Welcome to the Sudbury in Depth series, where we take a deep dive into the philosophy and practice of the Sudbury model. Each episode, three staff members from different schools will share their perspectives and experiences on a topic. This time, we'll be exploring the significance of community in Sudbury.

The video presents the interviews in an abridged form. Be sure to read the transcript below if you want the full story.

Larry: There are times when people ask me what I do for a living. The quick answer is, I'm a teacher, or I'm an administrator. But it is so much more than that. I'm an active member in a very small community. I come here every day to interact with people of all ages, and we're all living our lives. We get to figure out who we are within this community. This goes for all of us, regardless of our ages. All of us, through the experience of living with one another and interacting with one another as free individuals, get to learn about ourselves.

A community is a group of people who have voluntarily come together to spend time with one another, to manage the community, and to enjoy the benefits of being in a community, which are huge.

Christen: Our community means that we are each intentionally choosing to be part of this group and to be part of the work of sustaining this school.

You have so many choices here. But to get this level of choice and freedom, you're also choosing to make certain sacrifices, of things that you can't do in this kind of a community. If you want to be here, this is your choice. And then you also have to choose all the agreements that we voted on together in order to be here. Because you can't have both. You can't, for example, kick someone here and still want to be a member of this community. Because we're really clear, you can't hit other people.

Larry: As an intentional community, we've all chosen to be here. We've chosen to be here regularly. The intention is to be with one another, to be part of a group of people of all ages.

As such, you get to experience friendship. You get to experience people's ups and downs. Sometimes somebody comes in who's your best buddy, and they had a bad day, and you get to experience that. So, in a community that meets regularly, we get to learn how to support one another through tough times. And we get to learn how to be supported, because sometimes that's not so easy. Sometimes it's not easy to be vulnerable around a group of people. But when you know that we're all here together, and we're all wanting to support one another, it's sometimes easier to be vulnerable there and be able to say, hey, I need help. I need comfort. I need somebody to sit with me for a minute. Those are the aspects of community that are very precious to us.

Daniel: Our school is about the balance between community and independence, autonomy. You shouldn't be forced to be part of something that you don't want to be part of. But you should feel invited to participate in something that is happening. This is the place to have that freedom of opportunity—opportunity to have time for yourself if you want that, opportunity to interact with a friend, opportunity to play something with many people. You can pursue any of those.

If you're an adult, you can decide if you want to go to the party or not, if you want to go to church or not, if you want to enroll in a master's or not. You have that level of autonomy to decide. But a lot of times in society right now, kids are not allowed to take those decisions. So if the parents are going to the party, the kids have to go to the party. If parents want to go to church, the kids have to go to church. So what if they want some time alone and they have all these classes in the afternoon already organized? Well, they have to go. They don't have a choice. Somebody decided all of that for them.

Larry: At the risk of comparing ourselves to others and other models, I think that this form of education, the Sudbury model as practiced at Alpine Valley School, is a very good way to raise children, because they're in a community and they're here voluntarily. We do not accept students who are forced to be here. If a student doesn't want to be here, they don't have to be here. And that, I think, is a significant difference from conventional schooling. Sadly, in conventional schooling, students can be compelled to attend against their will. And that flavors that community. I think most of us who attended conventional schooling, even as far back as when I did, there were people who didn't want to be there, and yet they had to be there. And that's hard on anybody, especially hard on the idea of community.

Daniel: If you play soccer, here it's very easy to be part of a group and have that community, because you are a soccer player and you like soccer. But what if you don't like soccer? Then what are you going to do? How are you going to connect with other kids? So you may think that there are no other kids that want to do things other than playing soccer or tennis or something like that. When you join our school, you will see first that we don't have a soccer team. So that's not an option. I mean, we're not training soccer every day, and we're not raising the best soccer players. So they start doing a lot of other things, and they start connecting in other ways. So those kids that didn't like soccer or were not good at soccer, they start feeling competent and they start feeling connected because they see other kids that also like to do other things.

Christen: I homeschooled/unschooled my own children before we opened the Sudbury school. And homeschooling does provide a different kind of freedom. There's often not as much challenge. I mean, there's not the same social challenge, unless you're in a homeschool group or a pod. I felt that wwhen I was bringing my children to these social environments, you're dipping into the environment, but there's always, "I just want to go," or "I don't want to go back next week." Again, you're getting that freedom to do this, but I think you're also missing out on an important challenge of continuity of human relationship and that continuity of appropriate social challenge. So it is harder. It's a lot harder. When we were homeschooling, we just woke up when we wanted, and had leisurely breakfast, and it was like, "What do we want to do next?" And it's not necessarily challenging in certain ways that Sudbury schools are.

It is very challenging to be around other people. Sometimes other people are really annoying. And it's hard to figure out how to resolve those conflicts, to have a mediation, to tell another person your feelings and then to know you're going to see them the next day. And with that comes this strength of relationship, and this continuity and accountability.

