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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
