Education

Some thoughts about "democratic schools"

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(-> German translation/Deutsche Übersetzung)

I

The term “democratic school” has always seemed problematic to me. It’s problematic because democracy isn’t really the point. Democracy is a tool for creating something else: a community where free learning is possible, as much as such a community is possible. All democratic schools should be run by a democracy, but not every school that is run democratically is automatically a democratic school.

A democratic school is a place where students are responsible for how they use their own time. It is a school which does not try to encourage students, explicitly or implicitly, to take classes and tests. It is a place where people are treated with respect, and know they can expect justice to be served when someone disrespects the community or an individual.

II

It just so happens that certain styles of democracy serve as excellent tools for upholding freedom and respect. However, it’s very easy to get it wrong, which is why Sudbury schools are very insistent on getting it right. These schools set up very well-defined democracies, because democracy is only good so long as it does not overreach — it has to be there to protect students’ freedom in the present, without presuming to know what choices are better for their future, or infringing on the privacy of their feelings.

III

Incidentally, the word “republic” comes from the Latin res publica, meaning “public matter”. This hints at a very important idea: the polity (the state, the city, the school) is a public institution, and is something you keep separate from private things.

Sudbury schools use a Judicial Committee which focusses on whether school laws were broken (not on why, or what the individual is going through personally). Some in the free school movement express uneasiness about this seemingly severe approach to justice. However, anyone who has spent some time in such a school knows it is a good thing. Judicial Committee deals with the public aspect of disputes — disrespect of community decisions in such a way that bothered someone enough that they fill out a complaint. This process ignores the personal aspects completely and intentionally.

However, it leaves plenty of room for individuals to address these aspects on a truly personal level. And these are things that come across better when they’re truly and sincerely personal (like talking about problems at home, or about issues one is having with the school or with people there). The judicial process may not directly address the problems that lead people to break community decisions, but it does help others see the problem, which allows them to deal with it. And on the upside, it respects people’s privacy — sometimes you don’t feel like telling just anyone about how you feel.

IV

There are other benefits to separation of the public and the personal. When the community has accustomed itself to this habit, democratic meetings work better — being warned by the Chair is a technical issue, not a personal thing you have to get annoyed about; you can argue strongly against a friend’s motion without them taking it as an insult; every member of the community can apply their thinking to the process as much as they’d like without constantly worrying about the conclusions being taken the wrong way.

V

When a democracy protects the community’s interests and the individuals’ interests while keeping them separate, that democracy can create a democratic school. It can create a place where students develop freely and learn to direct their own learning and gauge their own success. It empowers students to determine their own direction and participate vigorously in community life.

None of these things are automatic, and protecting them is half the secret of success for those democratic schools that have succeeded.


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EUDEC General Meeting 2010 Report

Aside

In case you were wondering what I’m so busy with that I can’t write a proper post anymore, part of your answer lies in the EUDEC 2010 AGM Report. Take a look — it’s short and readable, and full of pictures and links! It was really a great meeting, and as always after these meetings, there’s a lot to do now, and it’s a lot of fun.

Still, I’m going to try to post here more in the near future. There are a couple of things I want to post very soon. If I find the time between all that EUDEC stuff and moving.

Israel, Links

Doing It Wrong: "Only Israel"

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A friend posted this video to Facebook:       YouTube Link

(WARNING: Viewers who don’t strongly identify with the Israeli state may experience nausea!)

The music is quite good, but the words are more problematic. I couldn’t find the lyrics in English, but they can be found in German.

Back on Facebook, I commented on the video, and for a reason I don’t know yet and might never understand, my comment was deleted. Luckily, I saved a copy of it, so I decided to repost it here where people can respond to it freely: Continue reading Doing It Wrong: "Only Israel" →

Education, Science

A Tirade Against Exams

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I don't like exams

Summer break has just begun. I managed to get away without any exams this semester, for the first time. In the past weeks, like every end of semester, I find myself thinking what an awful, ridiculous system these exams really are, especially in university. I’d like to try and articulate why.

I can imagine a university where exams are hardly even relevant because people only study things they find interesting, and only so long as they are interested. Such places exist (take Tokyo Shure for example).

However, most officially-recognized undegrad programs are still based on instructors providing students with pre-packaged chunks of information, and then judging whether each student has properly digested the information. This post will be about exams in that context; my point of reference will the linguistics BA program at the University of Leipzig. As far as I know, it’s as good an example as any of a normal undergrad program in science.

Exams are bad experiments

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. Continue reading A Tirade Against Exams →

Education

An Ode to Open Schedule

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I’ve been wanting to post but been a bit busy. I’m at a meeting/workshop of Sudbury schools in Berlin (at the TING School) and something has come up here that is probably worth writing and thinking about a little: meetings, conferences, and workshops need a schedule — but not necessarily too much of a schedule.

At this workshop as well as some others I’ve been to, the organizers decided not to make any kind of schedule in advance. Within democratic education this isn’t necessarily a problem — we’re used to making decisions in a group and discussing things to death, and democratic education is strongly connected with the notion of being free to decide, for yourself or within your group, what you do. But it’s not necessarily productive to spend the first two or three hours of an all-too-short weekend on planning how to use the rest of the time. After all, the weekend doesn’t have to have the perfect schedule. It doesn’t have to have sessions on every single topic on the participants’ minds. It just has to have a good schedule that covers a few key subjects; after the first session, people will know one another and be talking and talking and talking.

