What are the main ingredients of a democratic culture?

On August 25th, I’ll be giving a workshop and lecture in Greifswald. At the EUDEC conference in Freiburg, my host and I grabbed two plastic chairs and sat down in a sunny spot for a short interview, some of which is now on the fine poster ad you see here; at one point he asked me a question I haven’t heard too often: what are the main characteristics of individuals who are part of a “democratic culture”?

A democratic culture, as I understand it, is a kind of culture that develops within a group that makes decisions democratically; democratic culture makes democracy more than just a decision-making process – instead it becomes a way of life, something you notice in all kinds of interactions between people.

I came up with four main points:

• Communication at eye level (as opposed to talking up or down to someone) – regardless of age
• Respect  for all other individuals
• Willingness to listen, even when confronted with a view you disagree with
• Willingness to reflect  on one’s actions, recognize mistakes, and learn from them

To me, these are the things that people have to have in order to keep a truly democratic culture alive.

Without equal communication, respect, and willingness to listen, the discussions that are the bread and butter of democracy are impossible. Without a willingness to reflect, they’re pointless.

What do you think are the most important ingredients of democratic culture? Leave a short comment below!

“Where do you work?”

“At Sudbury Valley School.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing.”

-Hanna Greenberg, The Art of Doing Nothing

I was recently reminded of a discussion we had, more than a decade ago, when starting Sudbury Jerusalem.

The topic of the discussion was whether Sudbury staff are allowed to offer classes, and it’s one of the few discussions from the founding process which I still remember vividly today.

We were sitting in a co-founder’s airy living-room, spread out on several couches and stools, and we talked well into the night. It’s no wonder – the role of staff comes up again and again anywhere where people who went to more traditional schools are trying to wrap their heads around the Sudbury approach.

The ideal staffer

The ideal Sudbury staffer, to me, is an adult who communicates with young people respectfully, and does so in an authentic, natural way. They talk with them at eye level and don’t presume to know better just because they are older. They don’t see it as their mission to get students interested in their own areas of interest or expertise. A student’s interests are their own business, and theirs alone.

It is also very important that the staff understand this approach well, well enough to explain it to newcomers. But in this post I want to focus on staff’s role in everyday interactions in the school, so I’ll ignore this important aspect for a moment.

When explaining Sudbury schools, we often have to emphasize this: The staff’s job isn’t necessarily to offer classes, nor even to give classes on request.

A lot of adults out there feel it’s their responsibility (and their right) to take up young people’s time by teaching them, for their own good, whether or not they’re keenly interested. Such people are not ideal Sudbury staff material.

If a staff member really, truly wants to offer a class, because they would enjoy doing it, and not because they want to do something to alleviate students from their ignorance, then that’s perfectly fine. It’s the motivation behind the class that matters, and it’s the same with offering an opinion: it’s fine so long as it’s authentic.

It’s in the process

Ultimately, the Sudbury model doesn’t need a crisp and clear job description for staff, thanks to the democratic process used for hiring and firing them. Staff is typically hired by School Meeting based on a recommendation by a specialized committee; all staff stands for re-election every year, and School Meeting can decide to fire a staff member more or less at any time.

Staffers are hired by the school as a resource, and this means their areas of knowledge and experience will be taken into account. A staffer who can be helpful in running the school might be just as valuable and needed as a staffer who can teach 5 different subjects at a university level. But all of this is subject to a democratic process, meaning that individuals in the school can freely take part in deciding what the school needs at that time and choosing people who can supply it.

If the school hired someone who turns out not to be so helpful, that person can be fired for it. For example, a staff member who doesn’t help with administration, or never agrees to help people when asked, or seems to care more about personal projects than the school, may well be fired before long.

The proof is in the pudding

Ultimately, you just don’t need any fixed requirement at all – not even the requirement to be respectful and authentic. Adults who come in and can’t relate to children comfortably and respectfully aren’t likely to be offered a contract, or keep one for long if they get it. Adults who don’t respect children’s time and interests and always want to fill it up with their pet subjects will be seen as pesky and rude; they likely won’t get in either.

