People often ask why Sudbury schools can’t “just offer a few classes for anybody who is interested”. In reply I would answer, “why bother?” – if somebody is truly interested they can always start a class. Investing school resources – staff time is one of the school’s most precious – in offering classes “just in case” could be a terrible waste – what if nobody is interested? But there is another reason why these schools don’t bother. This reason is that Sudbury schools value boredom.
Boredom has gotten a bad rep. “Mom! I’m bored!” has become a battle-cry to sow fear in the heart of the mightiest of mothers. There are entire industries designed to provide parents and children with antidotes for boredom. But boredom isn’t such a bad thing. Boredom is the feeling of not being highly motivated. It is an unpleasant feeling which propels you to engage in high-motivation activity, if only to escape the boredom. There is nothing quite as satisfying as engaging in activities towards which you are highly motivated. How can a feeling pushing us towards such a state of being possibly be a bad thing?
In Sudbury schools, it has been observed that boredom plays a significant role. Because students are allowed to do whatever they want and nobody tries to cure them of their boredom, they often find themselves in a strange situation. They have all these options around them, people playing, painting, talking, studying (or teaching), reading (or writing), listening to music (or making their own) – so many things they could take part in, yet they are not satisfied. They find that despite everything going on, they are bored. But this boredom tells you something – it tells you they are not engaged in highly motivated activity; they have not found something that inspires in them a state of high motivation. If there is something in the school they could find that kind of enthusiasm towards, they have not found it yet.
People cope with boredom in different ways. One way is to find something to do – not necessarily something great that you’re highly motivated to do, just any old thing. People doing this “peck around”, trying all kinds of different activities, (established classes and other regular activities are especially popular, because they’re already there). But they keep pecking around, rarely sticking with the same thing for long, because none of these things dispels the boredom – none of these inspires enough keen interest and motivation to make them want to keep at it. Another thing people do is sit around and whine about how bored they are; others will try and interest them in new activities – or get annoyed, and tell them to be quiet. And some people might just talk to others about their boredom. Whether with staff or fellow students, conversation can often inspire all kinds of new ideas. At the very least, conversation keeps you busy while you’re bored.
Eventually, whatever you choose to do with your boredom, it propels you to find an activity interesting enough for you to really get into it and forget about your boredom. Sometimes people find something like this amongst the activities they “peck” at; sometimes they figure it out in conversation with a friend; often, it suddenly occurs to you after weeks of boredom (it might have even been right under your nose the whole time!) Sometimes it’s a sport, sometimes it’s a game, sometimes it’s a series or genre of literature, sometimes it’s a science. It can literally be anything a person might care to do. They will pursue their new-found interest as if obsessed, often spending days on end just doing that one thing. In a Sudbury school, there are very few mandatory activities to interrupt these pursuits.
The thing is that this process is cyclical – you may find something really interesting, but that’s no guarantee that you’ll never be bored again. Boredom is a natural part of living and learning. Usually, when someone finds something they really like, they’ll be happily busy for a few hours, days or weeks. If they’re lucky, it will last for months. In some cases it might even last years (this kind of thing can become a dream job). But often as not, people get bored again, sooner or later. They may have ready every single history book they could get their hands on, or they played enough soccer to last them a life time. Maybe they discovered that that really tough video game is much easier to beat once you really apply yourself to it, or they realized that they want to do more than just work in a pet store. And then the boredom kicks in – and moves them to find something else that can really motivate them.
I believe that one can only find motivation and keen interest in things which one considers valuable, or potentially valuable, for oneself. Sudbury schools don’t claim to know better than the student what is good for them. Instead they say “it’s up to you to figure out what is good for you, what is important to you – and it’s up to you to go and get those things!” People routinely become excited and motivated about things they identify as important or useful – whether consciously, or unconsciously. Kids discovering reading and writing (if they haven’t been forced to learn these elsewhere) are often amazingly enthusiastic about it. They just gobble up all the reading they can get their hands on, or scribble out all the writing that they can. Sure, this might not happen precisely at the age of 6 – I started at 4, my brother at 8 – but it does happen eventually, and many kids get extraordinarily excited about this amazing ability to interact with written words. The same can often be observed in somebody acquiring a new language, learning about numbers and arithmetic, learning to sketch or paint – learning almost anything, really. It is precisely the fact that Sudbury schools do not try and cut off the search for an interesting new thing, whether by coercing students to do things or by “just offering something that might be nice”, that allows students to explore themselves and the world around them in search of something interesting – something that may be valuable for them. And without boredom to propel this search, many people would just have to settle for less, stop exploring, and possibly end up doing things they really don’t care about.
