The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Four topics

Italy, 2002. Treviso, Trieste, Ferrara, Padua and Milan
Page 1

I have been a teacher for most of my life, and for most of my teaching career I worked in two democratic schools, one after the other. The children absorbed all my attention, so I had no energy left to look around and see what other people were doing in the same field. In the nine years since my retirement I have begun to explore the wide variety of such schools that exist all around the world.
I have been invited to speak to you about four topics that are probably completely unfamiliar to you - IDEC, WREN, Sands School and my own recent research. They are interrelated parts of one big picture. I would rather answer questions than make a long, uninterrupted speech, but how can you ask me questions until you know what it is that I may be able to tell you about? I'm afraid I must start with long explanations.

Firstly, a simple, factual description of IDEC.

IDEC stands for International Democratic Education Conference. (The meaning of the phrase "Democratic Education" will be explained later.) These conferences happen every year. There is no IDEC committee or governing body. Nobody is a member of IDEC. Each year a school offers to host the next year's conference, and once this offer has been accepted, everything that happens is decided by that school. This includes the length of the conference, the presence or absence of guest speakers, who is invited, the accommodation arrangements and the cost. Conferences have lasted two days and ten days. There have been conferences with a full pre-arranged programme, and others where every event was decided by the participants after they arrived. Accommodation has been in local homes, in tents and in the Olympic Centre in Tokyo. The cost to participants has varied from nothing to £30 a day.
The first conference took place in 1993 in Israel, and four countries were represented by about twenty participants. The 2000 conference took place in Tokyo, there were seventeen countries represented, and about a thousand people attended. This year's conference will be back in the Pacific, in New Zealand.
IDEC, it is clear, is an important and genuinely international phenomenon.
Although of course there is a central unity of purpose, IDECS are characterised by variety and absence of central control. That is also true of many of the participating schools.
I have been present at every IDEC up until now except for one. At every one I have made new friends and learnt about excitingly different schools.