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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The other day, I read a book called, Beyond Learning, Democratic Education for a Human Future, by Gert Biesta, who is a professor of educational philosophy, and I learnt a new angle. I’d just been saying it works, and it seems to work here, and it works there, but that’s not much of an argument against the huge mass of conventional, traditional education. But Biesta goes into the attack on conventional education, and I find my position greatly strengthened, because he argues very strongly that the most important aim of education is not to impart knowledge and skills in order to prepare young people to fit into modern society. He says that what educators must do is to cooperate in the individual development of each child, helping them to come into the world as unique, singular beings.

From Biesta’s book, and from my own experience, I now have four arguments against the idea that the purpose of education is to prepare people to fit into society. The first is that this idea implies that modern society is the best possible, because if it isn’t the best possible, why are we preparing people to fit into it? And traditional educators don’t generally accept this criticism, because they believe they obviously have the best system possible. When I was teaching at Repton, a public school for boys, I had an argument with a member of staff about how children learnt the difference between good and evil. In the end he said desperately, “Well, if we don’t tell them, how on earth are they going to know?” But how on earth did he know? Well, he knew because he’d been told, presumably, by his teachers, and they’d been told by their teachers. It’s a sort of extraordinary fundamentalism, which I don’t think will do.

The second reason is, if we prepare children to fit into the existing order, we prevent change or we hinder change. We all know that the existing order isn’t perfect, either in school or out of it, but even educators tend to - I don’t know if I should limit this to educators - people do resist change. There’s a town in Norway called Porsgrumm , where a few years ago all three industries on which the town depended collapsed, and there was a great deal of unemployment and very poor morale, and everybody wanted to get away from it. But the mayor of the town decided the thing to do was to invite schoolchildren into their council, and to all the council committees. The children had quite different ideas from the adults, and before long, the whole atmosphere was changed. But there was one committee that for a long, long time refused to have any children on it, which was of course, the education committee.

The tendency to stick to tradition happens also in the most experimental schools of all, for instance Summerhill has a notice up in its main room, which says “Unchanged for 80 years.”

You can’t have progress without change, so disagreement should be welcomed. If someone disagrees with you, it gives you an opportunity for changing your own view and improving it. So if you are with people who come from a different culture, or have limited faculties, or, as they usually are in schools, are younger and less experienced than you, that is no reason to look down on them, or to treat them, in Biesta’s phrase, as strangers. I made a collection of reminiscences and comments from ex-pupils of Dartington Hall School, which was published in a book called That’s All Folks, which was privately published when the school closed, and one child gave an excellent illustration of what it’s like to be annihilated as a stranger. Vanessa Pawsey, her name was. She wrote, “I sharply recall sitting alone in this little common room in full view, and one of the real girls came in and said, ‘Oh, there’s no-one here.’” “At Dartington,” she went on to say, “I found myself taken on trust as a person, instead of a few bits of me, left after censorship.”