or a nobleman, or a king. The idea that you can actually do something
with yourself, that your destiny is not fixed, but rather something you have to
uncover, understand, and go with, is a tremendously powerful concept. You can set your own goals in life. You dont
have to live according to someone elses
goals, or some pre-determined goal.
Connected to that is the realization that youre given one life to lead on this earth, and
appreciating the significance of that life is a central feature of happiness.
A
second feature of happiness is leading a meaningful life: the idea that what youre doing makes a difference. Youre not just a drone.
Youre not thinking, I
might as well go to work. I might as
well have kids. I might as well make
money. I might as well retire. This is not
our idea of happiness. Our idea of
happiness, for ourselves as adults and for our children, is to have a sense
that life has some significance. That
doesnt mean that we have to be in the history books as one
of the great people whom everybody recognizes.
We dont have to be Einstein, we dont have to be one in a billion. The idea is that every person can contribute
something.
This
focuses on the significance of meaningful to wit, that
youve somehow related your life to the rest of the world;
that what you do somehow links in to what you care about or to what other
people care about and what other people are sensitive to; that when you finally
end your days, people wont say, Who?
I never heard of him. I never saw him.
Did he even exist? but rather, people will say, Yes, he was a good person. He was a volunteer for sick people. He worked in the church.
He cleared paths through the woods.
He helped build a company. He
gave people employment. Something
that he did related to other people in the world and lent some value to the
human condition.
Another
component of leading a happy life is having self-confidence: the conviction that you are a capable human
being. It doesnt mean that Im
capable of doing anything that anybody else can do or everything that anybody
else could do. It doesnt mean that I have to know everything that everybody
else knows. It means that Im good at something. That I have a talent that I can develop, whatever it is. I can be a good mortician. I can be a good accountant. I can be a good lawyer. I can be a good bricklayer. Im good
at my work. It doesnt make a difference what it is. Hand in hand with that is the conviction
that Im competent enough to overcome the obstacles in my
path as I proceed to develop my capability in whatever Im doing.
Failures are viewed by self-confident people as something you learn
from, not as something to avoid. Its a very American tradition to feel that we are a can do kind of
people, against all odds.
Another
component of happiness is empowerment:
I have a say in what goes on in my life and in the life of the
community. Im not a non-entity.
I have the strength to stand for what I believe in, and I have the
ability to make my voice heard. I am a
powerful human being. Empowerment is
something thats internal. It
can even reside in you when youre under
somebody elses physical control.
Empowerment is something in the soul that says, I am as strong as the next person, in my essence, even
if right now Im being beaten down physically. You dont
get any better example of the concept of empowerment than you get if you study
the literature of places where large numbers of the population were put into
incredibly horrible physical circumstances.
An empowered person can live with a feeling of inner dignity and
strength inside even under those conditions, can say, I have strength and nobody can break me inside; even
if they break my bones, they cannot break my spirit.
Another
concept that has to do with happiness is independence: that you cant be deflected by others from your unique path in life. The understanding that you can be an
independent human being and follow your own path even though everything you do
inter-relates to what everybody else does is extremely subtle; if you dont have it, you end up feeling that I dont have any room
for maneuver. We are all
dependent on what other people do and yet, in a very profound sense, we are
independent if we stay true to our own paths.
Its like being the captain of the boat in rough
seas. If you throw away the oars, throw
away the sails, and allow yourself to be buffeted, thats not independence.
Independence means trying at all times to remain in control of your
ship.
Finally,
happiness means being able to live as an effective adult. Youre
not going to be a happy individual in a society if youre not functioning effectively in that society,
something that is very time- and culture-dependent. The interesting thing is that in the 21st century,
being a functional adult has now taken on a much more global meaning. It encompasses a number of characteristics,
such as the following:
You
have to be a lifelong learner,
because stuff is just coming out at an impossible pace of innovation. Whatever you learned in the past I dont care where
you learned it or when you learned it is
obsolete in a terribly short time.
Things that are written in books often turn out to be obsolete by the
time they get printed. Equipment
designed for educational settings, then marketed, sold, and installed, is often
obsolete by the time that it gets installed.
A classic example of that is high tech equipment in schools and universities. So you have to be able to stay on top of
things and be comfortable with lifelong learning, and not view learning as a
chore.
You
have to be self-motivated in the 21st
Century. You cannot rely on other
people to give you a push. Which means
that you have to be able to initiate your actions. You have to be able to do things and not wait for somebody else
to organize things for you.