But staff who relate to young people respectfully and authentically; staff who have their own interests and enjoy sharing them with whoever is interested; staff who have an opinion and know how to express themselves clearly but respectfully – such staffers can and do offer activities and opinions, and they’re appreciated for it.

Sudbury schools need adults who can just be adults, all day long, without the need to constantly be teachers.

The article quoted at the top of this post, The Art of Doing Nothing, offers Hanna Greenberg’s far more experienced and better-formulated take on the role of staff at Sudbury schools, or at least one aspect of it. I highly recommend reading it.

I’m often asked how many people really participated in School Meetings at Sudbury Jerusalem – as if it’s less democratic when fewer people choose to participate. But actually, low participation at meetings can be a sign that democracy is working well.

When we started Sudbury Jerusalem, for a few weeks we had a School Meeting every day.

Most of the proposals, at first, came from those who had been in and around the founding process – mainly staff and children of staff. I was a student and a co-founder, and one of the most active participants.

It took months – dozens of Meetings – for the process to become so established in the school’s culture that many other students made proposals. In parallel, as time went by, fewer and fewer students regularly took part in School Meetings.
The early School Meetings at Sudbury Jerusalem focussed on establishing the rules of the game. We spent hours in heated discussion about School Meeting, Committees, procedures – about how the whole thing works. Not everyone is interested in that kind of thing.

But some members of the community, especially those involved in starting the school, felt strongly about these things, and insisted on being part of these discussions.

Those of us who were more involved than others at the time weren’t trying to contol everything, we were mainly trying to lead by example. We, who had spent so much time in envisioning and preparing the school, wanted to demonstrate what the school’s democracy meant: that any of us can take initiative and put forward proposals for improving things in the school.
In the beginning, most students came to those daily School Meetings. They wanted to see what it’s all about, to make their voice heard, and to find out who makes the decisions. I think a few of them wanted to find out who’s really in charge so that they would know who to rebell against.

After a while, most students would only come to support or oppose some specific proposal.

In my view, this was a benefit of having an established way of doing things. It let people relax and trust the process. You don’t have to personally suffer through boring discussions if you know that decisions are made in a fair and transparent way, and that you can always propose to change them later.
For a while, most School Meetings were attended by the staff and one or two students. We came to see this as a sign that all was well.

Students who didn’t come to Meetings knew what was being discussed and what had been decided, and they knew that they could come and change things if need be. But School Meeting was doing a decent job, so most Meetings were small, almost empty.

Once in a while some proposal would come up which interested a lot of students, and suddenly the room would be full. Like the time when a student proposed to create a petting corner. When the proposal came up she called in a bunch of kids who wanted to make it happen, and they easily got a majority, despite some regular attendees (like myself) being against it.

But in day to day life, the Meeting and most of its decisions just didn’t get in the way. They were usually helpful or unnoticable.

The purpose of School Meetings was to ensure that the school continues to exist and that its members are safe and free to pursue their interests.

As a rule, apart from the first year, it was always a small group who was interested in attending every Meeting. We took this as a sign that things were working well.
Of course, different members have a different ability to participate in that kind of procedure, and that is a form of inequality.

But I think back about two younger friends of mine, A.P. and N.F., whom I knew as the kind of boys who would be interested in anything but School Meeting. Both used to have difficulties with reading and writing, another barrier to their participation. Both of them later became Chairs of School Meeting.

They became interested, they attended meetings and learned more about them, they saw work to do, and they stepped up.
People enter a school – or any organization – with diverse interests, different backgrounds, and different skills. Most are not interested in “running the business”, which is what the Meeting does. So a small group ends up doing that. It’s important that the Meeting stay accessible to new participants, but it ultimately has to focus on its important task – which most people find boring.

There’s just not much more you can do, unless you want to force people to participate, or force them to acquire the skills they’d need to participate effectively. But neither option respects people’s individual freedom and autonomy, so neither option is compatible with the liberal-democratic ideal.

