Life on the Cutting
Edge
Musings on the School’s 40th Anniversary1
Daniel Greenberg
Forty years
ago, in February of 1968, the papers of incorporation of The Sudbury Valley
School, Inc., were signed, and we came into being as an official
institution. That’s a very exciting
memory, and this is an exciting year for me, for everybody who is a member of
the Sudbury Valley community, and certainly for the four founders who are still
here working together collegially on the staff.
The invitation
we sent to this talk posed a series of questions. It read, “Forty years of amazing students have passed through our
campus, but parents still worry while their children are here, students still
struggle with the difficulty of the school, and the public still hangs onto models
of education that have fallen into disrepair.
Why?”
To me these
questions have a special poignancy, because when I walk across the campus
during the day, I always have same exciting experience. I see energetic groups of intense, focused,
active, happy kids playing outside, and then, after entering the building, I
see the same kind of intensity, busyness and interrelating, so rarely found in
any social group.
I don’t know of
any other place where that level of intensity, focus, interesting conversation,
excited activity and happiness in children occurs. I’ve always felt that parents who come to the school during the
day – say, for an interview, to see whether they’re interested in the school –
and walk down from the parking lot, through the school, and up to the office,
and don’t feel that this is the right place for their kids, probably shouldn’t
send their kids here. It’s just that
striking. It’s not something you see anywhere
else. We hear this over and over
again. We hear it from visitors. We hear it from contractors. We hear it from a host of strangers who say,
“We’ve never seen children look adults straight in the eye, treating them as
regular people, and show no fear.
You just have
to ask yourself: why? Why is it still
so hard? That is what I want to address
here.
What we’re
really talking about is the problem of change, and resistance to change. We have a model of education that is clearly
different from the traditional model, and certainly different from the model
that virtually all adults grew up with.
Radically different. I’d like to
examine that from various perspectives.
There are three
different kinds of change. I think it’s
important to distinguish between them.
The first kind, which is probably the rarest, is change that runs
against the prevailing world view, the accepted notions of how the world
works. That’s what one means by
“out-of-the-box thinking.”
One of the
classic examples of this is the experience of Ignaz Semmelweis, the person who
introduced asepsis into medicine – washing with disinfectant as a way of
avoiding the spread of infection in hospitals and lowering the mortality
rate. He came upon his discovery pretty
much by accident. In the mid-nineteenth
century, most women gave birth at home.
He was a physician working in a hospital where the death rate for women
who ended up giving birth there was about 90%.
That’s why most women who had any possibility to do so avoided, at all
cost, going to a hospital to have their child.
He found out pretty much serendipitously that carefully cleaning himself
before he attended each patient reduced the death rate in the hospitals to
something like 15%. It was that
dramatic, and it happened overnight.
Nevertheless, the idea that washing could reduce the death rate met no acceptance. Nobody paid any attention to it. In fact, his colleagues in the medical
profession thought it was insane, and they forced him out of the hospital,
because he was driving everybody crazy insisting that they wash their hands.
The point here
is not that the doctors there were evil people, but that his proposed reform of
hospital procedure bore no relationship to their world view of health, disease,
and medicine, which had no place whatsoever for the concept of washing. As far as they were concerned, that had
nothing to do with the death rate. This
was long before the idea of germs or viruses found its way into medicine. Washing sounded like mumbo-jumbo, voodoo
magic. It was as if somebody told you
today that he can reduce the death rate by waving a feather over somebody’s
head! Somebody could carry out that
experiment tomorrow and restore a hundred people to health, and still be
laughed out of town. Semmelweis finally
got another job in Hungary, did the same exact thing again, had the same exact
result, and was basically run out of that one as well. Eventually he committed
suicide by giving himself a mortal infection.
Another
excellent example occurred at the end of the 19th century with Max Planck and
his revolutionary idea of the quantum.
Today, everybody has heard of the quantum; it is a word in common usage,
and has come to mean any change in a measurable quantity that does not occur
continuously and smoothly. It was first
introduced by Planck in the study of an obscure problem in physics, dealing
with the nature of radiation inside a closed box. That’s something esoteric, to say the least, and very few people
were interested in it. Those handful of
physicists who were interested in it wrote theories about it to explain the
radiation pattern that had been observed and measured. The only problem was that they could never
get their theories to agree with the measurements. Max Planck figured out a way to get his formulas to agree with
the observations by introducing this idea that energy is not smooth, is not
continuous, but comes in little jumps.
