Democratic schools are often accused of being elitist, available only to a privileged few. It’s something I’ve heard again and again, in Israel as well as in Europe. This argument is mostly flat out wrong. Sometimes it’s good old circular logic: the Israeli Ministry of Education used the elitism charge for years as a reason not to give my school funding (which it is entitled to by law), because the school charges tuition. The main reason to charge tuition was, of course, that the school had to fund its operations without government assistance. But there is some truth in saying that democratic schools’ students are privileged. Continue reading Privileged? Yeah.
Category Archives: Education
[Video/TED] Philip K. Howard: Four ways to fix a broken legal system
I found this new TED Talk video by Philip K. Howard (a lawyer) about simplifying U.S. law pretty interesting. It was particularly interesting that he highlights trust as essential for the rule of law; Sudbury schools have always been based, amongst other things, on trust and on the rule of law. It’s nice to see the connection acknowledged.
About this talk
The land of the free has become a legal minefield, says Philip K. Howard — especially for teachers and doctors, whose work has been paralyzed by fear of suits. What’s the answer? A lawyer himself, Howard has four propositions for simplifying US law.
From TED.com. link
Frequently Asked Questions?
I write this post to ask for your questions. The reason will, hopefully, become clear eventually. For now, let us just say this is for a project that Sören Kirchner (of tologo verlag) and myself have been thinking about for a couple of years now. This is the first step towards realizing it.
If you have been involved in democratic education for more than a day or two, you will know what I mean when I say that some questions are frequently asked. Whenever you have to explain democratic schooling to someone new, there are a few topics that will invariably come up: how do children learn in such a school?, isn’t that too much freedom? (or: don’t children need structure?), how can young people make wise decisions, for themselves and for the school?, etc. These are just a few – but we want more.
If you are involved in democratic education, send us questions you are often asked.
And if democratic education is new to you, you certainly have questions of your own, and we’d like to hear them.
You can send us your questions in the comments, or by email: michael at sappir dot net.
Lisa Lyons: What I've Learned at Sudbury Schools (a staff retirement letter)
I’d like to share this excellent retirement letter by Lisa Lyons, who worked at Evergreen Sudbury School in Maine and Fairhaven School in Maryland.
Below is the full text of the letter, forwarded to me by my mother in PDF form (link to PDF):
Continue reading Lisa Lyons: What I've Learned at Sudbury Schools (a staff retirement letter)
On addictive games (Kids Don't "Need Structure", Part 4)
The two most common activities in a Sudbury schools are talk and free play. Conversation and free play are great things for children to engage in. These are universal human activities that people everywhere engage in readily whenever they can. It comes as no surprise that children choose to pursue them in an environment like Sudbury schools where no academic structure is imposed on their time.
I refer the interested reader to other sources regarding conversation and free play; you may find these at the bottom of this post, under Further reading.
To close this series of posts about children and academic structures, I will now turn to one other type of activity: video games. On occasion, I have heard the peculiar claim that, “okay, people seek novelty, but video games are addictive! Like heroin! They ruin everything and take away children’s freedom!”
In my experience, as much as video games may seem to engage people, a game can only retain its charm for so long, just like any other activity. People get sick of bad games because they get annoying after a while; people get sick of good games when they have mastered them to the point that the challenge is gone.
In all my years of gaming and involvement in the gaming community, I have not met many “game addicts”. However, those few I have met have always had real-life issues to run away from. It may be trouble at home, or it may be depression, but it seems the root of this obsessive behavior is the need to escape from something more serious. This becomes almost painfully obvious when you get over any prejudice you may have regading the nature of video games. Some people point at games in blame in these cases, but clearly the games are symptom, not cause. Even if a vicious circle is involved, I have not known people to truly spend too much time on games unless they need to escape from something else.
