By Daniel Greenberg
The Sudbury Valley School

Why Sudbury Valley School Doesn't Work for Everyone: Real Learning Disabilities

During our founding years, we thought that people would flock to the school. We thought we would be mobbed and we'd be turning people away at the door. We expected a cast of thousands. Who wouldn't want happy kids? More to the point, what kids wouldn't do everything in their power to gain their freedom? We expected, even if the parents weren't willing, that the kids would be knocking down the walls, making their parents' lives miserable. "Send us to Sudbury Valley, or we'll go on a hunger strike." We were very quickly disabused, and instead we underwent a long struggle to survive, to grow, to gain acceptance.

It's a fact that the whole idea of the school started spreading to other places only during our third decade. The question we were always asked in those first twenty years was, "If it's such a great idea, how come everybody isn't doing it? How come there are no other schools like this one?" I had an answer, but not in my heart. I didn't really know why. It took us a good two decades to become respectable in the educational community, to become accepted as a legitimate educational enterprise. We struggled to understand why it was so hard.