In 1992, Sudbury Valley School ("SVS") celebrated its twenty-fifth year of operation as a wholly new model of education in the context of Western culture. While drawing a great deal on the theories and practices of other schools and educators, SVS fashioned an original way of looking at the entire process of child development, learning, growth, maturation, and socio-economic acculturation. The novelty of SVS's approach, while evident to the founders from the beginning, is even now difficult to convey to people who have not struggled to understand and define for themselves the various concepts involved. On the other hand, the special kind of opposition that the school has generated from its very beginning -- an opposition laden with an unusual emotional intensity -- was an indicator that most people who encountered the school intuited at a deep level that SVS stood for an approach towards children, and towards life, that represented a significant break with prevailing norms. The catalyst for putting down on paper the various thoughts expressed in this essay was a telephone conversation I had in June 1992 with Nan Narboe, one of the founders of Cascade Valley School in Portland, Oregon. CVS had just completed its first -- stormy -- year of operation, and as she was discussing the past year, she asked me, "What is it that has changed at Sudbury Valley since you first opened?" I told her that I would collect my thoughts on the subject, which in fact had been broached on many occasions in many contexts. Hence this essay.

It was not until the twenty-third year of SVS's existence that other groups began to form in various, seemingly random, locations with the express purpose of emulating this model elsewhere. During the 1991-92 school year, several such schools commenced operation, and several others altered their programs to more closely reflect Sudbury Valley's philosophy. As these various groups struggled with the conceptualization and formation of new schools, they encountered most of the spectrum of reactions and difficulties that had confronted SVS when it first came into being in the late 1960s. This occurred despite the fact that these new groups had a successful model to point to, and an extensive and well-developed literature surrounding that model that could be distributed to newly interested parents and members of the public. Indeed, Sudbury Valley itself still encounters almost the exact same responses as were presented a generation ago, although with decreasing frequency.

This naturally raises some interesting questions, which actually have been occupying us from the beginning: What aspects of SVS form its inalienable core, which have not been, and cannot be, modified within an internally consistent model of education? What aspects of SVS can be compromised without compromising its integrity? What aspects of SVS bring forth what different kinds of reactions, and how can these be dealt with in the context of the previous two questions?

Although these questions are somewhat theoretical in nature, the history of SVS over twenty-five years gives us an experiential basis for formulating preliminary answers that can then be compared over the next few decades with the experiences of other schools and groups. With this in mind, I shall address myself to a more focused question (relating it all the while to the more general questions above) -- namely, what is it that has changed, and has not changed, about Sudbury Valley over the quarter century of its existence?