Lasting Lessons

By Shoshana London Sappir, Ed.M.’87, a translator and journalist currently living in Jerusalem with her husband and children. In 2002, she cofounded the Sudbury Jerusalem School.

The year I spent at the Ed School, 1986–1987, was the last year I lived near my father, Professor Perry London, who taught in the HGSE Counseling and Consulting Psychology Program at the time. At the end of the school year I went back to Israel; he died in 1992. My memories of that year are as much of the classes I took — portraiture, with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Ed.D.’72, where I learned the value of subjective experience in the social sciences; and Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences — as of the moments I shared with my father. Hanging out in his office on Appian Way, I saw him in action as the professor whose door was literally always open to his students, who took great joy and pride in their achievements, and who never lost sight of the individual as the focus of the educational process.

These lessons served me well years later when, together with a group of parents, students, and teachers, I founded the Sudbury Jerusalem School, based on the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Mass. By that time I had three children; my oldest, Michael, was miserable in school, even though he was considered a good student and was well-liked by his teachers and classmates. But honoring Michael’s own perspective on the situation and his personal learning style meant acknowledging that he experienced the very structure of the traditional school setting — with its dictated divisions by age, time periods, and subjects — as an assault on his self. He needed a lot more freedom and trust in his powers of self-direction. The Sudbury model provided just that.

Michael, who bears a great resemblance to his grandfather, had a corrective experience in his four happy years at our school. Currently a full-time hospital volunteer in a yearlong program, he wants to be a professor of philosophy. Meanwhile, I watch with joy and pride as our 70 other students learn and grow, seek the delicate balance between freedom and responsibility, and figure out who they are.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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photo by Debbi Cooper