The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Four topics

Italy, 2002. Treviso, Trieste, Ferrara, Padua and Milan
Page 5

It seems clear to me that the most important thing in life for adolescents is to learn how to get on with other people. This is what they most want to do, and yet conventional schools seem to be designed to prevent them from doing so. They are often made to sit quietly in lessons for hours without speaking to each other, they are not allowed to co-operate or to help each other with their work and their time for socialisation is kept to a minimum.

Sands allows continual social contact, in the classroom as well as outside it. Most of the time things run smoothly, but not always. Here is a comment from Bonnie Hill, another former student, who, like Immalee, was still at the school when the remark was recorded:-

Most of the time the atmosphere in the school is good, but sometimes it's horrible and stressful. I think this is OK because in school meetings and at other times we can look at what is causing the stress and what we can do to make the situation less stressful. It helps us to learn to deal with situations which are stressful. Some students think the school is ideal, but I don't, and I don't think it should be or can be.

This student had very much more realistic expectations of her school than the Dartington Hall Trustees who had expected their school to be perfect.

Sands is distinguished from many other democratic schools by the fact it tries to make as few rules as possible. On the first day there were only two - no drugs and no alcohol. By the second day a new rule had been added, by the children who wanted to smoke, that smoking would only be allowed outside the building. These rules were accepted by the whole community, so there was no need for any system of punishment. Sad to say, as the school has grown the rules have multiplied. From time to time punishments for certain breaches of the rules have been introduced, but apart from one strict rule about drugs, these systems have always proved ineffective and been abandoned before long. When you consider the ordinary costs of punishment - hostility, injustice, resentment, fear and so on - and then you realise that on top of all that it is not even very effective, it is only rational to abandon it.

There is, however, a systematic punishment for anyone who breaks the rule about drugs. Anyone who brings cannabis into school is automatically suspended for a week, and is only allowed back into the school after a discussion with the school meeting. This rule is enforced by the students themselves, which means that it actually works, unlike the rules about drugs in more conventional schools, where the staff have to attempt to deal with a situation which is kept secret for them.

The children who go to Sands nearly all want to take the national exams when they are sixteen, or in some cases earlier. They don't take as many subjects as their counterparts in conventional education, but they achieve high enough standards in those they do take to go on to whatever they choose when they leave the school. The most able students, instead of having A grades in ten subjects and a distorted view of the relative importance of school subjects and the rest of life, have a variety of grades over six or eight subjects, and a proper sense of their own worth as individuals. Less able children are likely to do better at Sands than they would do in other schools because of the opportunity to drop the subjects they hate and to get extra help in the subjects that are significant for them.