It’s as if I told you that there’s no such thing as a smooth line in the
world, or a smooth surface.2
Max Planck’s
theory was way out of line. Nobody had
any idea what he was talking about. People thought he was crazy. That’s what I mean by the kind of change
that completely breaks with the prevailing world view. Planck went through a miserable time until
he finally was recognized, when other physicists found other domains to which
to apply this concept in a useful manner.
Planck later said that if somebody comes up with a paradigm-changing
concept, he has to wait until the entire existing generation has died out
before it can be accepted.
There’s an
interesting footnote to that story.
Later, when Planck had become a famous professor, in the mid-1920’s, a
new generation of physicists came to him with new ideas that had to do with
what was called “wave mechanics” – a theory that soon became the new
standard. And he thought they were
cuckoo! He wouldn’t give them the time
of day. When you have a whole picture
of how the world operates and somebody comes up and says something that’s
absolutely inconsistent with that picture, you end up considering it crazy. Even Planck, who had lived through the same
experience himself!
That’s one kind
of change. It’s easy to understand the
resistance to it. But it’s not what
we’re talking about here with respect to education, as we’ll soon see.
There’s a
second kind of change, one that doesn’t overturn a world view. On the contrary, it actually sounds good –
only it doesn’t work! The kind of
change that appears to be a really good idea but doesn’t pan out when put into
practice. There’s an amusing example of
that in relatively recent history: the invention of the tank in modern
warfare. Today we look at tanks and
consider them superb and essential instruments of warfare. And indeed, when the tank was first
conceived in the middle of the first World War, the people who invented it
said: this is a major improvement. It’s
a moving fortress! Here we are, stuck
in the morass of World War I, mired in trench warfare between opposing infantry
slaughtering each other by the hundreds of thousands. We can barely move even a
hundred yards without killing tens of thousands of people. Look at this great idea. We’ll create a moving fortress that will
just move across the battlefield and mow everybody down.
Wouldn’t you
expect everybody to say: wow, that’s a good way to save lives and win a
war! But here’s the problem. It’s nice to think about a moving armored
vehicle, but how do you make one? They
had to try to figure out, first of all, what makes it go. So you start with a 1912-model motor car –
not exactly a promising beginning. Then
you attach big steel plates all around it to make it a fortress, which also
makes it hard to move, because motor engines weren’t that powerful back
then. Then it tends to fall apart,
because the arts of riveting and welding, needed to hold this thing together,
weren’t that advanced. Then they
realized that if you try to drive it through a lot of mud, or across defensive
trenches, it will be immobilized! So
they attached farm tractor tracks, which are basically a bunch of metal plates
that are riveted together and wrapped around wheels. Well, they had trouble enough welding the tank, how are they
going to put together sturdy tracks?
The whole thing was a nightmare to produce. They kept trying all sorts of things. They had test grounds in the middle of England and the neighbors
all complained for miles around because the noise these things made was
terrible, clanking loudly all day and all night. When they were subjected to field tests, most of them broke down.
They were
finally manufactured in quantity, in order to get them into battle and win the
war. Several hundred were sent by the
British to the front. The generals took
one look at this and said: this is the most ridiculous thing we ever saw. It’s not going to work. And, in fact, the first time they were put
into battle, most of them obliged the generals by breaking down!
The point is
not that the tank was a bad idea; even the people involved in military planning
thought it might be a good idea. But it
didn’t really work. It took a lot of
faith and determination and endless trial and error, until finally they got
something that worked and the people accepted this revolution in tactical
warfare.
I think one of
the funniest examples of this kind of change is related in the PBS series, Triumph of the Nerds, on the history of the
personal computer. The producer
interviewed the head of Intel, Andy Grove, who pioneered the development of
computer chips, and asked him: “When you people came up with your first chip,
you basically had the personal computer.
Nevertheless, Intel never made personal computers. Why didn’t you make them?” The answer is wonderful. Grove replied, “We knew this, so we sat
around and brainstormed. We asked
ourselves, what would anybody use this for?
The only thing they could come up with was as a device for people to
store recipes! Since none of us could
believe that our wives would use this thing to collect their recipes, we
dropped it.” That’s the kind of thing
I’m talking about. This change, the
chip-based PC, wasn’t out of the box; it didn’t defy the paradigm, but as far
as the inventors were concerned, it didn’t work.