Still, one type of game is increasingly implicated in those cases where someone gets “addicted” to gaming, and I would like to say some words in defense of these games: multi-player games. Multi-player games have risen to prominence in the past decade thanks to rapidly improving Internet infrastructures that now allow people around the world to play together in real time. Games usually fall out of favor after a year or two, but in 2009 there are a few conspicuous games from the late 90’s that are still being played. The two most notable are Starcraft and Counter-Strike, and the primary reason they are still played is their excellent multi-player experience. Multi-player games can offer something off-line games cannot – a built-in social aspect.
The most successful and long-lasting multi-player games are either games that have effectively become competitive sports, or they are “MMOGs” – Massively Multi-player Online Games. The former are games like Starcraft, which has become a virtual sport which aspiring players train for regularly, hoping to succeed at tournaments with real cash prizes. Counter-Strike, a team-based game, is played by teams of friends (“clans”) who play together regularly and are more or less equivalent to soccer or basketball teams. MMOGs, such as mega-hit World of Warcraft, on the other hand, engage players with intricately-designed virtual worlds that offer not only challenges but masses of other players, as well as means – and excuses – to interact with them regularly.
In both cases, these games are so exceptionally successful because of the social aspect – rather than isolating players, they bring them together. If a player abandons the game, they abandon their friends, and this makes it much harder to leave these games behind. Much of the gaming and communicating takes place in the privacy of one’s home, but it is common for Counter-Strike clans and their World of Warcraft equivalents, guilds, to meet up, face-to-face, to play together on a local network or simply to hang out. These games forge connections between people, united by a common interest, giving rise to friendships and in some cases relationships – even marriages. Such a game may hold a person’s attention for a surprisingly long time on their own, but sooner or later the virtual experience tends to escalate. More often, they are interwoven from the very start, helped by the online communities where players meet to discuss the games they play. In fact, the players who spend the most time on their games are the ones most likely to make friends with other gamers, perhaps because they spend more time with the games, or because they need new social connections the most. Games can enable these players to find other like-minded people, and in the long run may do more good than harm, eventually giving players a reason to go out after all.
If you believe that children do indeed need structure, I would like to hear from you in the comments: What kind of structure do children need? Do all children need it? If not, which kinds of children do, and why? In particular, do you see video games as an especially disturbing activity? And finally, I would really like to hear from you what you are afraid may happen to a child who attends a school like mine – what could go wrong without adult structure and guidance?
Further reading
- Peter Gray at Psychology Today has posted extensively on the subject of free play, for instance in this series: link.
- “We were a small group of people bouncing ideas off each other” – the experience of a Sudbury Valley School graduate who played a lot and never took a class. (From Kingdom of Childhood)
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I wrote a piece published in unerzogen magazine in 2008 (link [English, PDF]), where I argued that free and open communication enables school democracy and free learning, and that these also reinforce the freedom of communication in return.
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If you are concerned about video games, I have a book recommendation for you: Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes and Make-Believe Violence, by Gerard Jones. I found it exceptionally informative and interesting.
Kids don't "need structure", part 3
I am back, and I would like to continue this series by addressing one more aspect (or interpretation) of the argument which I have called “some children need structure”. This version reads something like this: “some children, if not provided with extrinsic academic structure, will make bad use of their time and never succeed.” In conventional schooling, it is implied that this applies not only to some children, but to most. In the context of discussing democratic education, this argument, in only referring to “some”, implies something like, “many children can handle the freedom given in a democratic school with grace and make good use of their time, but some of them fail to make good that freedom and will never amount to anything without adults helping them along the right path”. Sadly, I have mostly heard this kind of argument coming from parents, talking about their own children. Unlike the version of this argument which I discussed in Part 2 of this series, this version suggests not that these “some children” will be unhappy in the short-term future (because of inability to cope with creating their own structures), but that the unhappiness will come later on in life, even if the child is perfectly happy right now.
This is where the distastefulness of this argument lies: who is to say that an individual should not be allowed to pursue a course of action that gives them present enjoyment and fulfillment? Is it justified by the promise of future success (or, one would hope, happiness)? After all, there’s nothing wrong with suffering for the promise of something that you want. But then, this is not about a child electing to have less fun in the present to secure the future they want – it is about adults saying the child should be enjoying life less than they do, to enjoy a future the adult judges best. And even when the choice is made by one for oneself, I fear that the long-term consequence of this attitude (so pervasive in Western culture), is that we forget how to enjoy life; if all we can do is busy ourselves with improving the future, when does the point come where we truly enjoy the present 1? And is any point in our lifespan too soon for this? Should we not be enjoying the present as much as possible?
