Listen to this song. Kelmti Horra, ‘my word is free’, sung by Emel Mathlouthi at a mass sit-in.

What you hear is the sound of hope.

“I am those who are free and never fear,”¹ she sang, as the Tunisian people rose up to topple the dictator. Yes, that revolution may have been followed by an electoral victory for Islamists, but few revolutions ever attain total liberation. No, make that none.

That is the way of the world. Some regime grows abusive; eventually the people rise up and topple it; a new regime comes instead, and before long it abuses the very people who put it in power. Perhaps it is not as cruel as that which it replaced; all the better for the new rulers, as they know the people will consider them better than their predecessors, and be hesitant to rise up again.

But the way of human freedom – of free thought – is the way of the constant revolution. The old king is dead, long live the new king – for a while, until he grows cruel and we again grow weary and it is, again, time to replace him.

No regime that is abusive towards its people can last forever. Eventually, someone will stand up and say, “I am the free people of the world. I am like a bullet.”

And then, the cycle begins again.

Know hope.

Footnotes

1. I got the English translation of the lyrics from here.

My friend works in a democratic school and is doing research on democratic education. She recently visited my school, Sudbury Jerusalem – her first real live encounter with a Sudbury school. We were at an outdoor bar on Tel-Aviv’s famous Rothschild Avenue, and it was the middle of the night. On tall wooden barstools, across a long and narrow wooden table, we sat drinking an Irish stout as she recounted her visit.

My friend loved what she saw at Sudbury Jerusalem and saw in it a place that truly lives the ideals of democratic education. But she also raised a concern: that Sudbury schools are too unusual to attract many families from disadvantaged backgrounds. All I could do is nod sadly.

Radically different

Needless to say, Sudbury schools are open to people of all backgrounds. But Sudbury schools also completely reject traditional ideas of education – curricula, evaluation, adult guidance, etc. – approaching schooling from a radically different direction. It’s difficult for most people to understand, and seems to only attract few families from low-income backgrounds.

When you first tell people about schools like ours, the reaction is often one of shock and disbelief. “So they don’t have to take any classes? How do they ever learn anything? But children need structure!”

Other democratic schools can answer, for instance, that “students have a mentor who helps them identify goals and follow through on them.” This calms a lot of people down.

Sudbury schools, on the other hand, can only answer that the children learn to be responsible for their own time and identify what they want to do and how to do it.

I, of course, consider this correct, both in principle and in practice.

Between freedom and compromise

In Sudbury schools, students are wholly responsible for their own choices, first and foremost in choosing how to spend their own time.

Other democratic schools say the same thing, to some degree or another. But they typically integrate elements of traditional education as well. Though far from the overzealous, paternalistic control exercised by adults in traditional schools, adults in these schools typically take over some of the student’s responsibility, gently guiding them in some way.

Many in the movement view it as a compromise, but it makes the school easier to accept and understand, and as a result, makes it likelier to serve disadvantaged groups. Making no such compromise, Sudbury schools are not very well-equipped to serve them.

Like my friend, I too see this as a problem. Democratic schools are a good thing, and it seems unfair that they be the privilege of those who already enjoy social privilege.

Schools as a tool of change

My friend argued that democratic schools are a vital tool for social change, and that they should compromise in favor of common norms, so as to be more attractive to disadvantaged groups. This is important because democratic schools can be a great influence for children – of all backgrounds – and help them help themselves, their families, and their communities. If we care about disadvantaged groups and consider democratic education good, we should be concerned with bringing it to them.

I see the merit of that approach, but I’m not convinced that the tiny proportion of democratic schools in society right now can have significant impact on social gaps. And even if it does, I think there are other, more effective ways to work on these gaps than starting democratic schools.

Maybe it isn’t in the details

I also think there’s a limit to how much the conceptual minutiae of a democratic school matter in this regard. People from underprivileged backgrounds actually don’t want democratic schools, and for a good reason: they need socially-approved education that can help them get ahead in society. Democratic schools are not generally recognized as a good thing and are not an obvious tool for social advancement.

Attaining prestige

Appeal to disadvantaged groups, I argued, will come with time, by democratic schools establishing themselves as a viable and successful model and becoming socially desirable. Once the general public considers a democratic education prestigious, low-income families will aspire to send their children to our schools. But the more we compromise, as a movement, the less we can establish ourselves as a distinct and superior alternative.

Like so many other innovations, the early adopters will enjoy the benefits of democratic education first, paving the way for others to follow. In a perfect world, we would be spared this injustice – but we don’t live in a perfect world.

Conclusions

My friend could see merit in my argument as well. No conclusion was reached that night.

Ultimately, I think it’s great that different groups are trying different approaches to democratic education. We all have a lot to learn from one another, and the more different things we try, the more we will know about what works.

“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.

Desmond Tutu writes a passionate call for American divestment in Israel. He gives me some food for thought on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and on my role as an Israeli in the struggle for a just peace.

Justice requires action to stop subjugation of Palestinians

Desmond Tutu, TampaBay.com

A quarter-century ago I barnstormed around the United States encouraging Americans, particularly students, to press for divestment from South Africa. Today, regrettably, the time has come for similar action to force an end to Israel’s long-standing occupation of Palestinian territory and refusal to extend equal rights to Palestinian citizens who suffer from some 35 discriminatory laws.

