Democratic Education : Who Asks the Questions?

Talk given Bedales School in September 2008 and at a Futurelab conference at the University of Warwick in 2008.
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Nowadays, what’s known as education very often consists of asking children questions, which is extremely odd, because we presumably know more answers than they do, and instead of them asking us, we do tend to ask them. Or perhaps we tell them something, and then ask them questions to find out whether they’ve remembered it, and whether they’ve learnt what we were telling them, and what we tell them is, in most people’s minds, supposed to equip them to fit into modern society.

Over the last 50 years, I have come to regard this approach as extremely foolish. Most people, most schools, which start with interesting and experimental ideas, gradually move back towards the conventional, and I have moved in the opposite direction. I started teaching at Repton boys public school - only boys in those days - and I came to disapprove of it, and I was lucky enough to get a job at Dartington Hall School, which was one of the great progressive schools of the time, and when Dartington Hall School closed, then a group of children and two staff and I started another small school, in the same area, which took the same principles considerably further than Dartington did; the principles of self government, broadly speaking.

The school meeting of staff and pupils at Sands decides absolutely everything. It delegates some things; it delegates finance, for instance, but otherwise everything is decided, including appointments of staff, discipline troubles, the curriculum, the timetable - everything is approved or discussed by the school meeting, and if any of the committees in the school make a decision that the community as a whole disapproves of, then it can be changed.
Then when I retired from Sands, I visited similar schools all round the world; when I say similar schools I mean schools with the same sort of freedoms, and the same sort of shared responsibility. And I’ve been twice around the world, visiting schools in all sorts of different countries, which have the same sorts of principles. I have come to believe from this, that the most important aspect of any school is the relationship between the teachers and the taught, or between the older people and the younger people, which should, as far as possible be one of equality, mutual respect, and shared authority. It used to be called progressive education, but now it’s generally known as democratic education, and it comes, not merely in small, independent schools, like Summerhill or Sands, it also happens in state schools; it happened at Countesthorpe, which Michael Fielding has mentioned earlier today. It’s happening now in Room 13 in a primary school in Scotland.

And then, when one looks around the world, it’s happening in Moo Baan Dek, which is a children’s village in Thailand for abused, abandoned, and orphaned children - and abused children in Thailand have been very badly abused indeed. It is run on similar principles; it considers itself to be a mixture of Buddhism and Summerhill. And in Delhi I visited an organisation called Butterflies, which works with street children, and I’ll talk more about that later on. And everywhere, in all these places, I’ve found young people who were self confident, responsible, and happy.

Mutual respect, shared authority and equality characterise all these places, and until recently I have had no sort of theoretical justification for approving of this, I’ve just seen all these places, and worked in some of them, and found things that I thoroughly approved of, but I haven not been able give a philosophical justification for it.