Sudbury Valley School: Is Alternative Education Right for My Kids? | New Republic:
For example, Sudbury Valley and its peer schools have rejected the overly regimented school day, where learning stops the moment the minute hand hits the right spot; the pointless segregation of students by age and year; and the anxiety that comes with grading. Couldn't a public school do all that? Sudbury has also shown that students, enforcing community standards through representative committees, can keep order as well as the principal's office. Yes, these schools have fewer students, all of them self-selected. Sudbury Valley, the largest Sudbury school, has never got larger than 200 students—we have no way to know at what size its sense of community would break down.
And of course the Sudbury staff and students will be the first to say that the model only works because everyone there chose it. Only students committed to the philosophy can be expected to make it work, and that's an unusual subset of students. But there are such students, and there is no reason to ignore what they can teach us. For with little money, and little guidance, they are teaching themselves rather well indeed.