You
have to be adaptable to rapid change. You can be a lifelong learner and still be
stuck in a rut. You have to be ready for change. You have to think of change as
something thats just a fact of life. One of the things that has happened in the 21st
Century is that life-long careers are essentially a thing of the past. When I grew up, the only talk was of
life-long careers. In fact, people who
changed careers were viewed with great suspicion as people who didnt have direction or any clear idea of who they
were. The assumption was that if you
had a clear idea of who you were, you would know you were going to be that
for the rest of your life, you would be defined by your career. There were very few exceptions. There was one well-known model of a person
who changed career acceptably in mid-life, but that was considered
special. Im talking about Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer was an internationally renowned
organist who in his 30's had a new calling, to become a missionary physician to
Africans. So he dropped his
performances and turned his back on his fame and went through medical school,
after which he went to Africa and set up a clinic deep in the heartland. He was unquestionably a great person which
is why he was accepted as an exception to the rule. He was not considered fickle because he changed out of lofty
motives, so he could be forgiven for giving up music. But for ordinary people, going from one job to another was
usually considered unbalanced and flighty.
If you went to a company and tried to get hired, and your resume showed
five different jobs, each lasting less than five years, the first thing a person
would say is, Why would we hire this guy? He is just going to jump ship.
He has no direction. Today, almost the opposite is true. If you stay an executive assistant to the
president in a company for 35 years, people are likely to think, What is the matter with you? Youve experienced no growth at all?
Those
are the essential components of what we mean when we say we strive for
happiness. Im sure you can come up with other things that Ive missed, but I dont think youll give me an argument that these components are
essential and important in our eyes today for leading a life that we consider
to be a happy life.
IV. Happiness
and Schooling
How
does all of this relate to the educational environment appropriate for our
children? Lets consider each element.
Self-realization. What does it
take to realize who you are? One of the
key factors is patience. By patience I
mean the willingness to give yourself time.
Self-realization is something like ripening. Its not something that happens overnight, even for
people who have a calling. Joan of Arc
had a great revelation about her life, but it took a long time for that to
develop into action. You have to be
able to give children time. You cant push them.
You have to let them go by their own clock. That requires patience, it requires standing back, it requires
not saying, You look like you havent been doing very much for the last year or two years. Get a move-on. A year or two is no time at
all. Look at the life expectancy
today. Were not living in the 15th Century, when the life expectancy
was 30 years. Today life expectancy is
in the 70's. Whats the rush?
Leading
a meaningful life. To do this, one has to develop a sense of
meaning, an understanding of how your life relates to the rest of the
world. That involves two things. One has to do with developing a sense of
values. What is it that other people
value? What is it that society
values? What is it that I value? How do these link together? How do I contribute to society? You develop a sense of values by interacting
with other people in a value laden environment, where real questions of ethics
and morals come up. Not fake questions,
not role-playing questions, but the real questions of everyday life. Ive got a problem.
These kids arent playing with me.
How do I cope with that? How do
I get through to them? Or, What is more important in my life today, to do A or to
do B?
Another
component of learning how to sense whats
meaningful is learning to be sensitive to the emotions of the people around you
and to the effect that you have on their lives. This is not really a verbal thing. You may be able to verbalize it later, but in order to forge a
good relationship whether its
between spouses, or between parents and children, or between you and other
people you have to be able to develop a sensitivity to whats going on inside them at a level of feeling that is
pre-verbal. One mechanism for learning
how to do that is through the arts, and it is a mechanism used by an
overwhelming majority of free children.
The arts are a way of relating to mood.
Working with the arts freely develops a skills in understanding feelings
your own, and others. And indeed, at Sudbury model
schools, you see this involvement with the arts on all sides. Students are listening to music, performing
together, discussing their musical loves.
The same with the art theyre all doing art of one kind or another. Theyre
drawing, theyre scribbling, theyre
sculpting, theyre photographing.
And theyre sharing this work with each other, encouraging each
other, critiquing each other, doing all kinds of things with each other at a
level that has nothing to do with art
criticism; rather, it has to do with developing through art a
meaningful relationship that transcends words.
Self-confidence is developed primarily through self-initiated
activity. The most important thing
about self-initiated activity is that it really be allowed to go along without
being bothered by other people all the time.
Thats where we make our biggest mistakes, as parents, as
adults. We see somebody start something
and our instinct is to be helpful.
Always to be helpful. We dont intend any harm.
