Longview School

At Longview, we believe traditional education took a wrong turn when it began to focus almost exclusively on the acquisition of knowledge.  Certainly acquiring knowledge is important throughout a person’s life.  In fact, it is so important, it is unavoidable, so much so that most of what we need to know we learn simply by living our lives.  As a result, we feel it is a lofty but misguided approach to base a curriculum on gathering knowledge, and a waste of precious educational time.

Of what then should a curriculum consist?  The Longview curriculum has 7 components as follows:  play, conversation, democracy, justice, clerkships, classes, and internships.  Entire articles have been written about each of these, but in order to be able to give a broad overview, in this article I will simply give a cursory explanation of each.

PLAY

Since children decide how they spend their time at school all day, every day, almost entirely without exception, it is not surprising that they choose to spend a lot of time playing.  In the literature on child development, play is considered a primary modality of learning for children from birth to age five.  Unfortunately, many educators believe that learning for those older than five must be serious business.  At Sudbury schools, we believe that play is one of the best ways to learn not only for very young children, but also throughout one’s schooling, and even in one’s adult life.  Because it is so engaging, people tend to retain what they learn during play, whether it is social skills (such as conflict resolution) or academic skills (such as reading, writing, or mathematics).

CONVERSATION

Conversation is surprisingly absent from traditional schools.  Kids are expected to spend most of their days in quiet, listening to teachers or engaged in seat-time busywork.  Sometimes they can speak, such as to answer a teacher’s questions or to chat in the hallways, at lunch, or in gym, but these are the exception.

Take a moment to reflect upon your own life.  How have you learned what you know?  For most people, honest reflection shows that conversation has been a primary mode of learning.  As adults we learn through conversations with friends, relatives, co-workers, teachers, experts, and even with our children.  Kids deserve the opportunity to learn in the same way.

In Sudbury schools, students spend most of their time talking to others.  This includes conversing with  peers (one-on-one  and in groups), and with adults (primarily staff at their schools, but also to others in the wider community).  These conversations cover an incredible range of topics, from the seemingly mundane to the highly technical and philosophical.  These interactions are an essential part of their education.

DEMOCRACY

Longview is run by our School Meeting, a democratic body composed of students and staff, each with one vote.  This is not a mock democracy with the semblance of power, but rather a fully-empowered school government.  Every significant decision affecting the school is made by this body including making and reviewing the rules, planning field trips, planning new classes and activities, allocating school funds, etc.  The School Meeting could decide to spend the entire bank account on candy, or to paint the school neon pink.  It could theoretically make all sorts of bizarre decisions, but as a matter of practice, it doesn’t.  When kids are given real power, they take this seriously and make good decisions a high percentage of the time (I would venture to say much more often than most of our elected city, state, and federal governmental bodies).  Plus, there is no better way to understand that a bad decision has been made than for it to take effect and to have negative consequences (within the limits of safety, of course).  Then, when School Meeting revisits the issue, it reliably improves its decision based upon its actual experience.  The democratic basis of their school provides students with the necessary practice to participate in a democratic society upon graduation.

JUSTICE

At traditional schools, each conflict is resolved by a teacher who is usually eager to squelch the disruption of the lesson or by an administrator who tries to reconstruct an incident based upon scant information.  This approach teaches kids that conflict resolution is supposed to be done by adults in position of authority and that they bear little responsibility in the process beyond complying with their punishment.  Sadly, often  justice is not served.  In contrast, at Sudbury schools students learn what justice and fairness are through their participation in a judicial system modeled upon the US courts.  We have a Judicial Committee [JC] which is chaired by a student who acts as the judge, and two other students and one staff person who act as the jury.  The Judicial Committee hears cases and metes out justice.  Over time, every student at Longview is in the position of trying out each of the different roles in the judicial process, including judge (JC Chairperson), juror (JC Committee member), complainant, victim and witness.  This enables students to formulate their own conception of justice through first-hand experience.  At the same time, it makes them value the school rules which they have created and supported, rather than scoffing at what seem like senseless restraints.

CLERKSHIPS

Learning responsibility is quite challenging.  This is especially true for children when they are given few opportunities to practice being responsible.  In so many schools, students spend their time doing busywork which has been created solely for them and which will be thrown in the garbage once they complete it.

At Longview, students share in the work of running the school.  Much of the work students do is necessary for the smooth operation of the school.  The kids know this and as a result, they take their jobs, which we call clerkships, quite seriously.  The following is a list of current clerk jobs at Longview:

Admissions   Attendance   Birthday Calendar   Chores Computer

Fire Safety   Law Book     Library Mail Office       Supplies Physical Plant

Town Crier Judicial Committee Chairperson Judicial Committee  Secretary School Meeting Chairperson

School Meeting Chairperson

Students hold positions for two-month periods.  There is not enough space to describe each clerkship in detail, but the work includes paying the bills, balancing the bank statements, running both democratic and judicial meetings, maintaining the lawbook, running fire drills, keeping judicial records, overseeing the completion of daily chores, etc.

CLASSES

Students at Longview learn in both traditional and non-traditional ways.  Our classes, other than being small and personal, look similar to classes in any school.  The greatest difference is that we only offer a class when it is requested by one or more students.  There is no core curriculum through which students are forced into cursory exposure to the range of academic areas regardless of their interest.  Instead, students learn to become experts in the areas in which they are most interested.  Then, throughout their lives, they are able to apply this  experience in gaining expertise to each new endeavor.  In this way we teach excellence and resourcefulness as opposed to competence and compliance.

Longview classes are quite diverse.  They typically include both traditional subjects such as reading, writing, math, science, art, etc. as well as  unconventional subjects such as biking, canoeing, Dungeons and Dragons, etc.  Many students never choose to take a class.  Others try a class here or there, while yet others take multiple classes each day.  All of these approaches are honored at Longview.

INTERNSHIPS

Another questionable turn in education happened with the shift from the apprenticeship to the classroom model.  For older students, Longview offers the opportunity to explore the real world of work.  Students do unpaid internships for local businesses in return for getting first-hand experience in jobs in which they are interested.  This helps students make career choices based upon first-hand experience.  Internships are even valuable when a student hates the placement:  Learning from experience that you don’t like being a lawyer, veterinarian, acupuncturist, etc. could save years of wasted study.

While it may not resemble a traditional curriculum, a Sudbury school like Longview does have a vast and varied curriculum.  It is predicated  on the philoshopy of  helping kids develop into independent, responsible adults with real-world skills who know themselves, their talents and their abilities well enough to design happy, productive lives.  More than anything else, parents  want their children to grow up to be happy people.  I believe the Longview Sudbury approach helps make this possible.