Democratic Education

(Talk for the staff of the education department at the University of East Anglia, Norwich 2005)
Page 4

Moo Baan Dek in Thailand, is a village of abused, abandoned or orphaned children run on a Buddhist adaptation of Summerhill principles.

At Fundación Educativa Pestalozzi in Ecuador there are no lessons, and the staff are told that they must not even persuade, encourage, draw attention to things or make suggestions.

Sumavanam is in a poor rural village in India: children who want to come may do so as soon as they can walk there on their own.

The Doctor Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School in Chicago...

Information Overload!!

This overhead gives a list of some of the places I have mentioned. I haven't put it up just to help you to cope with the information overload. I've put it up to illustrate a point that is made by schools like Sudbury Valley and the Fundación Educativa Pestalozzi, where staff are banned from proposing topics of study. As soon as you make a list, what is on the list becomes apparently more important than what is not on the list. The mere existence of this list will make it more difficult for you to react in your own individual way to what I have been saying. If you have questions in your mind that are more important to you personally, this list will tend to wipe them out. In the same way, according to Sudbury and the Pesta, any school timetable, no matter how rich, runs the risk of distracting young people from their own personal needs.

Of course I hope that the brief descriptions of these various places has interested you, and that you will want to know more about them, but perhaps you have other concerns.
I'll mention a few possibilities, but I won't write them up on an overhead because that would give them too much importance over any others that you may want to bring up.

You might be interested, for instance, in questions about lessons and academic standards, or discipline and behaviour, or the balance between rights and responsibilities, or the necessity or otherwise for rules and punishments, or the question of whether compulsory free education is a contradiction in terms.

That little list illustrates an argument in favour of offering possibilities. When I was teaching the ten-year-olds at Dartington a child would quite often want to write a story, and ask me to provide ideas. I would produce a string of them - a picnic in a thunderstorm, perhaps, getting lost in a supermarket, telling a lie to get out of trouble and being caught out, living in a cage from the point of view of a rabbit - and suddenly the child would say "I know what I shall write about!" And it would be something completely different.