Why I Will Not Become a Teacher

Another aspect of this approach is that when a student fails to make good choices, they are purposefully held responsible for their actions, as in the larger society. In many traditional schools, students are repeatedly denied the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, and from the bad choices that they have made, by a system that wants to move everyone along. At SVS students are allowed to experience the consequences of their actions, a situation which more adequately prepares them for the conditions they will face once they are out of school. For example, if a student comes to the defense of her senior thesis (the sole requirement for graduation from SVS), and is incapable of adequately answering the questions put by staff, parents, and other students adequately, she will be denied a diploma. She will have the opportunity to return and try again next year or simply leave without a diploma. Though this may seem harsh, it is the way in which the world works, and SVS helps prepare students not only academically but to be members of society.

My sister, who was labeled as a failure by the public school system, went on to thrive at SVS. She danced in the ballet studio, learned to develop her own photographs in the darkroom, and read voraciously. She never took another math class after leaving Latin School in the eighth grade, or an English, or Science class for that matter. These are considered the fundamentals of education and yet without them my sister has not only performed sufficiently, she has excelled. Ironically, our divergent paths brought both my sister and me to Northeastern University. Despite my abundance of traditional academic training and her lack thereof, we both managed to make the Dean's List and graduate. Her experiences stand up strongly against the argument that there are basic academic standards that all students need in order to succeed. In fact her experiences support those assertions of Carl Rogers and Jerome Freiberg that the most vital skills a student needs are internal motivation, and the ability to investigate the questions that arise in the world around them, think critically, and learn independently.

Although my sister's story and perhaps even her school may seem like oddities, an isolated place or instance of extreme practice that happened to work for one student, it is not. The Sudbury Valley School, which was founded in 1964, has served as a model, and there is now a very small but steadily growing web of schools across the United States that practice this approach. Some have copied the Sudbury model exactly while others have formed variations, taking what seemed viable for the time and place in which the school was founded. Such schools include the Alpine Valley School in Colorado, the Booroobin Sudbury School in Australia, and the Evergreen Sudbury School in Maine.

Massachusetts seems intent on continuing on its current path towards an educational system in which accountability and standards through high-stakes testing are the goals instead of student learning. Accountability and standards are certainly worth striving for, but not when the methods of achieving them, namely the MCAS, serves to punish students by denying them diplomas rather than serving to reform schools and teachers thatare failing students. If this system remains intact, Sudbury Valley, a place which practices self-directed learning, democratic administration, and freedom to make any choice and handle the consequences that follow, is the only kind of place of education in which I can see myself, not as a teacher but as a member of a community of learning. At this point, all other options seem to put my philosophy in direct conflict with the goals and mandates of the school system, and therefore excludes teaching in a public school as an option for me.