Talk:List of Sudbury schools

Moved the following to Former Schools

 * Sudbury De vlinder, Ghent
 * Full Circle Community School, Orlando, Florida

I assumed they were closed because their websites no longer existed, if they are still open and just have broken websites feel free to move them back and update the link. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.115.230.188 (talk) 01:59, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Type? Oldest?
If the type referred to in the second paragraph is the category of democratic schools then saying they were one of the first in North America may be a stretch of the truth. The following self-identified democratic schools (as of 2010) all preceded Sudbury and one even predates Summerhill: Marietta Johnson's School of Organic Education founded in 1907. Play Mountain Place founded 1949. The Meeting School founded 1951. Arthur Morgan School founded 1967. Clonlara School founded 1967. and that is only to bring up the schools that still survive. There are undoubtedly many more that have ceased to exist. Rumor has it that there were boom times for democratic schools in the 20's & 30's then again in the 60's & 70's. But most of the schools from those periods have died off.

Then again if the type being referred to is Sudbury schools then it was by definition the very first. Either way the statement strikes me as incorrect.

The statement about Summerhill is also not accurate if Marietta Johnson's School of Organic Education counts as democratic. Donberg (talk) 21:52, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

The New School
Are you sure that The New School is really a Sudbury school? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.231.216.164 (talk • contribs) 06:22, 25 June 2004 (UTC)

No I am not sure. But look at this site http://www.thenewschool.com/Organization.htm

There is self-directed learning, a assembly, school meeting, judicial committee and a yearly election of staffs. In my opinion these are the most important facts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.133.91.1 (talk • contribs) 07:30, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Jefferson County Open School
This school is definitely no sudbury school. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.133.91.1 (talk • contribs) 07:30, 3 August 2005 (UTC)


 * JCOS does meet all the criteria on Sudbury model. Although I just looked over their site again, and it appears they only mention the age mixing on that site.  Too bad.  --NormalAsylum (talk) 17:27, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Criteria for a Sudbury school
I don't mean to criticize the inclusion of any given name on the list, but shouldn't the main criterion for definition as a Sudbury school simply be the school's self-definition? There are no set ideological criteria for this definition, there is no organization of Sudbury schools that sets criteria for membership, and the good folks over at Sudbury Valley School seem glad to meet people from schools with a variety of models similar to theirs and share their experience with them. Because of this vagueness - or complete absence - of definition, it looks like any school that associates itself with the Sudbury model and is not blatantly and obviously not a Sudbury school should be considered one. If a school does not associate itself with the model it should not be considered a part of it, as the ideological tenets of a school or the administrative system do not seem to be enough to define this model. Michael%Sappir 10:06, 27 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Sudbury Valley School has a list of ”Schools that operate in a manner similar to ours, and schools that identify themselves as Sudbury schools.” These include Leerhuis Brussel in Belgium, Aquariushoeve in the Netherlands, and Democratic School Makkukurosuke and Democratic School Sola in Japan. I don’t understand Dutch, but Leerhuis Brussel seems to call itself a Sudbury school, and Aquariushoeve links to SVS (among other things, including Summerhill).
 * SVS’ page also includes the New London Freedom School, which has now merged with the Greenwood School, so I don’t know whether they count as separate schools. Aren’t they in different locations? The link to Greenwood School here doesn’t seem to lead to it anymore.
 * Also, “The Brooklyn Free School is based on the principles of Summerhill School in England, the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, and The Albany Free School in Albany, NY.” (I’ve seen it among the New London Freedom School’s Sudbury links, but I haven’t looked at all the other free schools.) [Indented later, when I figured out how.] Kletta 22:41, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Pedantic geographical note
The Fairfield School (Wolfville, Nova Scotia) is in Canada - moved 30 Jan 2006. (Richard)

