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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When you’re genuinely interested, two things happen: learning ceases to be work, in the sense of an imposed duty - think of children who spend hours playing the guitar, or learning skateboard tricks, just because they want to. Anybody watching someone practising skateboard tricks will have been bored out of their minds, very rapidly, yet that child will go on doing it for days. And you also learn lots of new information without noticing, like how to get around in an area you live, or how to cook a meal so everything’s ready at the right time. I bet you don’t know intellectually whether the hot tap in your sink is on the left or the right, but I when you go to the sink and turn on a tap, you always turn on the right one. Since this occurred to me, I now find that when I go up to my sink, I have to think – I can’t do it automatically any more.

The taps are an example of learning without noticing. Pride and Prejudice at Tamariki was an example of learning for pleasure. This kind of learning stays with you, it doesn’t drift away as soon as the exam is over. And it can only happen when the teacher offers, or indeed accepts suggestions, rather than telling children what to do; helps rather than corrects; appreciates every individual’s personal motivation, and so allows each one of them, in Biesta’s phrase, to come into the world as a unique, singular being, ready, not merely, to fit into society, but to go out and change it for the better.