Were on your
side. Cant we support
you in this? I learned
this lesson in a very amusing way with our first oldest child when he was about
8 years old. For over a year he had
been passionately collecting rocks. He
found rocks where you wouldnt even think
rocks existed. Hed study them, wash them, compare them, look them up in
books. We watched this, and we thought
wed do something really nice to help. So we bought him, unsolicited, a rock
polisher. Isnt that a sweet thing for supportive parents to do?
He
never touched a rock after that. He
dropped his engagement with rocks completely.
We had taken over his activity.
Innocently, with the best of intentions. Theres nothing more dangerous than a helpful adult to
squelch self-initiated activity. It is
the curse of modern pedagogy that teachers help
motivate, seize teaching
moments, and try to assist at every turn.
By doing that, they rob children of the ability to self-initiate and to
carry out an activity, and undermine their self-confidence in the process.
Empowerment. This implies
political equality. That is essential
in the environment in which kids grow up if you want them to feel
empowered. Indeed, there is no reason
for them not to be empowered, even though they rarely are. Kids are people just like us, and theres absolutely no justification for not treating them
like anyone else.
Years
ago, we were visited by the headmaster of a famous progressive school, which
had a student council; the school prided itself on how it listened to students opinions. He
was a wonderful man and a fine educator.
Ill never forget how we sat together in the waning
hours of the day, and he turned to me and said, You know, your school is really different from ours. We have a lot of
student input, and a formal student council.
But in the last analysis, I can veto anything that they say. Here, you cant do that, and thats a world of
difference. He was visibly moved, and I was moved by his
ability to look me in the eye and say that.
Empowerment
means equality, empowerment means democracy and empowerment means mutual
respect. That you simply respect each
other as human beings, period. That
does not exist in schools which dont
have democracies. The minute I can say
to a student, just because hes young, You have to go to the other room because you did A, B
and C, theres no equality,
no respect, no democracy. Ive taken away his power. If I say to him, I dont like what youre
doing, he should be able to say to me, I dont think Im doing anything wrong. And then we ask the people
whom we, as a community, have chosen to judge these things, Who is right? Thats
empowerment; students who receive it at an early age will keep it until theyre a ripe old ninety-five.
Independence. Earlier, I
talked about the subtle interplay between individual independence and societal
interdependence. I want to say a bit
about the most powerful weapon that we all are endowed with for learning that
balance between independence and interdependence: its called talking. Talking and
talking and more talking, which is what everybody does, adults and children,
whenever they get a chance. Talking is
what enables you to develop your thoughts even as youre bouncing them off everybody elses. As adults,
if we want to make a decision about something, we not only look inside
ourselves, but we consult with our friends, indeed with everybody we think we
can benefit from. Are we losing our
direction when we do that? Of course
not. Were maneuvering the boundary between getting all the wisdom we can out
of others while maintaining our personal course. Conversation is the best tool for learning how to be independent
in an interdependent world. What do
traditional schools tell kids all day when theyre in school? Dont talk! They should
be saying, Talk all you want.
Its your best teacher.
Just
before the end of school, Sudbury Valley traditionally has a camping trip to a
beautiful state park. A huge group goes
out on a week-long trip. What amuses us
is that when they go out there, they have a great time, but they come back
exhausted. Why? Because theyre up half the night talking.
The reality is that there is never enough time for talking, that its exhilarating to have conversations because theyre your life-blood.
Thats where you develop that wonderful sense of how you
fit into the whole scheme of things and yet remain who you really are.
Adaptability
to rapid change is most compatible
with a school where you dont stand in the
way of children, because theres nothing that
moves more rapidly than a community of people who are free to do what they
want. Any community, but especially
children, because children are fully alive.
Kingdom of Childhood [3]
is based on long interviews with former students who reminisce about they felt
while they were at the school. In one
of them there is a passage where an interviewee tells how he remembers being a
young child and running around all day and having a wonderful time and just
doing a million different activities.
He recalled doing this with a sense of urgency, because he looked around
observed adults and he realized that it wasnt
going to be long before he was going to be tired and slow, just like those
adults, so he wanted to make the best of the time that he had. Thats
how you learn to adapt to rapid change!
In a
nutshell, if you think about the pursuit of
happiness and all this phrase signifies, you are almost forced
into a Sudbury-model school.
V. Education
Lets return to where we started to the concept of education. How did
people learn and impart knowledge throughout history? Mass schooling, after all, is something very new, barely 150
years old. They learned by growing up
immersed in their culture. Its as simple as that.