Should the list have internal links to schools?
The Circle School, The Highland School, and Sudbury Valley School have their own articles. Should they be linked from their names on this list? Thanks in advance! --Kletta (talk) 01:48, 18 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, better to link the WP articles. &mdash;Ashley Y 01:53, 18 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I've done that with The Circle School and The Highland School. I'd forgotten that there's already an internal link to the original SVS at the start; should the link on the list also be an internal one? --Kletta (talk) 05:16, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Fairfield School
I've deleted from the page, as it has closed. The listing was: and a reference to it's closing is here Nfitz (talk) 02:18, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
 * The Fairfield School, Wolfville, Nova Scotia


 * Sorry, the link to the article doesn't seem to work for me. Could the school still be listed under former schools, like The Chicago Sudbury School and Big Rock Sudbury School are? --Kletta (talk) 14:10, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Done - along with the now closed Beach School Nfitz (talk) 21:20, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Definition?
I have been updating, expanding, and streamlining the democratic education and democratic school pages. Is there a clear definitional reason for listing Sudbury schools separately from democratic schools? From what I see, Sudbury schools have been influenced/inspired by the Sudbury Valley School. However, they do not seem to be definitionally outside democratic schools.

In addition, there a number of schools listed here that were neither inspired by the Sudbury Valley School (rather, the Summerhill School or some other democratic school) nor include the word "Sudbury" in their name.

I suggest that clear definitional criteria for List of Sudbury Schools be created that limit, if possible, this list to those that self-identity with Sudbury Valley School.

In addition, and in line with the discussion going on at the Sudbury School discussion page, perhaps we should consider consolidating this page with the Sudbury School page and linking it to the democratic school page so as to streamline these things. Maguire09 (talk) 20:29, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

There used to be an excellent page describing the model, which is unique from democratic schools. A lot of people put a lot of work into it, but I guess it was deleted? That's a shame. Aaronwinborn (talk) 00:58, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Notability
Fortunately, you didn't yet delete the page, so I'm going to restore it for now until we can get this sorted out. For notability, please visit Google Trends, where you will note that the volume of searches for 'sudbury school' has consistently been far greater than for 'democratic school' over the past five years. Additionally, there have been more books written about the Sudbury model of education than for any other single model. If you have other specific concerns of notability, I can help to address them. Meanwhile, as I have time over the next few weeks, I'll work on finding other sources of information. Aaronwinborn (talk) 14:51, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Is this issue also in reference to there being no third party information included in this article? Can we include Peter Gray articles from Psychology Today? http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn Tintoberries (talk) 06:36, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Sydney Australia
I've deleted the proposed school in Sydney, Australia since the only ref for it is a facebook page that states that someone would like to create such a school in Sydney, but not to expect much on the page for a year or two. (I'd like to create such a school under a palm tree in Hawaii, but I'm going to hold off on the wikipage until I at least choose my tree.) I'm only bothering to explain this deletion since I see that this same entry was previously deleted and then restored. Meters (talk) 23:04, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

After the AfD improving the article.
I have had to revert an unfortunate deletion, the intention is to add references and add further detail. Please can we respect the AfD interpretation. --ClemRutter (talk) 18:53, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Exactly. Try rereading it. I made the clean up before the close. The close was done because of my cleanup. The onus is on those who wish to keep the mess to find sources. There's absolutely no need to keep WP:SPAM links in the meantime. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 18:55, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Its a fine line for a start class list as to which mess to keep and which to ditch. None of us has ownership of an article. My standpoint is that we cant improve it if it is no longer there. As I explained in the discussion how I had stumbled on this; while we try to do better, we keep the links that help further research. Coming from a conventional education background I don't regard lists of schools as spam- and all the policy documents I have seen are permissive. I leave it to other editors to give an opinion on the way forward. You and I have done our duty here- and should sit down on the sideline and enjoy a beer or two together. ClemRutter (talk) 19:18, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
 * No one ever claimed ownership over the article. However, there's no way policy allows for a laundry list of spam links, either. Hence their removal. When I first stumbled across this article, that was my first inclination (to just delete the links), however after realizing that it essentially meant the removal of the entire article, I opted for AFD. We know how that worked out. So, here we are. As for the doing further research on the old links, they're still available. In the page history. Like here. Have at it. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 19:34, 30 January 2019 (UTC)