However, in this case it is not an individual’s personal choice we are discussing. It is an adult individual’s choice for a younger individual mostly powerless to resist coercion. In the short-term, this amounts to adults making children miserable. Although the theories of how these structures will help them are fine, the reality is that increased structure does not promise happiness, nor even material success. Many students do their best in traditional schools and still end up unhappy and/or unsuccessful (by their own standards or those of others.) And many students in traditional schools do their best to avoid the academic structures’ influence, get horrible grades (or flunk, or drop out) and end up having a fabulous adult life they are perfectly happy with 2. And even if we were to assume that the right structure increases the likelihood of success, the end result is still making a kid have less fun because of the mere likelihood of enjoying their life more later on. If it were discovered that surgically removing all of your teeth statistically contributes to a longer life, would these same people elect to lose their teeth and switch directly to dentures? After all, the statistical probability does nothing to promise a particular individual will enjoy the benefits – it merely means such an individual has a better chance at them. The price is paid whether or not the results manifest.
But I doubt it is so effective to provide a child with academic structure or any sort of guided path to making the most of their time. Putting aside the argument I have already made in Part 2, that children need to learn to deal with free choice, I would like to take a look at the actual use children make of their time and free choice. When parents say “my child needs structure” about a perfectly happy child in a Sudbury school, likely as not, that child spends most of their time either talking or playing. If it is a younger kid, they are probably playing with friends most of the time 3. If it is an older kid, they are probably talking with friends, or playing video games, which some (very rarely) do alone 4. In the next part (or possibly parts) of this series, I will take a brief look at each of these activities and their value for young children.
1Alan Watts wrote wonderfully on this topic, among many others.
2Many end up rich and/or famous, so I challenge the reader to think of five famous examples from the past 100 years.
3But there are exceptions: my little brother, when he was 7-8 years old, spent most of his time simply walking around with a friend and talking.
4This is not to say that the majority of older students play video games – only that this is very often the cause for parents to start saying their child needs more structure.
Kids don't "need structure", part 2
In the previous part of this post, I introduced an argument often heard when discussing Sudbury schools: “Some children need structure!”; in this series of posts – originally just one post which couldn’t stop writing itself – I am exploring this argument and explaining why I disagree with it (even though I accept that it is true). In this part, I will explain my protest to the argument as it is used to justify adults introducing academic structures into democratic schools – “children need structure” in the sense that some children are unhappy, or experience hardship, when lacking academic guidance (..and thus we must provide them with some). It’s a long one, but I could not cut it down any shorter.
It is a fact that some young people experience difficulty when not provided with an extrinsic academic structure. This is true, I cannot argue otherwise, so strictly speaking, those making the argument are right. Of course, applying this only to “some” severely limits the extent to which this fact alone should affect our actions. But even if we were to believe that these “some” who have this difficulty are a significant proportion of children, I do not think people are born this way. When you observe a young child in free play, it is clear they have no “need” of extrinsic structure in this sense – they are perfectly engaged and happy without any adults’ intervention. You see the same with the younger students in a Sudbury school, the ones who have never gone to a traditional school – these children have no problem finding use for their time and are often surprised when the school day is over because they have been happily busy in self-directed activity and didn’t expect it to abruptly come to an end because some clock struck 3.
But if this argument doesn’t apply to the youngest children (presumably the least experienced and skilled), which children does it apply to? In my experience, the best match is those who have spent a few years in a traditional school and have gotten used to receiving a full program of instruction from adults. I have compared the situation with substance dependency – structure is like heroin or nicotine, there are individuals who need it, and the need is real – but it is not inborn. It is the result of habit, or conditioning – although a psychological habit is certainly not the same as a physical addiction. This really makes sense; after having their school time tightly managed for a few years, it is easy to understand why they are used to having structure, why they struggle to cope when nobody provides them with classes – they are in the habit of consuming structures, classes and content, and not at all in the habit of creating them.