They were born, they ran around their village or their town, they grew
up in extended families, and they received and imparted knowledge through
direct contact with each other. Thats the way adults still do it today, everywhere. We do most of our learning by just hanging
out and doing things that we want to do and asking other people and reading
books and immersing ourselves one way or another in whatever it is.
Throughout
pre-historic and historic times, that worked really well. For the first million years or so of human
evolution, nobody ever thought there was anything wrong with this picture. They knew that, just like adults, kids would
naturally learn by immersion. Its sort of odd to even think otherwise, because if kids
didnt learn by immersion, how would society have survived
for a million years? How did anything
ever get accomplished before schools?
Most of culture was created long before mass formal education, through
the natural transmission of knowledge and skills.
Fast
forward to the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution hits its
stride. What everybody sees in the
Industrial Revolution is an opportunity to increase material prosperity and
thereby enhance everybodys life.
Survival had always been a touch-and-go thing throughout history just having enough to eat, to wear, to be protected
from the elements. If we dont understand this, we cant understand the extent to which the Industrial
Revolution created an opportunity to have things that were never dreamt of from
the dawn of humanity. Now all of a
sudden people can have lots of clothes because they can make clothes in big
machines; they dont have to weave everything by hand. They can grow lots of food because they have
enormous machines going up and down huge fields, not an ox holding a forked
stick that makes a little indentation into the ground into which you throw a
few seeds. Everything is
transformed.
Now
for Europe, this works well: you have
machines, you have people manning the machines no problem! They didnt know from liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. So for them this was just a big new lease on
life. When Europeans realized that what
was happening was that huge numbers of their population were becoming cogs in
the industrial machine, it wasnt anything out
of the ordinary, because they hardly gave a thought to the individual human
being. What they focused on was the
good of the entire society, as they understood it, which meant becoming
prosperous. The fact that individuals
in the society had to be sacrificed for this good well, what else is new? Individuals were always sacrificed for something for a king, a nobleman, somebodys war, some religious leaders idea of what the next generation should die
for. So you become cogs in a machine no big deal!
But
for America its a big deal!
Americans arent used to being cogs in a machine. They seek liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. So its no accident that the industrial revolution reached
this country slowly. Even then, do you
know where most of the money came for the Industrial Revolution in 19th
century in America? Who had money in
the 19th century to build railroads, factories, and all the
tremendous infrastructure thats required for
an the industrialized economy?
Europeans! Europeans owned much
of this country for most of the 19th century. I had a good laugh back in the >70s when the oil crisis first came and everybody was
complaining, The Arabs are going to take over this country with all
their oil wealth. Then in the >80s it was the Japanese who were going to own us lock,
stock, and barrel. The Arabs and the
Japanese didnt own a fraction of what the Europeans owned back in
the 19th century!
Then
what happened was that we were caught in a vise, and people in the 19th
century knew it. We sort of liked this
new economy. We got a taste for the
benefits that the industrial revolution brought, in a big way, because they are
comfortable! It is more comfortable to
have a bigger house, it is more comfortable to have more clothes, it is more
comfortable to eat better, live longer, have sanitation, have all these
things. You do live longer and
better! No question about it! But we were caught in a dilemma, because in
order to have these goodies, we had to have a society in which the vast
majority of individuals serve as cogs in the industrial machine.
The
reason human cogs were needed is simple:
machines werent smart during the 19th century, or even
during the 20th century until the 1960s and >70s. In the >80s and >90s
they rapidly got smarter, and by the time the year 2020 comes around theyll be really smart.
But in the meantime, machines needed people to push them along.
This
introduced a tremendous cultural problem for America namely, how to limit liberty and the pursuit of
happiness in order to promote the good life.
This battle between individual realization and material prosperity tore
America apart in the latter part of the 19th century and is still
with us today.
Now
you can see where education fits in.
People understood that in order for the industrial system to work, it
wasnt good enough to start with adults, because if you
start with an adult who grew up the way American children grew up back then,
you were in trouble. American children
grew up to be pretty free and high spirited.
You cant suddenly take such a kid and stick them in a factory
and hope that everything will work out, because they are going to gum
everything up. So people realized during the first half of the 19th
century that for the Industrial Revolution to work here, youve got to make kids become cogs in the machine so that
when they grow up to be adults, they will be used to it.
