At Sudbury Valley School, students from *preschool through high school age* explore the world freely, at their own pace and in their own unique ways.
http://sudval.org/

Applicants must be *at least four years old*
http://sudval.org/01_abou_06.html

The school is governed on the model of a traditional New England Town Meeting. The daily affairs of the school are managed by the weekly School Meeting, at which each student and staff member has one vote. Rules of behavior, use of facilities, expenditures, staff hiring, and all the routines of running an institution are determined by debate and vote at the School Meeting. At Sudbury Valley, students share fully the responsibility for effective operation of the school and for the quality of life at school.
http://sudval.org/01_abou_05.html

By age four or thereabouts, human beings have a fully developed communication system which, for all intents and purposes, makes them mature persons. They are capable of expressing themselves, of understanding what's said to them, and of structuring continuous thought; and they are capable of doing things with their environment. You could ask whether a person age four and up belongs at all in a book on child rearing, because I don't consider someone over that age to be a child. To a certain extent the subject doesn't belong here, and yet society considers people to be children until a much older age than four, and so we have to discuss this largely because society forces it on us . . .

. . . I want to explain what I mean by a person over four being mature . . .

. . . A person aged fifty can have just as many difficulties solving a problem as a person aged five. A person aged fifty confronted with a new situation can feel just as helpless as a child. We have phrases for this in our language; we talk about older people confronted with difficult situations and refer to them as being "like children." Actually, the language reflects society's prejudices . . .

. . . It is the need to turn them into robots that takes time . . .

http://sudval.org/05_onli_07.html

new URL:

"Ages Four and Up", from Child Rearing, by Daniel Greenberg
http://www.sudval.com/05_underlyingideas.html#07