Zoe, 12, is working on a jigsaw puzzle at a table—the one she started yesterday. It’s a 500-piece puzzle so it will take a while to finish. Noah, 5, and Mason, 7, are building a pretend city out of magnet tiles on the floor. Emma finds her best friends, Elena and Claire (8 and 10) making paper fortune tellers, and she hurries over to catch up on the latest happenings.

After chatting for a bit, Emma has her fortune told. She picks a corner of the paper and unfolds it. At 6 years old she can’t read yet, so she has Claire read the fortune to her. “You will become rich and live in a mansion,” it says.

Emma is hungry, so the girls decide to head over to the kitchen to see what they can find. Miles, 15, is just carrying in a big box of single-serving chip bags and sets it on the counter. “Are you selling these?” Emma asks.

“Yes,” Miles says. “I still need to make the sign, but they’re $1.50 each.” Miles is raising money for his share of the school trip to New York.

Emma grabs a check to pay with her school bank account. She writes her name at the top, then asks Claire, “How do you spell ‘chips’?”

“C-H-I-P-S.”

“How do you spell ‘Miles’?”

“M-I-L-E-S.”

“What’s the date?”

“Ten slash twelve.”

Aaron, a staff member, appears at the doorway and lets them know it’s time for the Halloween party planning meeting. Emma hastily finishes the check, hands it to Miles, and selects her bag of chips. Then the girls make their way to the other side of the building.

On the way, they pass through the game room, where six kids have just started a session of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Then they arrive at the library, where Juan, 16, is developing a video game on his laptop, and across the room another staff member is giving a Spanish lesson to a small group of students.

This is a typical scene in Sudbury schools, which are set up less like academic institutions and more like villages. In a village, people are living life together in community. There is no academic curriculum, but learning certainly does happen, as I hope you can see from the vignette. This is a place where kids grow up, develop skills like how to get along with others, how to do business, and how to follow through on their obligations, and have space to pursue their passions.

Community is the Sudbury model’s secret ingredient. Virtually all other school models single-mindedly pursue learning. Unschooling, meanwhile, single-mindedly pursues children’s autonomy. Both are missing the essential piece of community. And while this may not have been as pressing of an issue in 1968 when the Sudbury model was invented, at the moment, at least in the West and especially in the U.S. where I live, we are in the midst of a community crisis.

In his influential book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam showed us that in the U.S. all forms of community have gradually been going out of fashion since the mid-1900s. As the title implies, people no longer bowl in leagues, but also people no longer join clubs or organizations (like the PTA), no longer attend religious services, no longer have dinner parties with friends, no longer live near extended family… I could go on for a while, but you could also just read the book or watch the recent Netflix documentary based on the book, Join or Die.

While none of these developments are necessarily bad on their own, taken together they paint a picture that many readers will recognize all too well. We no longer trust our neighbors; we’re suffering from epidemic levels of loneliness; and lacking contact with a diverse array of people, we’ve become politically polarized. And we get further off track with each passing year.

I believe that Sudbury schools are uniquely positioned among educational models to provide real community, buffering against the harms of an unraveling social fabric. Here are a few traits found in my school (The Open School), and commonly found in Sudbury schools, that promote community:

Community is also an excellent way to promote learning. Maybe you never would have been interested in learning Spanish, but two of your friends signed up for the class and you would love to learn alongside them.

People struggle to learn anything if they’re not internally motivated, right? Well, it turns out that community provides people with internal motivation to do basically whatever others in their community are doing. This is how we end up with students voluntarily doing cool activities all the time like baking cookies, designing board games, planting a garden, studying math (yes—many do), building a fort, putting on a play, and so on. It only has to begin with one person’s interest, and soon everyone is doing it.

It’s time that we recognize the power and importance of community not only in children’s educations but in their lives and well-being. And the Sudbury model is the best foundation we have to do this.