But is it really the right answer to just make it easy and decide on a curriculum for them? Are these students, who have essentially forgotten how to manage their own time, best off if their time is managed for them, to a degree? It’s pretty clear to me that the answer is no. If we do this, where will it end? When people turn 18 or 19 – depending on where they live – they are considered adults and soon stop going to school. Suddenly, they are confronted with a lot of choices. Even for students used to academic freedom, the variety variety of choices faced by a new high-school graduate can be very difficult to deal with.
In Israel, where mandatory military service usually postpones this confrontation until the age of 20 or 21, it is stereotypically common for a young adult to go spend a few months – or a couple of years – somewhere in southern Asia, “clearing their head” (usually with the help of intoxicants) and figuring things out. In Germany, where this is less of a present issue, I know several people who, after completing high-school (or Germany’s civilian service, or the shorter military service), chose their university major almost at random because they had no clue what they wanted to study. It seems a kind of folk stereotype here, echoed by many in my environment in university, that many become teachers because all they ever knew is school and they rather go back there as teachers than try something new. The common thread is young people who find themselves suddenly faced with more choice than they know what to do with it. This looks to me like a natural consequence of a system that does not give young people an opportunity to confront the real variety of choices typical to “real life”, putting people on railroad tracks with a promise of eventual success and teaching them that they need these rails in order to find their way. Of course there are also high-school graduates everywhere who know exactly what they want to do – but in many places, this is the exception rather than the rule. Yet somehow, amongst fresh Sudbury graduates, it is cluelessness that seems the exception, and motivation the norm. This appears to be affected by the system, not only by the individuals going through it.
I’ll be the first to admit my plans were flawed when I got up and moved to Germany right after my civilian service, but even I certainly had plans and ambitions. I know that so far, each and every one of the other Sudbury Jerusalem graduates has had a clear idea of what they want to do when they graduated. Some of these plans change, for many of them it is still far too soon to tell, but what is clear is that these are people who can deal with a bit of choice. And this when all of the graduates of Sudbury Jerusalem so far (including myself) have been people who had already spent most or all of elementary school (if not middle school) in a conventional school, before arriving at the Sudbury school. We all came in used to a lot of structure, and we all had to deal with not having that any more. We each dealt with it in different ways. At the end, we were all okay with not having extrinsic structure handed to us. For me, this is an ongoing process that I am still not entirely done with (a fact I only understood about a year and a half after graduation.) But I imagine it would have been a great deal harder to deal with if I hadn’t had those four years of Sudbury Jerusalem where I had to create structures in my life rather than only consume them. This is something each of us has to go through and figure out sooner or later. Feeding children artificial structures when they could be working out their own is a tremendous disservice to them and to society.
In the next installment of this series, I will discuss a version of this argument often presented by proponents of traditional schooling who believe imposing extrinsic structure is necessary for a person to succeed.
Kids don't "need structure"
Martin Roberts, a colleague on EUDEC Council, brought up an argument yesterday that you often get when talking about Sudbury schools. “Why not offer classes? Some children need structure.” (These are not exactly his words, but this is the argument in a more general sense.) I replied to Martin directly, but because of how common this line of reasoning is, I would like to discuss it more extensively. In this series of posts (originally a single post that got out of hand) I will explore this issue from a few angles and hopefully provide you with something interesting to read, if nothing more.
