Is Sudbury Valley School “Anti-Intellectual”?
By Daniel Greenberg At first sight, the question posed in the title of this essay appears ludicrous. After all, the school’s walls are virtually all lined with books from floor to ceiling a library that would be the pride of schools far richer and larger than SVS. The staff has always consisted of people who are highly educated and have a wide range of interests. The conversations at school, engaged in freely by children and adults of all ages, are often distinguished by their richness of content, elegance of expression, and wide range of topics. And the school has produced a more extensive literature, probing its philosophical foundations, than any other single school ever. It would seem that to wonder whether this institution has an “anti-intellectual” flavor is to be wholly unaware of who we are or what we are doing on a daily basis here. Yet, the question is not infrequently asked, and this fact alone must drive us to consider whence it arises. As so often is the case, once we exam
