The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Four topics

Italy, 2002. Treviso, Trieste, Ferrara, Padua and Milan
Page 8

I asked Rita Panicker, the founder of Butterlies, how she defined success. She started with the most fundamental element. Success, she said, is when the children trust the adults. Only then do other things follow. These are children who have been frequently beaten by the police and by drunken fathers, who are widely regarded as pickpockets and thieves and who are frequently subject to sexual abuse. To win the trust of children who have suffered all this is an extraordinary achievement, but when Lynette and I visited Butterflies we were immediately accepted as friends.

Rita Panicker went on to say that it is also success when children learn to read and write, even though they may get no academic qualifactions; it is success when they succeed in personal projects, such as research, or finding a solution to a problem. And of course it is a success if they go on to high school and get good jobs. There are children who have been sleeping in the cold Delhi winters in the streets or on the roofs of the railway station who do achieve all these things.

This gives some idea of the sort of education I have seen in different parts of the world where the essential element is respect for each individual child. Sands School is the example that I know best, because I worked there for four years. There is a list of some of the places on the WREN database, and there is an annual IDEC where some of them are represented.

At an IDEC one hears of different approaches involving, for instance, lessons or no lessons, rules or no rules, punishments or no punishments, obligation to attend or freedom to stay away, parliamentary-style meetings with votes or informal consensus. What is the same everywhere is the understanding that children are not merely social embryos, learning to become people. They are people already, with the same rights as anybody else.

At the IDEC in New Zealand later in 2002 it was agreed that WREN was a somewhat undignified name, and the network is now called IDEN, the International Democratic Education Network. It has grown considerably since the time of this talk, and its web address is http://www.idenetwork.org

The address is now davidgribble@idenetwork.org, and the web master lives in the UK.