Which brings me to the bit about not having too much of a schedule. I’ve noticed in conference and workshop after conference and workshop that after a few sessions (workshops, lectures, or whatever), great discussions develop that are actually hindered by the restrictions of the schedule. Of course, nobody was really forced to attend sessions in any of the conferences I’ve been to, but the existence of sessions on other interesting topics means people end up going to sessions about something else instead of continuing their conversation.

Scheduling democratically at the beginning of the meeting doesn’t solve this problem. It just means the sessions that are encroaching on spontaneous discussion have been planned collectively, rather than centrally. The only solution I’m aware of is Open Schedule. I first experienced Open Schedule at IDEC 2005 (also in Berlin), which was an amazing event. During the organization of EUDEC 2008, we decided to replicate the system, and it worked well. It’s a very simple idea. You start with an empty schedule spread across a large wall, divided only into time-slots, and optionally for the available rooms. Then participants can just come up to the schedule and pin up sessions they would like to have. They pin up the sessions in time-slots when they have no other plans, meaning nobody has to worry about coordinating the schedule to avoid conflicts — it just happens on its own. Open Schedule also means when a discussion begins during one session and some of its participants want to continue it, they are free to set up an extra session for it.

Of course, Open Schedule is not necessarily the best model for all events. But for conferences with a range of topics, it’s an excellent way to balance between individual mobility, variety of topics, and limitations of time. It’s a system that lets the participants self-organize in a really good way. Not a perfect way — good is better than perfect.

Education, Links

[Video] Democratic Schools: Where are they Heading?

Video 7 Comments

I participated in a panel at IDEC 2010 titled “Democratic Schools: Where are they Heading?”, moderated by Yaacov Hecht. AERO filmed the discussion and posted it (and other workshops) on the AERO blog.

Below (after the jump) is the part with my thoughts about the future of democratic education. I talked about EUDEC, the power of networks, collective outreach, and suggested we should be emphasizing that democratic education is a human rights issue. Let me know what you think. Continue reading [Video] Democratic Schools: Where are they Heading? →

Education

No Curriculum, Ever

19 Comments

(-> German translation/Deutsche Übersetzung)

I’d like to share some thoughts about why democratic schools should not have even a little bit of curriculum or mandatory guidance. Imposing even a single mandatory class, even just a mentorship or a morning meeting, is disrespectful towards students, and signals that the school does not take self-directed learning seriously. Sometimes, motivated by fear, parents attack this notion, demanding more guidance and railroading to make sure their children get where they want them to go. Every school responds in a different way. Only a clear “no” — the typical Sudbury response — makes sense, especially considering what democratic schools are for.

People, especially parents, always ask why the school can’t guide its students a little more actively. It is not that the guidance itself is a bad idea — in fact, I would say it’s vital that guidance be available in the school to those who feel they need it. But forcing guidance on students, even “just a little”, even just implicitly, by making some form of educational activity mandatory, is a signal of distrust. It’s saying, “we trust you to decide what to do with your time, so long as we have some influence on it”, or in other words, “we trust you entirely, except that we actually don’t”. It’s not only a mixed signal, it’s implicitly disrespectful, patronizing and demeaning — even if the guidance itself is presented by people who are respectful towards the students, and even if it’s done in a respectful way. Continue reading No Curriculum, Ever →

Education, Government, Israel

Contra Hecht: A Likelier Success Story for Israeli Democratic Education

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I spent most of the day at the IDEC conference in Tel Aviv, and will be going back tomorrow. The first day has already brought up a whole lot of really interesting issues, but I want to address just a small one right now. I want to respond to a claim made by Yaacov Hecht of the Israeli Institute for Democratic Education: that the big secret to Israel’s success in democratic education is the mandatory military service. Continue reading Contra Hecht: A Likelier Success Story for Israeli Democratic Education →

Education, Language, Science

Conversation and happiness

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Language Log recently had an interesting post about a study that found that happy people tend to have more substantive conversations. I was reminded of the kind of conversations we had in Sudbury Jerusalem. I’ve written about it before (for example, in The Secret Weapon) and I thought I’d bring up the connection here. As the Language Log post explains, the study doesn’t say whether it’s substantive conversation that increases happiness, or being a happy person that increases substantive conversation.

But it’s interesting to think about how this relates to democratic schools. My experience is that a democratic school is a good place for substantive conversation. In Sudbury Jerusalem, I was a student who rarely had any classes and spent much of my time socializing, talking. It was a place where the general atmosphere is happy rather than depressed. I noticed that in school, we talked a lot, and had a lot of really good conversation, and I never considered whether it’s just because people are often in a good mood (I, by the way, often was not in a good mood, despite a lot of conversation — maybe that’s why). I also never considered that this might be why people are often in a good mood.

I don’t know, but I had other things in mind. The school democracy itself, it seems to me, encourages a culture of talking things through. It’s what we would try to do in School Meeting and in committees, and it’s often what we would do to solve conflicts before resorting to a Judicial Committee complaint form. And the other side of things, the personal freedom, simply gives people more time to talk. There’s always conversation going on all over the place, and it makes sense that when you get to talk with people a lot, you eventually get to deeper, “substantive” conversations.

But maybe the large amount of conversation in democratic schools is caused by something else. Maybe it’s the nature of the school as a community in which people operate freely in the same spaces, together; the school is a very social environment. This is also something that probably contributes to the general happiness of the population. Actually, considering that more social environment are probably causes for both happiness and for conversation, maybe this is the causal link behind the study’s findings. People with more social contact are happier and have more substantive conversation (as compared to people with less social contact.) It definitely makes sense to me.

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