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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It is important to allow disagreement in school, and an instance of that came up in an interview Mary John of Exeter University had with a girl called Bonnie Hill from Sands school, the school I helped to start. Bonnie said, “Most of the time the atmosphere in the school is good, but sometimes it’s horrible and stressful. I think this is okay, because in school meetings and at other times, we can look at what is causing this stress, and what we can do to make the situation less stressful. It helps us to learn to deal with situations which are stressful. Some students think the school is ideal, but I don’t, and I don’t think it should, or can be.” The discovery that you can improve the situation in your own school hopefully leads you to think, when you leave school, that you can improve the situation in society as a whole, which we all agree, I hope, is less than ideal.

The third reason for not wanting to prepare children to fit into society is such an objective denies the vital duty of caring for children as they are. The implications of traditional education are that adults know what children ought to know, and if they don’t know it, they must learn it, and adults know what sort of person you ought to be, and if you don’t fit in with the model, you must change. But the denial of the child’s own values and personalities is destructive. There’s a Swiss educator, Jürg Jegge, who worked with children who no other school would accept, even special schools. They were divided into little tiny groups of six; they were called the Kleingruppen, near Zurich. A group of six, with one teacher, in a building somewhere, miles away from any school. These children, who had severe problems, would stay in Jegge’s group for some years, and he said that he thought that all their problems had stemmed from the fact that they were told they had them. His first book about it was called Dummheit ist lernbar – “Stupidity is learnable.” If you’re told you’re stupid, there’s no point in trying, and Jegge emphasises the fact that if you’re told you’re stupid, you’re probably told you’re stupid ten times a day - in a secondary school, by ten different people. You’re told you’re stupid, you’re useless, you’re no good. If you’re told you’re a liar, there’s no point in telling the truth; if you’re told you’re a thief, you might as well pick up anything you can find. And these children he found, hated this, and were ashamed and frightened of these things they did; they wished they weren’t like that, and he helped them to forget these labels, and to recover from them. But all too often, even children doing well accept what adults tell them, without question. Gemma Simm, who was a girl at school when she was 17 at the International Democratic Education conference in Australia in 2006, talking about herself and her companions in conventional education said, “We all have the mindset that we are dependent on people who are above us” – which is hardly a good grounding for living in a democratic society.

Lots of people think that if you allow children to develop in their own way, they’re going to become self-centred and blind to the welfare of others, but this is actually exactly the opposite of what happens. If children are forced to do certain things, obey rules, forced to conform, then they are relieved of the duty of thinking about other people. But if they are to develop themselves they need other people; you can’t develop yourself on your own, you need to relate to other people. And so it is a fact that forcing conformity is a bad way of helping people to relate to the world, and to be concerned about it. Hanrahan Highland is an ex-pupil of Dartington Hall School, and he described his own experience of this kind of thing. He said that what mattered most to him at school was, “from the very start, being given responsibility for yourself, to learn what you can do, and what you shouldn’t do; what you can be and what you want to be, and to be told that you’re just as important as anyone else, which is exactly the same as saying that everyone is else, is just as important as you.”