We were a small group of people bouncing ideas off each other

      Plasticene was probably one of the most intense things I've ever done. There were days when we'd show up, go right to the art room, work steadily at it until lunch time, eat lunch at the table, and keep on going until we had to leave that night; and we'd never, never leave the room once. The villages would evolve. Sometimes you'd be building a gold mining community. Sometimes it would be a bunch of towns with hotels and saloons. It usually involved a lot of buildings, a lot of vehicles, a lot people, and you'd make all this stuff. Then you would enact various scenes with it. You would drive your cars around and have certain battles and blow them up on occasion. But for the most part, you were building. You'd be building tanks and airplanes, just one thing after another. I did it at home too; you could bring them in already built.

      I think about it every now and then, and I did exactly what I'm doing now, except I'm doing it now in real life. I'm building a factory and making machines and talking to people all day long. Same exact thing. And very intensely. Day in and day out, the same exact thing I was doing in plasticene. Except that when you're a kid you don't really have as many of the same complications you have when you're an adult. If you're working on a plasticene village, the worst that can happen is you can lose your razor blade or something like that. And maybe you can find another one pretty quickly. There aren't setbacks like you would have in real life, later on. You won't run out of bricks for your building, because you're making the bricks yourself.

      With the plasticene, I was making businesses. I made a lot of factories. I had a cannery at one time. I had a still. I had a bottling plant attached to the still. I could picture it -- I had seen films and gone through books that would show you pictures of bottling plants and such things. It had to be realistic.

      It was the fascination of creating. You were creating things that you couldn't have yourself, maybe, but you could still make them, and by making them, you could have them. And if you were going to do it and have it, you might as well have it as realistic as you could make it.

...

      I was in sixth grade, and I was doing anything I could to rebel against the system. I noticed as soon as I got to Sudbury Valley that I no longer had anything to rebel against, so there was no reason to do all those other things that I was starting to do, like starting to smoke. If nobody's telling you to do things that you want to rebel against, there's no more point in rebelling. So we just played.

...hmm, dalej pise ako opravoval auto, motorku, dalsie auto...

      I did find something funny out though when I had that car. Some local kids ruined it one day. I had to have it towed away because they smashed it. But the funny thing was that after they did that, that day I had a type of stomachache which I had not had since public school. I used to have some really painful stomachaches, but I wouldn't let on that I had them. I would be quite miserable to the point of practically fainting. Sometimes I'd go home and just lay down and they'd go away. But for the most part, I'd lay down at recess time and it would go away, so I could live with it. After that car was wrecked, that stomachache recurred, and I realized that it was all stress. I finally understood what those stomachaches were caused by: school.

      Somewhere in these books I was reading, the idea of farming as a way of life, self-sufficiency, homesteading, became a real interest. With that interest came raising some animals. We talked it over, my friends and I, and decided that we were going to raise goats. We got permission from the school. We built a fence, made a pasture, got everything ready, bought the goats, raised them, had them bred, and had the kids. We had them about four years. They were purebred goats, so we could always sell the kids. With the goats came other rights. We could now stay at the school after hours.

      I enjoyed being at the school, and I have no regrets that maybe I missed something. I had the shortest thesis defense ever. There were no questions. I said "I believe I'm responsible enough to leave the school and to get a diploma." That was it. "Any questions?" None. "See you later."