Ticket sales went well beyond 200 for the USO Show re-enactment held at the Military Museum on Saturday afternoon May 19.  With performances by Gary Ferris as a World War II radio star modeled after Bob Hope, the Manhattan Dolls trio and the Saratoga Savoy Swing Dancers,  young and old were treated to an extraordinary program.  Organized as a fundraiser, the show was a recreation of a live-audience radio program as was commonly heard over Armed Forces Radio in the 1940s.

The entire event ran for three hours and included refreshments similar to those  served at a war time cantina.  Nearly all who came stayed to the finish.  The audience included World War II, Korea and Vietnam vets and their families, as well as current generation vets and others joined in the extravaganza.  Exhibition Hall was turned in to an auditorium with seats ringing a stage for the live radio broadcast and the band supporting the Manhattan Dolls.  Area reenactors turned out in uniform and mixed in with the crowd.  Additional period displays of posters, photos and artifacts were added on tables set up near the Museum’s standing exhibits.

“There could have been no better reward for us and the Museum, than to see those elderly warriors stand proud when the National Anthem was sung,” said “Friends” president Lance Ingmire.   “Watching them tap their feet to the music and seeing them get misty eyed when the girls ran through their military songs — It was moving and truly an honor to have given something back to them,” he said. “I feel in my heart they enjoyed the performance.”


Sarah Drake, one of the performers for The Manhattan Dolls, also recalls the wonderful experience her trio had at the show. She writes on their official blog “I feel so honored that we could be a part of that fundraiser and we hope to return another time.”

This is another successful fund raising effort by “Friends” and follows the sell-out joint effort with the Saratoga Springs Lions Club back on March 31 dubbed “Brewseum.”  This effort is one of many programs the Friends of the New York State Military Museums puts on during the year to support New York military history and education. Such efforts are essential to not only preserve the Museum and its present exhibits but to improve and add new ones in the near future.

Check it out at www.friendsofthenysmilitarymuseum.com 

Being Taught By a Five Year Old

I'm visiting another democratic school. One of the children is asking me to dance with her to a particular song. I tell her I don't know this song. She says "It's okay, I will teach you my dance routine!"

Everybody has something to offer. Adults, children, senior citizens, wealthy business leaders, homeless people, teachers, your postal carrier. When we open ourselves to new sources of information, it benefits everybody involved.

Class is Out, Learning Is In

Step into a democratic school and one of the first things you'll notice is the structure of the classrooms.

There isn't one.

Every student chooses how they will best learn. For some, that might be a vigorous conversation about some subject that really interests them. Others will be quietly reading in a corner alone. Some students will be creating something, others will be engaging in sport. Students might be outside enjoying the weather or inside playing on computers.

Something you won't find here… teachers standing in the front of the room, students chained to desks and staring with glazed-over eyes at the blackboard, textbooks filled with information that students will forget about once the class is over.

One Hundred Years Later...

In Leo Tolstoy's "Education and Instruction", written in 1860, he predicts that democratic education will not become widely accepted for another one hundred years.

Indeed, the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts first opened in 1968, and many democratic schools continued to be opened soon after (the first democratic school, Summerhill School, in Suffolk, England, opened in 1921).

Although democratic schools have been opened across the world, it is clear that the teaching method of choice is one that is archaic and irrelevant for the modern world. Lectures, rote memorization, standardized tests, students passing through sterile white halls to the sounds of a bell…

How much longer can we wait for change?

What would you do?

The great thing about democratic schools is you can do whatever you'd like during the day.

The horrible thing about democratic schools is you can do whatever you'd like during the day.

There are no teachers here telling you what to do. No classes, no homework, no tests.

It's completely up to you to figure out how you are going to spend each and every day.

What would you do with your life when there's nobody who is going to tell you how to live it?

Students and Adults as Peers

In the traditional school model, teachers are authority figures. They have control over the child's education. They have control over the classroom. They have the power to discipline and the power to reward.

This model is simply contradictory to a democratic education. If we believe that all people have the ability to control the decisions to affect their lives, then we must believe that students are capable of controlling their own education.

In the democratic model, adults have no authority over students. There is no assumption that adults hold all knowledge (indeed, children are just as capable of dispensing information to others). Learning is student-facilitated and student-directed.

To live in a democratic society, we must rethink how teachers and students relate to each other.

Defining Democracy

Democracy: (n) Greek: dēmokratía; A government in which all citizens have control over the decisions that affect their lives.

We can vote for our local and state representatives.

But where is democracy to be found in our schools? How often are our children encouraged to take control over the decisions that will affect their lives? What they will learn, how they will learn it…

It's time to give the power back to our students.