One December morning, Ellie, my kindergartener, woke up and, on hearing that school was canceled because of imminent snowfall, decided to draw a picture for her teacher of a gingerbread man missing a toe, with an explanatory caption. “It’s my work today,” Ellie said. She then instructed me to deliver the page to her teacher’s house, which is five doors from our own. At about 7:15 a.m., when I went out to walk our two dogs, I did as Ellie had instructed, slipping the picture into the mail slot of her teacher’s house. At 7:53 a.m., an e-mail from the teacher arrived in my and my wife’s inboxes, with a photograph attached, showing the picture already stuck to her refrigerator.

We would love our daughters’ school even if it weren’t at the corner of our street, but we love it more because it is. Even though it's a magnet school, most of the students, some of the teachers, and even our recently retired principal all live in the neighborhood. When my daughters learn to write their letters or multiply numbers, they are learning from and with people who live near them, shout to them from windows, and keep them safe. School doesn’t have to be like that, but I have concluded that it should be.

Nevertheless, common sense tells me that with four daughters each doing 13 years of school on their way to college, I will someday have a child for whom the local public school is not working. Public school didn’t always work for me, or for my three siblings, and over the years we each advanced through a complicated hopscotch of public and private schools. And my wife and I have always said that if any of our children were really unhappy in school, and matters did not seem likely to get better, then we would look for something different. Private school? Perhaps, if we could afford it. Homeschooling? Maybe.

Two of my daughters are now in school, and that future unhappy child is beginning to seem more real, like a disliked relative who, although we know not when, will surely pay us a visit. I hope I’m wrong, but odds seem to favor some daughter, someday, wanting out. What would we do? I don’t know. But I look around and wonder what other schools, or non-schools, are like. So when I picked up a book that described Sudbury Valley School, which sounded different from all the rest, I decided that I had to visit. If what I read about Sudbury Valley was correct, then it was not just one alternative among many: It was the alternative to everything else.

The campus of the Sudbury Valley School, in Framingham, Massachusetts, includes a large house, a barn, and a pond, all situated on ten acres. The school was founded in 1968, and it currently has about 150 students, ages four to 19. The students aren’t grouped by grade level—there is no first grade, second grade, etc. There are also no grades in the sense of marks: A, B, C. There is no curriculum, and no required classes, although sometimes students organize to ask a staff member to give a class on a certain subject. Nobody is required to be anywhere at any given time. School opens at 8:30 in the morning and closes at 5:30 in the afternoon, and students are expected to be present for at least five hours during that time; they may stay longer if they wish. There are eight staff members (they aren’t called teachers), whom students may seek out with questions, for help, or just to chat. In the school meeting, where rules are made and discipline enforced, the staff get one vote each, the same as each student. The meeting also sets the budget and hires (and, on occasion, fires) the teachers. By and large, students respect the rules and their peers’ enforcement of them. Bullying is not a problem.