Democracy can be excruciating. It takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of discussion. A lot of repetitive discussion, as you have to convince a majority of your point of view. But democracy can deliver.

A strong reminder came at EUDEC’s Assembly meetings, three weeks ago, right before and during the IDEC@EUDEC conference. The difficult, divisive issue was, as always, membership: who’s in, and who’s out. This particular story starts a year earlier, at the previous meeting of Assembly, in Roskilde, Denmark.

In Roskilde, Assembly decided, based on my proposal, that in order for a school to become a full member of EUDEC, it would have to declare that it is a democratic school (under EUDEC’s definition) and intends to stay one. This decision was made at the very end of the very last plenary, when everyone was exhausted and very few people were really paying attention. Many people were confused and angry about the decision afterwards. But the decision also established a committee to discuss membership issues and work towards a comprehensive solution.

The committee was less active than I had hoped, but eventually the discussions started there brought me to make a new proposal. For this year, I proposed to get rid of the Roskilde restriction, and even open up school membership more, while adding tools for (self-)evaluation and transparency regarding how each member school works.

I thought the proposal would be an easy sell – boy, was I wrong! Membership discussions bring out a lot of emotions, and they very quickly come down to discussions about the core vision of the organization; as a democratic organization, EUDEC’s nature and course of action depend quite directly on the makeup of its membership.

By the second day of discussions, there appeared to be two separate camps, for and against our proposal. Each side talked amongst itself more than with the other side. When the sides met, the debate was heated and people came away feeling sick. At some point there was an (Extended) Council meeting in which we talked about it, and some of us were in tears, others close to it. A few of us who had been involved since founding EUDEC – myself included – had a sense of doom; it seemed our organization was about to splinter, sputter and die. The difficulties seemed truly insurmountable.

But then, maybe an hour or two after that meeting, everything changed. Some of us had talked with “the other side” in the café and came out feeling our differences were minor, both in principal and in practice. It was as if we were standing on a cliff, about to fall, only to be suddenly yanked back onto solid ground. That feeling opened us up – all of us, on both sides, I think – to what other people were saying. And then my friend Or Levi came by and took advantage of my openness to tell me that we’re all being idiots (loudly, but in Hebrew). As has become typical in our friendship, he came at me with criticism that at first seemed ignorant, insensitive, and arrogant, but quickly turned out to be useful in that it questioned things I took for granted.

New ideas came up that evening, ideas that it was too late at that point to introduce into the debate. But that evening calmed everyone down and left us with the knowledge that we’re in this together and everyone is determined to resolve the differences and find the right way to go. It also taught us (or me, at least) that given enough time, new solutions may come up that weren’t even on anybody’s mind. Many were now content with finding a compromise we can live with for a while and continuing to look for the best solution.

The truly amazing thing happened during the next session of Assembly. By the time we got to finally voting on the membership proposals, there were some six or seven different proposals on the table, some divided into 3, 4, 5 sub-proposals. We voted, and voted, and voted, and voted, well into lunch-time. Due to the system we use, members of the Assembly were instructed to vote on each sub-proposal independently of all others; that is, the question was only if that part is something you’re in favor of, regardless of whether or not other parts you want together with it should pass.

As the voting went on, an odd pattern emerged – Assembly passed no more than one sub-proposal of any proposal. We ended up with six different bits and pieces, not all of which were intended to work together, few of which were intended to work alone. Council took the day to check if there was any contradiction between them, but when we left the meeting, everyone – both sides – seemed okay. Nobody left in anger or tears. Nobody said they’d leave the organization (as some had threatened to do). And when Council went over the decisions, it found no contradiction whatsoever. The full package of decisions had to be ratified in the next plenary, and it was carried unanimously.

Give democracy time and attention, and it will deliver.

Photo by Monika Wernz.

One more thing: Or is working on spiffing up EUDEC’s semi-official YouTube channel, EUDECmovies. Subscribe now, there’s going to be a lot of material from the conference over there pretty soon!