I
want to tell you the flip side. In
Brazil, theres a man by the name of Ricardo Semler who took over
one of the largest production companies in Brazil (called Semco). He was a brash young guy who didnt like the feeling of being boss over a slew of
obedient subordinates. So, over a
period of a few years, he went about creating the first large democratic
company in South America. Hes told the story of this transformation in a gripping
book called Maverick. He turned
his organization into one where everybody had a right to participate in the way
it was run. The workers met with each
other and decided what to produce and how to produce it, what their salaries
should be, what their hours should be, how they should relate to each
other. It was a total revolution. The result was highly gratifying. Not only was the work environment
transformed, but the company prospered more than ever.
Nevertheless,
he soon discovered that he had a problem namely,
finding adults who could function in a free and democratic environment. People like that were rare, because the
adults in general were the product of Brazils
schools, which carefully trained people to be cogs in the industrial
machine! He had the worst time
orienting his workers and getting them accustomed to this new kind of
workplace. What he is starting to do
now is to establish a school in which children are given freedom and
responsibility.
The
tension between individual freedom and industrial schooling is tremendous. You have all felt it, whether youre aware of it or not. We have recurring bouts in which the culture as a whole rebels in
bizarre ways: the 1890s, the roaring >20s, the 1950s
(when people became selfish by
thinking about their own individual goals and their own interests), and of
course the >60s. Often,
this tension drives people to be self-destructive in their pursuit of
happiness; theyll go to any lengths in that pursuit. Theyll
turn to alcohol, to drugs, to partying, to exotic alternative religions,
whatever they can do to break out of this tension.
Historically,
one thinks of the industrial revolution as a rapid transformation which it was, because it happened in just over a
century. But the demise of the industrial
age happened even more quickly.
Information technology made the necessity for human cogs vanish. The reason for that is simple: anything repetitive and predictable can be
done today with the aid of some kind of a computerized program. There is no need anymore for people to
interact with machines as thoughtless workers.
In addition, the information revolution created instantaneous global
communication, so that the latest advances have been able to be spread worldwide
basically instantaneously, and everybody can have access to them. It all happened within one generation, all
over the world, even in those countries where liberty and the pursuit of
happiness doesnt mean a thing.
In fact, its one of the reasons why the concepts of liberty and
the pursuit of happiness are spreading throughout the world.
Thus,
the whole raison detre of traditional schools has vanished. Theres
no point to them anymore. The need to
take children, break their individual wills, and make them conform to a
prescribed pattern that youve set for them
is gone. It is no longer necessary to
tell a child what to do any more than to tell adults what to do. The Founding Fathers tried to form a society
of free and equal citizens. For a
while, we went off track because of the needs of the industrial machine. But were
really only comfortable with the kind of society originally envisaged in the 18th
century. Thats what were
about.
We
still have to have schools as safe environments for children. But we dont need schools in any sense of the term as it is commonly
understood. We dont need compulsory classes, or a curriculum. Thats
prescriptive industrial age stuff. No
one tolerates this as an adult, and it makes no sense for children.
Schools
will probably eventually wither away.
In the meantime, for safety reasons and because the adult world is still
so crabby about children, weve got to
create environments in which kids can grow up.
The only environment that makes sense now is one where we treat them the
way we treat adults where we let them be free, where we let them pursue
happiness and give them liberty, where we let them figure out what they want to
do, what their life dream is at any given age, whether theyre 4 or 8 or 16, and where we treat them as
equals. To the usual objection, Dont young kids
need to be given some guidance? I say that if you take that logic, young
adults should be getting guidance from senior citizens. Thats
not, of course, the way we work. An
older, more experienced person doesnt
have the right to treat a younger one with any less respect than anybody
else. All ages deserve the same
treatment and the same respect. Sudbury
Valley School is that kind of environment, a community of people with
aspirations that fit American ideals.
1. Based on talks given at Framingham State
College and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the 2001-2002 school year.
2. Once it was
used here, where did it go immediately?
To France! It was no accident
that it went to France. They helped us
with the Revolution. Imagine how
stupidly the King of France acted! He
sent over generals and soldiers to fight side by side with the Americans, who
are running around talking about all this liberty stuff. France, the most autocratic country outside
of Russia in all of Europe, the country where the King declared, in a notorious
statement, I am the state. Why did he send over his soldiers to fight
here? He had no idea what the
Revolution was about. He thought it was
about kicking England in the butt, so he sent people over here to fight the
English! By the way, thats one of the reasons we won the Revolution. Its
doubtful whether we would have won it without the French. Then they all went back and made their own
revolution. And what was the first word
of their rallying cry? Liberty!