That too is not
what we’re talking about, with regard to the school and education. What we’re talking about is a third kind of
change. It’s the kind that in many ways
is the most troubling. It doesn’t defy
deeply held beliefs about how the world works.
It doesn’t involve a proposed change that doesn’t work in practice. Rather, it involves a loss of control. It is a conflict between control and freedom
that lies at the heart of our culture.
In fact, it is spelled out at the beginning of the book of Genesis, the
first book of the Bible, which is the starting point for all three of the major
Western religions.
Genesis states
that when God created human beings, He said: “Let us make man in our image
after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over
the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every
creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”3 In other words, God is saying, “Let’s create
beings that are essentially God-like, that have dominion over everything.” But then a little later, during the story of
the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, after they ate from the
Tree of Knowledge, the following text appears: “Then the Lord God said,
‘Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. And now lest he put forth his hand and take
also of the Tree of Life and eat and live forever’ – therefore the Lord God
sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was
made.”4 The first
declaration attributed to God is: I want them to be God-like,
all-powerful. And the second is: oh my,
he’s almost like us. We’re about to
lose control over him. Let’s make sure
we don’t!
The most important
aspect of this conflict is fear. People fear the unknown.
People fear what they can’t predict.
People fear outcomes that they’re not sure of. This is something we hear all the time about the school: what are
the outcomes? What can we be guaranteed? When you don’t know the outcome of
something, what do you tend to do? You
tend to stick to the known. You tend to
stick to what you’ve been doing all along, because you think you know how
that’s going to turn out, and that’s a comfort. Whereas if you try something completely new – that’s
terrifying! The reaction to any kind of
a jump into freedom is fear.
I want to give
a few historical examples of what I’m talking about – the kinds of change where
people are sticking to the beliefs that are prevalent in the culture but are
encountering the tension between control and freedom. One of the best and most interesting examples is the French
Revolution. The heart of it was
expressed in the famous phrase – liberty, equality and brotherhood. The equality of all human beings is the
antithesis of the concept of a hierarchical autocracy where an elite rules
everybody else. The idea of human
equality was not a strange new idea. It
was not introduced by the French revolutionaries. The idea that all human beings are equal is, once again, at the
heart of the three great monotheistic religions, which depict all human beings
as descendants from one ancestor. Every
person is thus seen as the blood relative of every other member of the human
race. The notion of human equality thus
eschews any notion that one person is entitled to rule over or control another.
It is striking
to observe how long a society can maintain itself with this kind of conflict
brewing within it. Eighteenth century
France was known as the most autocratic place on the continent. That was the locus of absolute monarchy
personified, as illustrated by the notorious declaration of Louis XIV: “L’etat,
c’est moi,” (I am the state). He was
the final authority for all decisions and laws governing the country. Yet, throughout the 18th century, the great
French philosophers of the Enlightenment wrote tract after tract talking about
liberty, about the need for a social contract, about government by mutual consent. They wrote these books in France, and the
king allowed them to be written. Here
was a society where that tension was present every day. The books were out there, people were
reading and discussing them. People
understood what was at issue, and the king nevertheless did nothing to stop the
subversive literature. This could only
happen because the fundamental beliefs were steeped in the common religion,
even while they were contrary to the way French society actually functioned.
The inevitable
result of that kind of conflict between control and freedom is a buildup of
tension that leads to a cataclysmic explosion.
It’s a question of time, but it has to happen. No society can sustain that kind of tension forever. When
the explosion will happen, nobody knows, but we can be sure it will happen. The French Revolution was just that kind of
explosion. And it was an explosion that
terrified the rest of Europe and led to a very unsettled century and a half.
Another example
occurred here in this country, with regard to the institution of slavery. Every one of the Founding Fathers knew that
a fundamental tension existed between slavery and the equality that was
enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.
Everybody understood that holding a whole segment of the population in
servitude was in conflict with the fundamental beliefs and theories of the
society that was being established.
That tension built up in this country until it led to the explosive
upheaval of the Civil War.
Which brings me
to the questions with which I began. At
Sudbury Valley, in the realm of education, we’re dealing with a situation where
the principles underlying the school are in harmony with the prevailing beliefs
of the larger society. Our struggles
stem from the tension inherent in the conflict between control and freedom
playing itself out in American society’s approach to education. I want to illustrate some of these common
prevailing beliefs, so as to put into sharp focus what I’m talking about.