All you can do is keep Meeting accessible and lead by example. If you make use of the Meeting on the one hand, and respect its decisions on the other hand, you show others what the Meeting means. If you do neither, there’s no reason for anyone to participate in it at all.

By the way: I haven’t been posting much, and probably won’t be posting much in the coming weeks either. I’m focussing on my work in linguistics now, which involved more than enough writing, but not of the bloggy kind. Being this focussed is a lot of fun and I want to keep it up while my contract lasts. I expect to post more actively starting in August.

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of serving as interpreter to John Moravec, in his talk about the Invisible Learning project, in Halle (a town near Leipzig.) I had never done this before, but once I got into it it went pretty well.

You can judge for yourself – you can watch the talk (mainly English with my attempt at German translation) online:

The Invisible Learning website – where you can read and watch more about the project – says:

“The proposed invisible learning concept is the result of several years of research and work to integrate diverse perspectives on a new paradigm of learning and human capital development that is especially relevant in the context of the 21st century. This view takes into account the impact of technological advances and changes in formal, non-formal, and informal education, in addition to the ‘fuzzy’ metaspaces in between. Within this approach, we explore a panorama of options for future development of education that is relevant today. Invisible Learning does not propose a theory, but rather establishes a metatheory capable of integrating different ideas and perspectives. This has been described as a protoparadigm, which is still in the ‘beta’ stage of construction.”

2

For the Hebrew speakers amongst you, there’s also a new promotional movie about Sudbury Jerusalem:

The movie was released in honor of the school’s tenth anniversary. I was in Israel briefly, to take part in the celebrations, and just got back this past weekend. This is the main reason for the long silence on this blog – normal (almost-daily) posting is now officially the order of the day.

I hope to be able to post a subtitled version of the video soon. I also expect to post videos of my talk at the decennial events, as well as the other excellent talks given there (also given in Hebrew.)

Apparently the most popular of my old posts is one I wrote almost two years ago about university exams.

I’ve edited the post a little, and if you didn’t read it yet, you might want to check it out:

A Tirade Against Exams

[…]

So why are exams a bad idea when you want to check whether a bunch of science undergrads understood what you taught them? Well, one part of the problem should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of science:exams are not very good experiments. There is no way to control for interference of irrelevant, extraneous factors. When scientists conduct a study, in any field and with any methodology, they seek to control for irrelevant interferences. For example, when psychologists test hand-eye coordination, they’ll do something like only taking right-handed people with healthy hands and eyes, in order to make sure that the results aren’t skewed by irrelevant differences between individuals.

You can’t do anything like that in exams.

Continue reading »

I’ve also changed the blogs settings so that comments are now open on old posts, too (they used to close automatically after two months). Feel free to rekindle the discussion on the Tirade, or on any other old post.

Sudbury and traditional schooling have something in common: they agree that young people leaving school should enter the world well-prepared for a successful life. For Sudbury schools too, this includes professional life – and that’s a good thing.

When talking about Sudbury schools, one point seems to get people a little worked up, at least in Europe. It’s not unusual for Sudburians to talk about students preparing themselves for a satisfying and successful life, including getting a good job. In progressive circles in Europe, a lot of people frown on this; “getting a good job” shouldn’t be so important to us, right?

I think this is all basically a misunderstanding. People don’t like to hear about school preparing children for the job market because traditional schools say they do that – but we don’t mean the same thing.

Traditional education, with its timetables, classes, hierarchy and discipline, is built upon brilliant methods for preparing young people for work in a 19th-century factory or army. Such schools and their proponents say they prepare students for work in the diverse and creative modern Western economy. But many people who come out of that system can spend 60 hours a week at a job they don’t care for, to make money for consumer products they don’t need, which they expect to enjoy in the little free time they have left – and consider themselves successful.

When Sudburians talk about being successful, we have something else in mind. We don’t mean “serve the system well”; we mean “figure out what’s important to you, and make it happen.”

