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 way of being with children which leads to such a result is not easy. Jesper Juul, a Danish family therapist, very well known in Denmark and in Germany, said, “It demands much more than we speak democratically with them. It means that we must develop a kind of dialogue that many adults are unable to establish, even with other adults. That is to say, a personal dialogue based on equal dignity.” I have an example of this; when my own children had left nursery school, and I had forgotten the importance of the dignity of a three-year-old, I had a conversation with the teacher at Dartington Hall nursery school, who told me that during the day she’d noticed a three-year-old boy sitting at a table by himself, looking very unhappy. And she said, “I went over and tried to strike up a conversation with him.” Now, she didn’t go to give him something to do; she didn’t go to point out how all the other children were doing things that were great fun; she didn’t go to show him anything; she didn’t even go to strike up a conversation; she went over to try to strike up a conversation. That’s what I call a personal dialogue, based on equal dignity.

And the fourth reason for disliking this idea of preparing children to fit into society, is that it actually inhibits learning; it prevents children from learning as much as they would do otherwise. I don’t know if you know about Williams and Pierce - they ran the Peckham Health Centre in the 1930s, which was a centre where you went to keep well, not when you were ill. And whole families joined and were given advice how to keep healthy, and there was a gymnasium, and a dancehall, and a swimming pool, and all sorts of nice things there. But after 18 months there, they wrote this: “Our failures during our first 18 months work have taught us something very significant: individuals from infants to old people resent or fail to show any interest in anything initially presented to them through discipline, regulation, or instruction, which is another aspect of authority.” I think this is absolutely extraordinarily important, and very, very seldom recognised. When I can look back on my time at school, and I can remember times when I was actually unable to learn. I didn’t mean to refuse to learn things, but it was literally impossible for me to learn them. Even if I was threatened with a beating, I simply couldn’t learn them, and this was entirely because I was told I had to.

Compulsion inhibits learning, so what are we to do? How are we to help children to learn anything? The old method was often for the adults to ask children questions. So, what did we do in geography last week? Or who can give me an example of iambic pentameter? We asked questions instead of waiting to be asked. And nowadays teachers also use questions as a means of leading children along pre-programmed paths, as a method of instruction, asking questions which they, the teachers, already know the answers to. There’s a nice story about someone who was taking a class in Biology, and trying to elicit answers as to the difference between a living thing and a non-living thing, and so we got, they reproduce, yes; they use energy, yes; they grow, yes usually; they need nourishment, yes; they die, no. Dying wasn’t on the list. And throughout this conversation, the teacher, in spite of asking questions, retained authority to decide which answers were correct, and the students had no opportunity of asking any questions of their own.

But, even in the old progressive schools, like Summerhill and Dartington, or like Sands School now, people have not really been interested in techniques of teaching. Curry, who was the principal head during the most important period of the history of Dartington, said, “As to what has actually been taught, and how it has been taught, I don’t think we can claim to have departed in important or significant ways, than what is done elsewhere.”
I’ve recently been learning lots of things about what can be done elsewhere. For instance there’s a German educator, Falko Peschel, who became a teacher when he was approaching 30 years old, because he had a vision of primary classes where all the children were working enthusiastically, on their own, independently, really enjoying themselves. He went round visiting schools all over the place, to try and find this atmosphere, and he found that children seldom preferred school to other activities. In fact in Montessori and Petersen schools, he found, and this is a quotation: “The pupils were supposed to work independently, but had no plan for themselves; performed tasks unwillingly and wrong; got bored, pulled themselves together again, and tried, somehow or other to create a curriculum for the day that would be moderately satisfying. Everybody seemed to be fighting for himself, and lots of them didn’t know why they were in school, anyway, and just got through the day, somehow.”