Let’s begin
with this: everybody now acknowledges that human knowledge has no bounds. This is actually a relatively new idea. It wasn’t that long ago, historically
speaking, that the first encyclopedia was written, in the 18th century. The point of the encyclopedia was to
incorporate all of human knowledge into a collection of books. It was a huge success in its time. When I was growing up, the Encyclopedia
Britannica was the gold standard, and we assumed that if there was anything
worth knowing, it was in the Britannica.
If we wanted to look something up, we looked in the Britannica.
The concept of
a “university” is also based on this idea.
All of the “universe of knowledge” was theoretically collected in a
group of scholars, whose purpose it was to promulgate it to the next
generation, and thus keep the culture alive.
In a “good” university, everything had to be covered; nothing was to be
left out. Nowadays, we all know that
this is nonsense – that knowledge is exploding. There are all kinds of new things being discovered and invented
all the time, at an ever increasing pace.
The notion of an institution that can promulgate the entire culture is
recognized to be obsolete. That’s
something everybody understands.
Let’s move on
to another prevailing belief today.
Everybody – psychologists, child development experts, educators – agrees
that children are naturally curious.
That view didn’t always prevail.
People used say that children’s minds at birth were like a blank slate –
tabula rasa; that their brains were
empty, and that our job was to fill them with whatever society wished to
perpetuate. Nobody believes that
anymore. We all know that children are
naturally curious, that they’re going to explore their environment actively on their
own. Indeed, we understand now better
than ever before that the most rapid pace of learning occurs between birth and
the age of three or so. When a child is
born, it essentially has no skills. By
the age of three, then can do a zillion things. They can walk, talk, make sense out of much of their world,
interact socially – even manipulate other people!
In addition, it
is common knowledge that the rate of change of our culture is accelerating, and
that most of what we have today, or think we understand, will be obsolete
tomorrow. This is almost a mantra of
our culture. Obsolescence is built into
our culture – not just into what is derided as “American materialism”, but also
into the whole culture. It’s hard to
even conceive. I don’t know how many of
you feel like dinosaurs – if you don’t, you probably should. The things that I was familiar with when I
was growing up are mostly gone. The
world of today would have seemed alien to the world of my childhood. We didn’t have talk shows. Long distance direct dialing? When I was growing up in Philadelphia, my
father would phone his mother in Brooklyn, and he had to go through four
operators to place that call. I
remember it vividly. He dialed the
Philadelphia operator, who would dial Trenton; Trenton would contact Manhattan,
and the Manhattan operator would contact the final destination number. That took a long time and of course was very
expensive. Today any child can pick up
the phone and direct dial just about any place in the world.
When I bought a
digital camera a few years ago, I wanted one on the cutting edge. I paid a lot of money for four megapixels! Today, twelve megapixels can be had for the
same amount of money, or less. This is
all taking place so quickly! How many kids
today even know what a vinyl LP record is?
A needle going around grooves?
It won’t be long before they won’t know what a CD is. Who walks around with a CD walkman any
more? Or a tape walkman? They have Ipods that store 10,000 songs, or
100,000 songs! Flash memory cards store
gigabytes!
Gigabytes? I was involved with a business with a lot of
people from Sudbury Valley back in the ‘70’s.
It was a chain of natural food supermarkets, actually the first one in
the country. It was a very interesting
venture. (Also interesting was the
experience of going into bankruptcy, as we did, being a decade ahead of the
curve.) We were the first outfit in
that business to computerize ordering and inventory control. All the programs had to be custom written
for us, because there was nothing available off the shelf. That concept didn’t even exist. We had a Data General computer, the size of
a commercial refrigerator, and it had five
megabytes of memory, on huge removable discs that weighed about fifteen
pounds each. We were on the cutting
edge at the time! This was in the
‘70’s, barely one generation ago.
Another concept
that has won widespread agreement in the world these days is that free
societies are more productive, more creative, and more stable than controlled
societies. That’s something relatively
new. When America was created, it was
the first country to operate as what we today call “a liberal democracy”. Outside observers declared that it wouldn’t
work; that a central governing authority with a clear hierarchy of authority
knows what’s going on, while there is total chaos in a free society. How would anyone figure out and decide how to
do anything without a strong guiding hand?
We also know
that traditional schools were designed to be Industrial Age schools that
prepare people to work in an industrial economy. What we often don’t realize is the extent to which the whole
culture was “industrial”. The whole
point of an industrial model is to have precise control over production. Factories are supposed to turn out
everything the same, using templates and standardized procedures manned by masses
of tightly organized workers. Since the
Industrial Revolution led to tremendous economic prosperity, people began to
think that government too should be organized in a similar manner.
