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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Which is just the sort of atmosphere that traditional educators expect to result from any departure from tradition. Peschel said, “I found my school visits rather boring, and I think that, basically, I couldn’t have been all that far from what the children were feeling, too.” But then, eventually, he found one classroom which was exactly what he was hoping for, and this is his description of it. “The children were great; they were working completely independently, writing their own stories; doing tricky mathematical exercises; collecting the information they needed for their research projects from reference books; thinking out exercises for other children whose stories they dramatised skilfully as they were read out, artistically illustrating poems. On top of this, the level of achievement in this second year class, [which is seven- to eight-year-olds in Germany], was far above that of other classes. It was as if the lid had been taken off, and the children were reaching for the stars.”

And this is what he said about the teacher’s approach. “The teacher behaved absolutely naturally; she didn’t provide any extra motivation with materials, or smiley stickers. She gave the children her opinion openly; put them off when she had no time, and gave praise when she found things great. In this classroom, there were no games, no teaching materials. You worked with blank paper which forced you to produce things for yourself. The class sets of maths and reading books were somehow more or less lost on the bookshelves. The children know that they are taken seriously, and behave correspondingly independently and openly; they want to learn.”

I haven’t, so far, seen one of Peschel’s classes, though I intend to go when I can, but I have seen a class where the lid had been taken off in that way, which was at Tamariki, a school in New Zealand, which is almost a state school - it isn’t quite, it’s supported by the state and the parents pay a small supplement. When I was there, there was a group of 11- and 12-year-old girls who had taken a fancy to the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. They had brought in a video to school, and they had watched it, over and over again, lots of them. And then they decided eventually that they were going to make a film of it themselves, and because I was there and I can play the piano after a fashion, they decided that they would do what they called the ballroom scene. They dressed themselves up in an astonishingly convincing sort of way, out of the stuff that you normally find in an old dressing-up box somewhere. And they rehearsed their dance for three quarters of an hour, and by the end of am hour, they had filmed it with a video camera that they were allowed to use in the school, and produced something which was fascinating to watch. Now, this was done without any adult interference at all. I was very much employed as the musician, I wasn’t making any suggestions or offering any advice. There was no adult guidance of any sort, and it also stemmed from something that wouldn’t be allowed in most schools, which was that children had, for a long, long time watched a video that one of the children had brought in. Now, if a teacher produces a video of Pride and Prejudice and everybody listens to it and watches it, and gets a bit bored, that’s one thing; if a child brings it in, and plays it not once, but over and over again, and it’s hours long, then this is normally considered a bad thing. If a teacher tells you to do something, it’s work, but if you decide to do something for yourself, it’s play. But these children knew more about Pride and Prejudice than I did, and it was wonderful.