What happened to people who studied at a school without classes, tests or grades

Peter Gray and David Chanoff tracked down the graduates of Sudbury Valley School. It is the most cited study on the subject.

This article is not mine: it is a summary of a study by Peter Gray and David Chanoff. The research is theirs — published in the American Journal of Education in 1986, on what became of the graduates of Sudbury Valley School. My work was to read the original article, summarize the findings and translate the quoted passages into Portuguese, because none of it existed in that language. Everything that follows is the authors' conclusion, except the last section, where I say why I went after this.

Sudbury Valley School opened in 1968 in Framingham, Massachusetts. It has no curriculum, no compulsory classes, no tests, no grades and no report cards. Children decide what to do all day, from age 4 to 19, and the school is governed by an assembly in which every student and every staff member has exactly one vote.

The question every parent asks about this is always the same: and then what? Peter Gray, professor of psychology at Boston College, and David Chanoff went after the answer: they tracked down, one by one, the graduates of the school's first eleven years. It is the most cited study on the subject, and what follows is what they found.

How the study was done

Between June 1970 and June 1981, 82 people left the school as graduates — 78 with a diploma and 4 who left at 16 or older without presenting a graduation thesis. The researchers located 76 of them and obtained responses from 69: 91% of those located, 84% of the total. There were 47 written questionnaires, 15 telephone interviews and 15 in-person interviews.

The graduates were split into two groups: those who entered the school by 6th grade (group 1, who spent longer there) and those who entered from 7th grade on (group 2).

How much time they spent studying "subjects"

Little, and that is not a figure of speech: 29% of group 1 and 56% of group 2 reported having taken no course or tutorial at the school. Asked to estimate how much of their time went to recognizably academic activity, the average answer was 8%.

The results

Just over 50% went to college

They had completed or were pursuing an undergraduate degree at the time of the survey — 64% of group 1 and 47% of group 2. Another 25% had done some higher education without being enrolled in a degree course.

86% and 54% entered selective colleges

That is the proportion of enrollments from group 1 (6 of 7) and group 2 (13 of 24) that went to one of the roughly 220 most selective institutions in the United States, per the 1982 Fiske guide.

And with no transcript, no grades

About half first entered a less selective college and transferred later, using their record there as a credential. The rest went straight in, with SATs, letters of recommendation and, in some cases, interviews or tests given by the college itself. Among those who already held a bachelor's degree, six were in graduate school or already had the degree — two of them doctoral students, in theoretical physics and in anthropology.

None regretted it

To the final question — "on the whole, are you glad you attended SVS rather than a more traditional school?" — 56 answered "yes, very much", 11 answered "yes, moderately", 2 left it blank, and none said it would have been better not to have gone.

And the harms? The study records those too

This is the part usually left out by those promoting the school, and it is precisely what gives the rest its credibility. Of the 35 graduates in the college subgroup, 13 said the school harmed them in some way: eight reported arriving weak in some academic area — mathematics was the most cited; three felt hurt by having no transcript when applying; and two said they felt intimidated at first, finding college very different from school. One of them postponed entry by a few years because of it.

The same 13, without exception, also answered that the school benefited them — and most made clear the benefit outweighed the harm. In total, 32 of 35 said the school helped them in their later studies. The two most cited reasons, each by about half of them: more desire to keep learning, and the habit of being responsible for their own education.

What they did for a living

Among the 69, careers spread across the arts (15), health and caring professions (13), management and business (8), clerical work and sales (6), academic careers (5), applied science and technology (5), skilled trades (9) and miscellaneous (8).

Half the graduates of group 1 — those who spent the most years at the school — were pursuing careers in the arts: a dancer in an international company, a landscape photographer supporting himself with studio portraits, an apprentice potter, a rock musician, a pianist and arranger trained at a prestigious conservatory.

What they said themselves

I am grateful to the school for the education it gave me about people, life and living together. I am far more tolerant of those who are different from me. There, everyone is an individual. In public school, being different in any respect is something to avoid at all costs.

The discussion of democratic philosophy, especially the debates about each person's responsibility, marked me deeply. I still work hard at knowing what my responsibilities are and at meeting them. And that, of course, helped in every area of my life.

I am glad I went and glad I lived among those people, because it turned me from a rebellious child into a person in control of my own life. I gained the confidence to do whatever I want.

What this study does not prove

The article is honest about its own limits, and those who cite it should be too. The sample is small and from a single school. The data are self-reported. The researchers had ties to the school and acknowledge in the text the risk of that influencing the answers. And, above all, the population is not random: 83% of respondents had at least one parent with a university degree. A family that chooses a school like this is already an unusual family.

What the study does allow us to say is more modest — and still remarkable: growing up without a curriculum, without tests and without grades did not stop these people from entering university, from working in varied professions, or from being at peace with their own education. The question "and then what?" has, at the very least, one documented answer.

Original and full reading

Gray, P. & Chanoff, D. (1986). Democratic schooling: what happens to young people who have charge of their own education? American Journal of Education, 94(2), 182–213. doi.org/10.1086/443842

The full article is made available by the author himself as a PDF, and has an entry at the Alliance for Self-Directed Education.

Who wrote what: the research, the numbers and the conclusions are Peter Gray's and David Chanoff's. This text is an original summary written by me from the original article — it is not a translation of it; those rights belong to the authors and to the University of Chicago Press. The quoted passages are alumni statements cited in the article. If you read English, read the original: it is better than any summary.

Why I summarized this

I am trying to gather a group to open a school like this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and I started with the simplest step: a weekly meeting, same place and same time, for children to play freely, with no organized activity.

About the original school: sudburyvalley.org. The book that tells its daily life is Free at Last, by Daniel Greenberg — still with no Portuguese edition, and that is what we are trying to change.