Sudbury Valley is a private day school founded by Daniel Greenberg located in a semi-rural part of Massachusetts. He wondered why there couldn't be an educational system that helps students develop passionate interests and then pursue those interests.

So Greenberg founded s...

• Children educate themselves.
• The school establishes no curriculum, gives no tests, and does not rank or evaluate students.
• The school is a democratic community. Students and staff members operate on a one-person-per-vote basis, regardless of ...

Hundreds of studies conducted with children show that they gaze longer at new scenes than familiar ones. They look longer at events that they find intriguing and lose interest as soon as there is nothing new to learn from it.

Children are relentlessly drawn toward anything that runs counter...

Children are instinctively predisposed to educate themselves. Watch any child left alone with an iPhone, and you can see the drive to self-education.

Learning drives are:

• Curiosity drives the child to know what the apparatus is, how it works, and...

The limitations of school:

• Children are confined to a largely unchanging environment.
• They are not free to pursue their interests in self-directed ways.
• Children are continuously evaluated so that instead of exploring, discovering, and failing, they lea...

School teaches selfishness, not sociability.

When students are evaluated for their learning and compared to other students, they learn to only look out for themselves.

If you have the drive to share information and ideas, you're not allowed to bring them into school. ...

Education is cultural transmission. That is how each new generation acquires and builds upon the skills, knowledge, lore, and values.

Without sociability, there's no education. Without sociability, you eliminate the two most important forms of learning:

Free play is play in which the players decide what and how to play and are free to change the goal and rules as they go along.

Free play is how children learn to structure their own behaviour.

The modern schooling system is known to prevent people from acquiring the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in today's world.

Before children start school, they learn at a mind-blowing speed. They learn how to walk, run, jump and climb. They become fluent in one or more languages and us...

After the curiosity drive leads a child to a new toy or situation, playfulness takes over. Without that curiosity, we wouldn't try out anything new. Without playfulness, we wouldn't become skilful at anything.

Research found that the shift from exploration to play is one from a focused seri...

Unschooling is not schooling. Unschooling parents do not send their children to school. At home, children are not bogged down by a curriculum, do not require particular assignments for the purpose of education, and do not test their children to measure progress.

Instead, they allow their ch...