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Welcome to ANI In The Air Online and Around Baltimore.
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This is a talk about Tuesday where I talk about some issue related to Sudbury School.
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So today I thought I'd just talk about the basic role of critiquing in Sudbury School.
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So I think one of the things that conventional minded people might think about, you know, the problems with Sudbury School is it sounds like, oh, you get to do whatever you want and sort of no pushback.
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You know, you're not you're not really being challenged, that kind of thing.
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And I would say that that's, you know, really quite false.
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I think Sudbury Schooling is full of challenges, real challenges, real, you know, critiquing of what people do, essentially. You know, in conventional schooling, you have, you know, teachers saying, OK, you do these things and you get these marks.
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And I know from my own many years of both being a student and being a teacher that, you know, essentially there's this, well, desire not to fail people, essentially.
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I mean, you know, how teachers grade and do whatever is in the tests that are designed, they're all quite arbitrary. If I wanted to fail every single student, I could. I wanted to give them all A's, I could.
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You know, it's all my power. I know how to design things and how to grade things in order to get the outcome that I want.
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There's no objective truth there. And, you know, the kind of goal of a lot of teaching is to, you know, particularly nowadays is to have high grades, essentially.
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There isn't much of an appetite for failing, you know, 90 percent of the people. It would look very bad for a teacher to fail 90 percent of their students. It just would.
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And, you know, so there's incentives throughout to soften that grading to not say to not have the highest possible standard, which, of course, almost no one could meet. But it's all arbitrary. There's nothing real about it. You get A's, you get F's. It doesn't matter.
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There is, you know, kind of a relative grading between one and the other. But otherwise, it's not like if someone gets, you know, an A's in high school that that actually means that they're just as capable as somebody else who gets A's in high school.
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You know, it really, you know, depends on a lot of things that are just not visible in that grade.
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And, you know, so in contrast, Sudbury School, what a student does, you know, is very much constantly and legitimately challenged by those around them.
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You know, interacting with people who can choose not to interact with you is a huge, you know, a challenge, basically.
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You know, it is the critique of one's existence, essentially. The, you know, at a Sudbury School, there's, you know, generally a notion of accepting people so someone doesn't have to prove themselves to be part of the community.
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They can just be. But in order to interact with, you know, other people, to have friends, to have people to play with or talk with, or do something with, you know, that that requires
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understanding the feedback they get from others and adapting to become something that can mesh with these other people.
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That's, you know, an absolutely challenging issue. There's also the, you know, like, there are constantly ideas being floated. There are, of course, formal settings, school meeting in JC where there's actual things that are proposed in a formal voting process.
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They get discussed and debated and voted up or down. It's based on the merits of the ideas and the arguments presented.
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It's not the personality of the people involved. And so that's a really nice feature. But, you know, there's also the more usual
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commonplace challenges of ideas outside of those formal structures. Somebody wants to play a game, they need to get other people to buy into playing that game.
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They have to sell it. They have to make it appealing to them. You know, there's constant sort of rule negotiations and just, you know, it's like a constant sort of battle of ideas.
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And so, you know, how people explain themselves, how people present their visions, what their ultimate goals are, all of this is being challenged and critiqued constantly.
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It's just the nature of humans interacting freely. That's how it goes. In a conventional setting, you know, there's none of that.
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There can be some sort of group work project thing where maybe somebody presents an idea and somebody else criticizes it, but probably not.
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Probably if there is an idea that somebody is willing to pursue, then everybody else in the group just goes along with it.
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Let's say there's something, you know, occasionally you might have groups with a couple of dominant personalities who will conflict, but, you know, the framework is already presented.
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So much of the conflict is even just knowing the basic thing to do. That's where the genius of humans lie, is just in coming up with what to do with themselves.
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And as a community, it's figuring out what we want to do together, you know, and this, you know, a lot of what staff do can be hidden from students.
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You know, we deal with the boring stuff and making sure our school keeps running.
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But, you know, I like to think and hope that a lot of what we experience as staff does get noticed by at least some, if not all at some point in their time at our school.
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And, you know, we as staff are also subject to those constraints.
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It's been particularly clear during this online experience, staff have tried, you know, a variety of things to have something going on online.
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And we'll get some students interested, but the vast majority don't. They want to do their own thing.
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And, you know, so it's just a really, you know, that's essentially rejecting the ideas of the staff. That's what that is when people, you know, students don't show up.
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And as staff, we have to be happy with that, you know, I mean, not like that's our goal, but, you know, but like that's to be expected. Whatever we do generally, you know, has limited participation because students are very much interested in what they want to do and figure out that stuff rather than what, you know, adults want to do.
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We still do it just because there are some who like it, but, you know, it's really about, you know, putting ourselves out there and being rejected over and over again.
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It's kind of nice. But, you know, at some level that is what, you know, is going on in some schools in general, just people putting themselves out there and, you know, failing and then trying again and eventually being successful in creating interest for whatever they want to do.
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That's just what goes on. It's kind of on a, we certainly call ourselves a democratic school, we have votes and stuff, but in many ways that choice, that free choice to decide what to do and with whom to do it with, that is like some super democracy kind of principle, right?
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That is our ultra local democratic process. So it's not formal, but it is kind of a foundational principle.
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All right. I guess I've rambled enough for this topic, but essentially, you know, our schooling is extremely hard because it's so real in terms of, you know, critiquing and failing and iterating until something works.
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So it's a huge kind of challenge and so worthwhile, so rewarding.
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All right. Well, until next time.