The 20th
century was the heyday of nationwide experimentation with various forms of
centrally planned societies on the industrial model. What was it that stood out most in people’s minds when they
talked about Italian fascism? That
Mussolini “made the trains run on time”.
If any of you have ever been in Italy, you’ll know to this day that’s an
achievement. In the same vein, National
socialism in Germany appealed to people pride in being part of a nation that
was marching together towards a glorious place in history.
The basic
appeal of the Soviet model of communism was the planning it touted, that was
going to make every citizen prosperous.
Central planners decided, for example, that they wanted to produce
10,000 automobiles in one year. That
meant this many of part A had to be manufactured, this many of part B, and so
on. This factory will make enough of A,
that factory will make enough of B, and so forth.
It seems to
make sense to plan centrally. If you
think about the way a free economy works, nothing appears to make sense. An average automobile has at least 5,000
different parts in it, each one of which has to be manufactured
separately. Ask yourself how, in a free
economy, where no overseeing body is coordinating how many of any particular
part to produce – how is it possible ever to put an entire car together? What if just one of those 5,000 parts turns out to be missing? What if somebody forgot to make a factory
for door handles? Or just didn’t get
around to it, or nobody thought it was profitable? Yet, cars come off the assembly line by the millions! It took the very painful experiences of the
twentieth century for people to realize that free societies and free markets
are actually far more effective than planned economies or controlled
societies. Lack of control trumps control.
Even the last large so-called “communist” country, China, felt a need to
invent a special kind of “Chinese communism”, which basically amounts to a free
market economy.
Perhaps the
most scary challenge to the notion of control is cyberspace, and the
Information Age in general. That’s
really terrifying. Not just the fact
that knowledge is exploding, but that access to it is almost completely open to
everyone in the world. That is a
radical, transforming, new development.
When we were younger where did we go to get information if we couldn’t
get it at home? We went to libraries
and got books. What did we do when we
wanted to look up a word? We went to a
thing called a “dictionary”. We didn’t
go to dictionary.com. We went to a book, that we took off a shelf and paged through to look for
something. Today, if you ask any child
in the school – the younger, the better – what a word they don’t know means,
they’ll say: “I don’t know, but I’ll tell you in a minute.” They run to their computers, go to dictionary.com, and they come back with
the answer.
Scott Gray has
been with us a long time. Some of us
remember how he struggled in 1993! We
hired him back then, before he joined the staff, to work in the basement a day
or so a week. This was before the
basement was remodeled. It was cold and
damp and dank, and we put some heaters in there, and a telephone line, and had
a 26 kps modem to connect to “bulletin boards”. (Does anybody remember those?)
The aim was to put our name out there, to write about Sudbury Valley on
them for public relations. We have a
drawer full of the correspondence that he participated in, printed out on a
dot-matrix printer (another long-forgotten dinosaur). That was only fourteen years ago!
When I was in
Columbia University in the summer of 1961, they computerized the payroll
department. They put in a huge computer
facility, about four times the size of the main building at Sudbury Valley,
built specially for their giant computers (that undoubtedly had less capacity
in the entire building than a handful of laptops have today). They used punch-cards back then. The first payroll came out and everybody got
their checks. When my check came through,
it was made out to “Daniel Greenlery”.
So I called them up and said, “How am I going to cash this check? It’s not my name. My name is ‘Greenberg’, not ‘Greenlery’”. They answered – and if I hadn’t heard it
myself I wouldn’t have believed it – that it would be easier for me to change
my name than for them to change the check!
The nice part about it was that the bank never looks at your checks
anyway.
How difficult
is the cyber revolution to comprehend?
It took place in a tiny span of time, and has precluded any possibility
of controlling access to information.
Indeed, the cyber revolution is totally destructive of any form of
control or management. By now, this is
becoming clear to everybody, and is no longer seriously contested.
So here we see
that people in general agree on all these points, and yet we’re having so much
trouble having them accept the school, even after forty years of highly
successful operation. Why? This goes back to where we started: because
it is terrifying. The school
terrifies adults in particular. It
shouldn’t terrify children, for whom all the considerations we have been
discussing are commonplace. But because
adults are terrified, they transmit their terror to the kids. Kids get their fears from the fears of the
parents, but also from the worries of the close family – grandparents, uncles,
whatever, people around them whom they love and admire and would like to
please. These people can’t usually hide
their anxieties – often they don’t want to!