Many people my age are uninterested in politics. They don’t vote, they don’t take part in social and political movements, they just don’t care. I wouldn’t call it selfishness; sometimes it’s jadedness. And the reasons are probably not simple. But I think one reason is the way we relate to authority.

Like any social structure in which a small group holds all authority, traditional state schools create a dynamic by which students learn to see authority figures as distant, unreasonable, and often malignant. As a result, students disengage. The individuals involved are not to blame, it’s the system that is broken. But that broken system teaches the students the wrong lessons, and twists the way they see authority. I think this might have far-reaching consequences for society and for democracy.

The vicious cycle of secrecy and injustice

In traditional state schools — even the really nice ones I attended before Sudbury Jerusalem — adults and students are groups that play two very different roles. I’d like to sketch how this seems to work.

The adults are usually there to practice the profession they chose, and they can arbitrarily tell any student to do almost anything any time — answer a question (whether or not you find it interesting), clean up a mess (whether or not you made it), etc. Students are usually there because they are forced to or expected to, and most students can’t tell anyone at all what to do, with the notable exception of bullies.

The students are wary of the adults, who will often punish them, which, if nothing else, is almost always humiliating; what’s worse, punishment is unpredictable and often unfair — usually no system is in place for the due process of justice, and the norm is that teachers make executive decisions quickly and decisively. The good news for the students is that they will never get in trouble for something the adults don’t know about. As a result, students learn to keep their distance, and act with secrecy. It’s just the best strategy against sanctions and humiliation.

Teachers are usually wonderful people with nothing but the best intentions. But faced with a mass of children who are constantly sneaking around, they don’t always show their wonderful, good-intentioned side. They are always on the lookout for bad behavior, which is usually a more transparent concept to them than to their students (in the very nice elementary school I attended, I don’t recall ever having a clear set of rules laid out before me).

So the teachers have to be on the lookout, because the students are accustomed to secrecy. New students quickly learn to be secretive, because the teachers are clearly on the lookout. It’s a vicious cycle. Nobody’s really to blame. Injustice abounds.

Relating to authority

In the traditional school system, children rarely have the opportunity to relate to an adult as a real human being with emotions, preferences, aspirations, mistakes and subsequent humility. They learn to see authority figures as distant, isolated, and somewhat malignant forces in their lives. They learn to distrust and disengage.

Good authority, bad authority

There’s nothing wrong with authority when it’s mandated and part of a social order in which responsibility and authority are bestowed by the community. It is arbitrarily imposed authority that is problematic; the situation I described above plays out similarly in totalitarian states, albeit with more violence.

But modern democratic states are something of a mix, and can be seen either way: authority stems from the will of the people; but with a community so large, that authority is often indeed arbitrary, and even more often feels arbitary. Behavior one generation has accepted as normal may still be criminal or stigmatized due to previous generations’ norms — to take a current example, homosexual activity was still criminal in some US states as recently as 2003, and to this day the US military still will not allow gays to serve openly.

Young people today…

It seems to me that our childhood encounters with authority shape how we understand it and relate to it as adults. Children who mainly experience it as arbitrary, forceful and unpleasant may well continue to perceive all authority this way. Even in entirely democratic schools, you see this attitude with teenagers who arrive after a few years in a traditional school. The strategy of distrust and disengagement, a habit of both thought and behavior, seems very hard to drop.

We in the developed world live in modern democracies. Half of democracy is accepting that it takes time and discussion to make things happen. But change does happen, at least when a mass of individuals dares to try. I think people who have had the opportunity to experience fair and mandated authority can more easily relate to the structures of authority in adult life. And people who can do that are more likely to try.

The point

This brings me back to the point from Sunday’s post: democratic education is a sensible choice for democratic states. We don’t need schools that just tell students about democracy while allowing them to experience the opposite. We need schools where students have a real say and learn that as democratic citizens, they are empowered to make a difference. We need citizens who know their voice matters, even when those in power seem deaf.