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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Another place where children have done fantastic things is Room 13, which I’ve also been to. The original Room 13 is in Scotland, at Caol primary school. You may have seen they made their own half-hour television programme, which was shown on Channel Four. It is an art studio that is run entirely by the children. And when I say run by the children, they raise money to pay the artist in residence, they have their own bank account, they make their own decisions about how the place is to be run, they answer the emails, they keep the accounts, and they do the most fantastic art work. Their art work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, among many other places, and it’s very, very impressive indeed. The children are dignified and sensible, and when I was there they had just succeeded in getting a donation of £200,000, so these 12-year-olds were administering £200,000 to expand the idea into other schools. There are now several Room 13s in Britain, and in other countries as well.

At Butterflies, the street children’s place in Delhi that I mentioned earlier, the street educators have huge great trunks, which they bring to certain places, at certain times of day. And in the trunks there are slates and chalk, not books on the whole - some of them have exercise books but mostly slates and chalk - posters, perhaps a few books, and some games, and any children who want to, come. Now, the street children earn about 30 rupees a day, which is just enough to live on. If you went to a really cheap restaurant, 30 rupees would buy you a meal. So, you could have got one meal in a restaurant a day, or else you lived on scraps to some extent, and in spite of that, children were prepared to give up earning time in order to come to learn. And they mostly, apparently, learnt to read and write in six months. The point of this is that it’s the children in those circumstances who are wanting to do something. It’s not the teachers who are saying, “Come here, and we’re going to teach you things. You must do this, and you must do that.” The children come to the street educators because they want to; they want to know how to read; they want to know how to add up.

You don’t have to make young children learn, because they learn all the time. Falko Peschel, the German educator, said that they want to learn. The trick is to avoid putting them off learning, let’s say, by giving them things to do that seem to them pointless or boring. And the way you do this, principally, is not by asking questions yourself, but by allowing the children to ask the questions.

Peschel was talking about primary schools; Tamariki is a primary school that goes up to 12; the original Room 13 is in a primary school and Butterflies is concerned with basic skills, but the approach also works at a secondary level. Countesthorpe was a large comprehensive school, with 1,400 pupils, every one of whom had an individual timetable, a large part of which was described as team time. During team time no particular subjects were taught, but people followed up their own interests. I’ve got a list of projects that children were doing there. One boy wrote a play for a primary school which was acted in primary schools in the neighbourhood. Another investigated the bird life in the garden, at home. A girl researched extreme right literature, from the BNP and so on, in order to be able to have answers for it. Another followed her family tree back to the 16th century. There was a boy investigating the patterns made by swinging pendulums. A girl compared her mother’s life with the life of a model. A boy photographed examples of ecological damage in the neighbourhood, and so on. An extraordinary variety of stuff, and when I was there everybody was proud of what they’d done, and was eager to show it to me; there was no question of me imposing on them in any way, they wanted to show me what they’d been doing.