They also pick up fear from peers, from kids in other schools who want
to think that what they are suffering is not for nought. So kids have to be brave to withstand all of
this, and meanwhile they also have to deal with the rather adult job of
figuring out how to spend their time in a ways that are meaningful for
them. That is a tall order. There is no harder school anywhere. So occasionally it is just too much for a
child, and they run away in fear. They
aren’t bad people; they just can’t overcome their fear.
I want to share
with you a wonderful quote from a book entitled A Nation of Wimps, by Hara Marano, scheduled for publication in
April 2008. The author is the person
who wrote the insightful article about Sudbury Valley that appeared in Psychology Today. The passage relates directly to what I’m
talking about:
No one has limned the generational
digital divide better than those who established the electronic frontier.
“On the most rudimentary level,” John
Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, wrote so presciently in 1994, “there is simply terror of
feeling like an immigrant in a place where your children are natives – where
you’re always going to be behind the 8-ball because they can develop the
technology faster than you can learn it.
It’s what I call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are going to be
comfortable with that are people who don’t mind confusion and ambiguity. I look at confusing circumstances as an
opportunity – but not everybody feels that way. We’ve got a culture that’s based on the ability of people to
control everything.
In this new order, Barlow later
emphasized, “you are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in
a world where you will always be immigrants.”
It’s what the kids know, and we don’t, that is piling on the parental
anxiety. They’re the digital natives,
born to the technology, and we’re the digital immigrants, the adults, who think
text messaging is more of a stress than a cool and necessary way of keeping up
with pals. We learned the technology
late enough so that it isn’t second nature, and we speak with varying degrees
of an accent.5
There is
another segment which is just as poignant:
Mark Prensky is a video game creator who
insists we have yet to grapple with the full implications of the digital
native-digital immigrant divide.
“Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was
designed to teach,” he writes. “Today’s
students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with
this new technology. They have spent
their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music
players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the
digital age. It is now clear that as a
result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction
with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally
differently from their predecessors.
These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect
or realize.”6
Let me end by
asking: how do you deal with this situation?
What you need when you face something that terrifies you is courage. Courage consists of admitting that you’re
afraid, but going ahead and doing it anyway.
Only a fool faces danger without admitting they’re afraid. A courageous person faces his fear,
confronts it, and grapples with it.
All of us need
courage. Parents, children. The founders of Sudbury Valley needed
it. It wasn’t easy for us. We went through all these struggles
too. We were tested in a lot of
ways. Courage is something that this
country was built on. From the very
beginning. This is the first country
settled by people who abandoned their roots and came to start a whole new
life. It is almost impossible to fathom
the courage that it took those people, who sailed away from communities where
their families had lived for hundreds, often thousands, of years – who left the
villages, the tribes, the connections, the culture, the religion, everything
that they were born into, to begin from scratch a new way of life.
So we live in a
country that began with innumerable individual acts of bravery. It is also the first country to engage in a
successful revolution against a ruling colonial power. Not just any colonial power, but the
strongest colonial power in the world.
By hook or by crook – mostly by a little of each – they pulled it
off. What incredible courage that
took! We live in the first country to
have the courage and foresight to devise a written document, the Constitution,
that defined the limits of power of their government, and peacefully united
thirteen proud, disparate, fiercely independent state into a coherent federal
union. That, too, is something almost
inconceivable. When you think of how
Europe has been struggling now for over sixty years, since the end of the
Second World War, to create some form of viable union, you realize how
difficult an achievement this country’s Founding Fathers pulled off. They knew they were doing something that’s
never been done before in the history of the world. It was an amazing act of courage.
This country
had courage to see itself through the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and not
abandon everything that had taken so long to build. On every side, people were saying, “This is what a free society
produces – this calamitous scene of national misery. All because of the chaos of liberty. It’s time for a planned society, for some new social model.” That generation had the courage to withstand
the temptation to abandon freedom and embrace control. Courage is in our bones, as a nation.
We have to
rediscover it in our midst, in this country.
We have to embrace the consequences of the common beliefs that we all
share, and to support an educational institution that has been true to these
beliefs for forty years, even as traditional schools have all but abandoned
them. But it takes an act of courage to
say we’re ready to let go of control because we know that to do so is right.
We must find within us the courage to face the challenge of living on the cutting edge.
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