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by KedarMhaswade 4081 days ago
We have previously discussed something similar [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709631). The book, Free to Learn, by Peter Gray discusses the promise of democratic schools with a historical and social perspective. He even calls the Sudbury Valley schools "America's best kept secret".

I attended the open house of the closest (around 50 miles from where I live in CA!) local Sudbury Valley School (called Diablo Valley School, DVS) a few months ago. We, of course, went there with the kids. After coming back home, I asked the kids which school they would rather attend -- their present school or this one and they had no doubt in their mind that they wanted to attend the DVS.

But for some reason, I am not able to make the switch to the idea that the democratic schools are the way to go, although Dan Greenberg (the founder of SVS, back in 1968 in Framingham, MA) has been running this 'experiment' for past 46 years. Maybe, as a parent, I feel overly responsible for my kids and insist that I know more about them than they do. And we know, as Kahneman (Thinking fast and slow) and others have repeated shown, how little we know. It's a sad impasse.