Sudbury schools are about giving students the time and space to find their place in the world and to learn how to be effective in the world around them.

Without a doubt, making a decent living is part of what most young people today will want to do in order to achieve their goals and live the life they want to live. Some people might find a way through life that they’re satisfied with and in which they don’t need anything resembling a normal job. But most people leaving school this year – any school – will be working for money pretty soon.

Sudbury schools should not, and do not, especially encourage students to prepare for that path, or any other one. It’s up to each individual to decide what path to take, and because we are part of the world we live in, most of us will want to try to make money, amongst other things.

It has to be up to each individual to figure out what’s important, and to find their own way to be effective adults. To me, and to many, this means not selling yourself completely for a salary. It means finding a way of making a living that is satisfying, or at least painless, that leaves an amount of free time you’re happy with, and provides an income you’re happy with.

As a result, a lot of us will find ways to make good money doing stuff we really want to do – or at least to make it in a way that requires us to sacrifice as little as possible in terms of time and personality – while maintaining the standard of living we want. A lot of us will want to have enough free time left over for creativity, a social life, a hobby, activism, or some combination of those, unless our work gives us enough of them already.

Yes, we make these decisions within the paradigm of a deeply flawed economic system. But we’ve only got the one world as it is now, and nobody is qualified to impose their theories, expectations, or ideals on free individuals just because they’re school students. Let them prepare themselves for the world as we know it – and if they want to, for changing it.

Traditional schooling and Sudbury schooling have one central idea in common: the result of schooling should be that young people are prepared for life as adults.

The similarities, of course, more or less end there.

One difference I find very curious.

While anyone involved in education of any sort will admit that there are certain skills which every young adult should probably have – setting aside the question of who gets to identify what those are, and how, on which Sudbury schools differ radically from traditional eudcation.

It is also generally accepted that not every student will acquire all of these important skills perfectly. The curious thing is this: traditional schooling seems to be based on the belief that “at least we have to try”.¹

So on the one hand, the argument is that it’s critical that young people know things like English and math, and hence the state and its schools have to make every effort to ensure that young people learn them. On the other hand, the system and its supporters can’t escape the simple fact that they’re not going to succeed completely – but the system is still justified, because what matters is the attempt.

In some situations, that’s a fair argument. But let us be clear here: this is not some trivial pass-time being justified. It’s an enormous state mechanism that requires huge numbers of public servants, bucketloads of public money, and severe limitations on individual rights for every single human currently between the ages of (more or less) 6 and 18.

But it’s okay – at least they’re trying to help them out!

What matters is not what happens to the learner, not even what happens to society, but only that the state has “done its best” to equip the next generation with skills and knowledge. How much more could you possibly ignore young people? What are they, iPods?

Footnotes

1. This is a perspective I heard in a lively panel discussion I was part of last night; the event was basis’12, a very cool conference of school students, and the speaker in question – whom I hope I didn’t misunderstand – is a high school principal and an active functionary in state and non-government organizations representing teachers.

Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen

[…]
Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women’s Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon].” The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites.[…]

This again connects to how everything’s political. Yes, trying to change a natural language might be taking it a bit too far. But this piece points out quite a few things that can conceivably be seen as fostering inequality; it’s really interesting to see how maintaining a supposedly neutral/natural status quo becomes explicitly political in this situation.

Ultimately, for all the liberating ideals behind these attempts, as soon as they become part of an oppressive mechanism, there’s nothing liberating about them. As the piece says:

Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers.

(Full piece here. H/t to whoever shared this on Facebook!)

2. An abdication of responsibility

Grading encourages you to abdicate all responsibility for evaluating your own learning. That’s somebody else’s job. Other people know better about not only what you should be learning but how well you are learning it. This is their game, and it’s your job to play it. Why you would want to learn something, what you would apply it to, what meaning or importance it has for you, what enjoyment you get from it—these are completely irrelevant to your grade. So why even pay attention to these considerations? They are a waste of time. They’re not going to help you pass that next test.

Read the rest over at Lenz on Learning.