It's not all bubbles and cupcakes at a Sudbury school. But don't expect that in any human community. Sometimes there are bubbles and cupcakes—that is very true. But not always. Sometimes it's conflict. Sometimes it is like, "Hey, I thought I signed up for that computer time slot." "Oh, you signed up for a different time slot". "Oh." You're handling disappointment. You're having to practice frustration tolerance in a very real and authentic way. And that's something that, at least for me when I was homeschooling our kids, I couldn't replicate. I tried to incorporate as much choice as possible: "What do we want to do today? Do we want to go to the zoo or the botanical gardens or...?" I was a very benevolent cruise director, helping to guide what the three of my children wanted to do, and take into consideration things like, we do have to go grocery shopping. But once I read about the Sudbury model, I really thought, I can't provide this in the same way at home.

Larry: From our perspective, freedom necessarily comes with responsibilities. Two days a week, Alpine Valley School does chores. All of us do the chores. They're not onerous, but they are required by the Aesthetics and Use Committee, to keep the building clean.

The chore procedure has gone through many changes. When we came here from our rented facility, all of a sudden we didn't need to do chores. In our rented facility, in the first three years of our existence, we were compelled to do chores as a condition of our lease. Well, when we arrived in this building in 2000, we owned the building. Who's making us do chores? And so we had no chores for a long time. Finally the kids came to the Aesthetics and Use Committee and said, "This is gross!" And so we developed a chore procedure. Two days a week, we do chores. They're divided to little kid chores and big kid chores. Everybody has to do them. And you can ask for help, and of course. You can get help. It's like cleaning up a mess. No one's going to say, "Sorry, you made the mess, you have to clean it up." If a kid comes to me and says, "Larry, I need your help cleaning up a mess. It's so huge, I can't deal with it." Of course I'm going to help them. It's part of being in a community.

Last year, at the end of the year, a person came to the Aesthetics and Use Committee and said, "I'd like to try doing chores once a week." So we tried it. For the remainder of the year, which I think was maybe a month, we only did chores once a week. And it was awful. It was universally accepted that it was awful. So we're back to two days a week.

So are there things that are required at a school like ours? Of course there are. You're in a community. It is not anarchy. It is not lawlessness. It's ordered freedom. And if you don't like it, you can try to change things. There are many examples of where a rule is onerous in some way or inappropriate in some way, and a community member can bring that forward, and they do. So you're not a helpless victim who can only do what you're told to do. That's just not the way we operate.

Christen: What I often say about Sudbury is that it's very real. It's not artificial. I'm not lesson planning, like, "What will be a situation that they'll have to problem solve together?" The truth is that kids smell artificial from 20 paces. They're like, "Oh, I see what you're doing here." Here, we don't have to fabricate it. There's going to be conflict. There's human beings all together in a building. It's not bubbles and cupcakes all the time! There are going to be problems, and they're going to have to resolve them, and they're going to have to ask for help, and they're going to have to negotiate. "I wanted to do this. Oh, somebody else is using that room right now." I didn't have to set up a problem. Like, here's a word problem: There's 10 people in a room, and 7 of them want to do this, and 3 of them want to do that. I don't have to set this up. This is a real life, real situation of real human beings all in one space, figuring out how to share it and how to pursue their interests without stepping on someone else's toes, sometimes literally.

Oftentimes, actually, it can be challenging to pursue their own interests, because they're doing it within a community. But even there, there's extreme value. Maybe they are interested in bugs, and so they're going to be spending a lot of their time looking at bugs, looking at books about bugs, and so on. But then they've got somebody else who's interested in something else. And it's something that their parent may not have thought to add to the curriculum. But they're getting this authentic experience of, "Oh, I have a friend that's also interested in skateboarding. It would never have occurred to me to be interested in skateboarding."

Parents will often say, are they being exposed to a wide variety of things that will pique their interests? Of course! They're in a human community! There is just naturally going to be a wide variety of interests. Everyone here is interested in something a little bit different, and they're going to try to recruit you for their interests. Like, "Hey, I want to do a D&D campaign." "What's D&D?" And they'll explain it. "This is Dungeons and Dragons. You get these character sheets and you fill them out and they have different..." I don't even understand all of it, which is great! I can just watch this magical, collaborative, cooperative interest evolve.

We think about, what are the most important things that we want our children to learn and to internalize? Is it the times tables? Is this what we really need them to internalize and practice ad nauseam in their childhood? We really just want them to be internalizing and practicing being a good, kind, honest member of a human community. These are prosocial skills that will serve them their whole lives. And if they also get excited about the times tables, great.

Larry: Since the events of 2020-2021, when many of us were restricted from being with each other on a regular basis, the idea of being together has become much more important to us as a school. Being together in a physical way, being able to walk into a room and sit with somebody and speak to them, or to be approached by somebody in person, is a huge part of being in a community. You can read their faces, you can hear the tone of voice, you can see body language. And being in a community allows you to do that.

Daniel: I think what comes up with the organic community is that we try to encourage all the families to really participate in creating community. One family invited everyone in the school to go and visit firefighters, because they had that connection. And so many students were like, "Oh, yeah, let's do it." So as a community, we were there, but it wasn't like a social event. We were like exploring and learning about something different. And then another family would say, "I want to invite the school to this ranch and have this stay over and do some grilling." And so it's more about, how do we invite and empower all the families in different ways to participate.

Christen: Again, this is such a unique space where instead of the top-down, pre-planned, curated experience, the focus is: Let's all be community, intentionally deciding what we're doing, and you can still pursue your interests, as long as you're doing it in a way that is respectful of everybody else.