Summerhill: a Radical Approach to Child Rearing is an awesome book and explains how a free school works and why. The Summerhill school has been around for decad

Summerhill: a Radical Approach to Child Rearing is an awesome book and explains how a free school works and why. The Summerhill school has been around for decades and is successful, and probably inspired all of the schools discussed in the article (the book was published in 1960). It optimizes for pyschology --- not pedagogy. This is why it is free: freedom but not license, which to Americans, would be better stated as: an environment without submission and without domination (so, as opposed to an anarchic school, teachers are not submitting to arbitrary demands of children). A healthy degree of assertion develops in this environment. I've seen Sudbury graduates describe this type of school as a generator of entrepreneurs --- they start businesses afterwards and become successful (although from the Summerhill point of view, success is having a happy and flourishing life). I've found many papers across the years, while researching this topic, that, added together, support the idea that learning is affective and pyschology should be an organizing principle of the school.