I have reached this conclusion slowly and painfully. I am aware that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government. And I am enormously concerned that raising this issue will cause heartache to some in the Jewish community with whom I have worked closely and successfully for decades. But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices of those courageous Jews troubled by Israel’s discriminatory course.

 Continue reading on the Tampa Bay Times »

I’m not entirely sure what I think about the Palestinian BDS campaign.

On one level, I support it because it is a form of non-violent resistance (the Israeli claims that this is “financial terrorism” are absurd and preposterous – what do they not call “terrorism” at this point?)

At the same time, it hurts all Israelis to one degree or another, and that makes it hard for me to really feel enthusiastic about it.

As an Israeli, I need to worry about the internal processes, within Israeli society, that can lead to an equal and just resolution to the conflict.

If the rest of the world wants to pressure Israelis into changing course, that’s their own business, and nobody can tell them what to buy from whom. BDS is a fair and reasonable way to go about it, and as long as it’s clearly a boycott of the Israeli state and not “the Jews” I’m glad it’s now such a central part of the Palestinian struggle.

I find Tutu’s piece an excellent contribution to the debate. It is personal, passionate, and compassionate. You don’t have to agree with his position in order to appreciate his ability to communicate in that way.

He quotes the great Martin Luther King Jr.:

I recall well the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which he confesses to his “Christian and Jewish brothers” that he has been “gravely disappointed with the white moderate … who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom. …”

This strengthens my feeling on the place of Israelis in the struggle for peace. Some of us struggle because we want to see a different future for Israelis. Some because we want to see a different future for Palestinians. Often it is a combination of both.

Either way, it is legitimate for us to support Palestinian-initiated action we agree with. But it is not our place to tell Palestinians how to free themselves.

We can support them directly; we can support them indirectly by taking action within Israeli society independent of the Palestinians; if we disagree with their course of action, we can and should work against it. That much is ours to choose.

But we are not here to guide them to enlightenment. That mistake is made far too often by progressives, and a habit we have to kick.

Family puts kids in charge for a month

A German author and his wife put themselves to the biggest test of their lives last year by handing over the family power to their two children for a month. The biggest challenge? Managing the budget.

[…]

“For one month we parents unquestioningly took orders from our children. We gave them absolute control of the family budget.”

The result was a long humiliation – asking for pocket money, begging to stay up longer in the evenings, and accepting a “No” without question.

“Even if they grow up with loving, generous parents, children have to do whatever they’re told, day in, day out,” wrote Metzger, explaining the experiment.

“Of course, we’re the big ones, they’re the little ones. It’s our job to protect and feed them, and to show them how things work. But very often we do all that with words and with an attitude that contradicts all the rules of respectful co-habiting.”

Metzger claims the psychological experiment did not come out of any radical pedagogical beliefs – “Me and Helga are not hippies” – but out of a spontaneous decision to allow his son Jonny to train him in table-tennis.

“Afterwards, he gave me a big hug and told me, ‘Dad, no adult has ever talked to me as politely as you did then. That felt really good.’ ”

[…]

(Read the full piece on The Local)

I’m glad to see adults outside alternative education taking note of how condescending and authoritarian adults’ treatment of children is. It does, however, chalk up the children’s inferior planning skills to their age, which isn’t really fair (besides being ageism.)

I bet these kids would be much better at planning if they were allowed to plan more. Since their parents “aren’t hippies” – which apparently means they go to traditional schools – they’ve spent the better part of the day every day for years in an environment in which a clock tells them what to do when. How on earth are they supposed to learn how to plan anything?

Not to mention budget management. In a Sudbury school, the Metzger children would have had the right to participate in school budget decisions – which are boring, so they probably wouldn’t, but if they did they’d know more about budgets – and they would be able to consult with friends amongst the students and staff who have more experience with money.

I guess the thing that disturbs me most about this is that even when a couple is willing to give their children serious responsibility, they do it in this temporary, schizophrenic way. Children actually can deal with real responsibility and control over their life, but that doesn’t mean the children should swap roles with the parents. There’s quite a lot of room for treating each other equally and respectfully within a parent-children relationship, without either side going all authoritarian on the other.

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.

• “The Many Benefits, for Kids, of Playing Video Games”
• “Video Game Addiction: Does It Occur? If So, Why?“

One more link: While we’re on the topic of Peter Gray, here’s an interview he gave, very much worth watching:

Blog status comment: Over the past 10 days, I’ve had 4 exams (which, remember, I really don’t like having). Real posting will resume soon; comments are sporadically open, depending on how thick the spam is coming in – but I hope to fix that issue soon, too.

May each of the 37 “parliamentarians” who voted for this thing die slowly, and alone. Preferably of thirst, in the desert.¹

Footnotes

1. Note: I am strongly opposed to any action intended to cause any person to die in such a manner, and this is not to be interpreted as incitement to murder. It is merely that I would find it a fitting fate if they were to suffer that way, especially if they had nobody to blame for it but themselves.