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34. Responsibility
The Sudbury Valley School was founded during the hippie generation, and has survived and
thrived as an independent school for forty years. From their introductory handbook:
The way we saw it, responsibility means that each person has to carry
the ball for himself. You, and you alone, must make your decisions, and
you must live with them. No one should be thinking for you, and no one
should be protecting you from the consequences of your actions. This,
we felt, is essential if you want to be independent, self-directed, and the
master of your own destiny.
While this is easy to dismiss as hype or pabulum, what if it’s true? What if you actually built a
school from the ground up with this as its core idea, not just window dressing? This is precisely
what they did.
Students ask for teachers when they wish. They play soccer if they choose. They take responsibility
for everything they do and learn, from the age of six. And it works.
If a school is seen as a place for encouragement and truth-telling, a place where students go to
find their passion and then achieve their goals, it is not a school we would generally recognize,
because our schools do none of this.
35.Off the hook: Denying opportunities for greatness
Greatness is frightening. With it comes responsibility.
If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade
yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook.
And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off
the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook,
since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook,
because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone.
If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job
hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault.
That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck
careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. “I did what they told me to do and now I’m
stuck and it’s not my fault.”
What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go
off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.
Because the industrial education system makes it so clear when someone has stepped from the
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