First, let us clarify what the “kids need structure” argument actually means – after all, it does not refer to children creating structures to meet their own needs on their own terms. No, what the argument actually says is that children are not all capable of getting everything they need independently and some of them need adults to provide them with an extrinsic academic structure.1
Before I explain why I disagree so strongly with it, I will point out an unpleasant implication of this claim that seems problematic to me: when making this argument, Martin implies – although I am sure this is not his intention – that children are not capable of managing their own lives. Moreover, I am willing to bet that Martin, like most people, would never make this claim about adults. If you, dear reader, happen to be an adult currently in the workforce, can you imagine making this claim about your colleagues? Or your friends? I assume most people will answer with a “no”.2 So without meaning to, Martin is not treating the vague age-group called “children” with the same respect as he would afford to fellow adults. This does not mean the claim is false – in fact, as we will see, I think it is true and disagree nonetheless. But equal respect for people, regardless of age, is not only an essential requirement for democratic education, but a necessary step for society to make as a whole. It makes very little sense to disrespect people because of their age and leads to the ridiculous situation where everyone is disrespected for no good reason sooner or later. But I digress.
Let us turn to the argument itself: “[some] children … need adults to provide them with an extrinsic academic structure”. Before I start to address it I would ask what “need” really means here. Surely it is not used in the same sense as “children need a regular intake of oxygen, water and food” – no child ever died from lack of an academic framework. Rather, what is intended is “need” in the sense that some children are unhappy, or experience hardship, when lacking academic guidance (this is the sense Martin meant this is). It is true that some young people have a very hard time when they aren’t prescribed academic structures by adults, a matter which I will return to in the next post. The final possible intention I can see for this claim, which is not the intention in Martin’s case, is that some children “need” a framework of instruction in order to grow up to be successful adults. This is an important interpretation, because people outside of democratic education very often claim this when defending the practices of traditional education.
In the next post, I will address Martin’s sense of this argument, that it is difficult for some students to deal with a lack of instructional framework. In the posts following that I will examine the last sense of this argument and go in more detail into how this claim ties in with video games (which so many people view as dangerous for children, especially when no structure deprives them of the chance to play them.) I have already written much of this text, so these posts will be more frequent than I have otherwise been posting.
1A similar argument is that children are not capable of controlling their diet in a healthy way and need adults to dictate when, what and how much they eat. When a teacher says “kids need structure” this is usually not what they are referring to.
2The exception is totalitarians, who explicitly believe human beings need to be led by a charismatic male who tells them what to do. I will not bother arguing against that kind of claptrap here.
After seven years, Sudbury Jerusalem receives government recognition
Just a short shout of joy before I resume posting for real:
After almost seven years of running without any form of government recognition — or more importantly, government funding — Sudbury Jerusalem has received notice that the school is to be recognized. Wisely enough, they’re holding off the party until the papers arrive, but I wish I was there today.
My mother and I got involved in founding Jerusalem’s first democratic school in late 2001, and in September 2002 the school first started operating — in rented space in a synagogue on the outskirts of the city. The school moved twice in the year that followed, always having to fund its operations in rented spaces, using only tuition taken from parents who, for the most part, could hardly afford it. One of the arguments the government has used when defending their refusal to recognize the school is that it takes tuition, a fact that could have been easily avoided if the school got the money from the government instead.
The school has moved once more in 2007, a year after I left, and has kept growing, so whenever I visit now, both the building and many of the people are different from what I knew in my time there. But a lot seems very familiar, and when you think about how the school has made it this far alone, without the support that even the tiniest religious boys’ or girls’ schools in Israel receive, it’s pretty impressive.
It has been quite the battle for Sudbury Jerusalem to get here, and I know the school will do great things with its new status, and continue being a great place for people to live and learn.
I will start posting again, posting real posts, although it seems I will continue the Democracy posts at a later date — I have something else in mind right now.
Peter Gray: Social Play and the Genesis of Democracy
I’m back sooner than expected and will resume posting about democracy soon. Meanwhile, here’s a link to the latest post over at Peter Gray’s excellent Freedom to Learn blog, in which Peter discusses how free social play lends itself to the development of a sense of democracy in children:
Children cannot acquire democratic values through activities run autocratically by adults. They can and do, however, experience and acquire such values in free play with other children. That is a setting where they are treated as equals, where they must have a say in what goes on, and where they must respect the rights of others if they wish to be included.
Link: Social Play and the Genesis of Democracy
P.S.
The rest of the blog is well-worth reading as well!