A common criticism of Sudbury Valley schools (SVS) is that if it is so good why it hasn’t produced many great people. To this criticism, SVS’ counter argument is that life is about simple things. Being a happy person who enjoys life is the most important thing. Recently I understand more of this. Life is really about enjoying doing activities together with friends, about how you treat every person in your daily life. All these simple things.
For “great people”, they are a very small percentage of the population anyway. There are only over 40 SVS across US. It is unreasonable to expect some “great people” happen to go there. It is too small a chance. Actually for great people, they can survive any kind of environment. They can survive the compulsory schooling. It doesn’t matter too much for them. (The term “great people” is of course oversimplification since there are lot of factors such as family environment and so on contributing to “the luck” of the person surviving compulsory schooling. )
It is however quite immoral for compulsory schooling to dumb the majority of people down so they cannot be a healthy human being, troubled for their whole lives for anger, boringness, violence, and so on.