 * why not just remove the links and keep the list? i think the removal of everything is absolutely bullshit and you are pretending that this is your article in some way. but that's just my 2 cents — Preceding unsigned comment added by Denneledoe (talk • contribs) 09:45, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * sorry, I didn't get your ping and didn't notice your comment until now. Perhaps because you didn't sign your comment? I don't know. Anyway, in answer to your question, see the Manual of Style on lists. The list should be links to items with articles already. You can make an argument for adding a school without an article (red link or not) that has an actual reliable source attached to it (and not a spammy one to their website as incorrectly suggested below), but so far, that hasn't been done. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 18:59, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * On the strength of the comments in the concluding section of the AfD- it is clear the intention is keep displaying the list- and possibly clean up the format. I would suggest the becomes  and a  is added for two of the longer refs/notes- I have left advice in Edit summary and two examples in the ==Ireland==. You could do the whole lot in 20 minutes. ClemRutter (talk) 10:51, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * No, the intention is NOT to keep a list of links. Hiding spam as references is also wrong. Your reading comprehension and knowledge of policy needs work. Reverting.... Jauerbackdude?/dude. 12:24, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Flinging insults does not help. I suggest you revert your last edit leave this article before you hit a topic ban- your points are reasonable, and have been considered but as the AfD decided, they were not ones that the community accepted. I would love to support a purist approach but our duty to the readers in the community in this case is to make the information available and visible. ClemRutter (talk) 16:35, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * There was no insult. I'm simply pointing out that you not only do not understand what the outcome of the AFD was (as previously explained in this section), but you also don't understand the policy on WP:SPAM (specifically WP:CITESPAM) or WP:ELNO. Yet, here you continue insist otherwise. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 16:43, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

, to clear up any further confusion, can you elaborate your closing statement on this AFD? Jauerbackdude?/dude. 17:17, 18 February 2019 (UTC)


 * To clarify my thoughts, I contacted fellow schools co-ordinator too, to get a fresh set of eyes on the issue, he has responded on his talk page.ClemRutter (talk) 20:45, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, I saw that, thanks. I wish you would go back and reread all of this, because this really isn't all that complicated. In hindsight, I wish I cleaned up the article and removed all the external links and then started a discussion to merge this into Sudbury school, because this small list could fit into there. However, I started the AFD first and the consenus was leaning towards WP:SOFIXIT, so I did exactly that. Soon after that, the AFD was closed because the issues had been addressed. Now we're left with a bare bones article that really is just a fork of the Sudbury school article with a handful of schools. It's pointless, but that's what the outcome of hte AFD was. If at some point, there is an agreement on what constitutes a notable Sudbury school that a reasonable list can be made, then no prejudice at all to add more schools to it. I really could care less. However, I will not let an article that is just a WP:LINKFARM to school websites (where the sole purpose is to promote them) stand. Making them into citations does not address that issue at all. I'm not sure why you disagree with that? So, to summarize: a list of external links don't belong here as they are against policy and a list of random schools without some sort of verification makes no sense. Where does that leave us? Jauerbackdude?/dude. 22:11, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm not interested in getting involved in editing disputes over this page, particularly where I'm not sure what the question even is that would be relevant to my AFDclosure. postdlf (talk) 21:55, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I apologize that I wasn't clear and it's not fair to ask you to wade through this mess. There's a disagreement on what you meant in your closing statement, specifically the part (that I'm focusing on) "..the improvements made while this AFD was open clearly show that the complaints raised were fixable...". You closed the AFD three hours after I removed all the spam. My impression is that my clean up addressed the issues and there was no need for an AFD had I just done that in the first place. ClemRutter disagrees and thinks I did that as a way to subvert your AFD close and delete the article by other means. I understand if you'd just rather not get any more involved, too. Jauerbackdude?/dude. 22:20, 18 February 2019 (UTC)