1997 IDEC Report

by Jerry Mintz

This was the fifth annual meeting of IDEC. The first one was organized at Hadera School in Israel in 1993. It is a gathering of teachers and students of democratic schools from all around the world. What made this particular conference unique was that it was entirely organized by students. The key organizers were Jessica and Rachel, 17 and 16 years old, of the Sands School in Ashburton, England, in Devon.

In the past, it had always seemed to me that even though this was a very exciting conference, it was a little flawed because the conference itself did not reflect the democratic approaches of the schools involved, and had too many "talking head" talking adults workshops. It seems that Jessica and Rachel decided to try to rectify this by organizing a conference entirely by students. The pair attempted to keep the cost as low as possible so that as many schools as wanted to could participate in it. They were about to get a 10,000 pound grant to help them with basic expenses! They used some of these funds to rent a nearby camp site, a big tent as a central meeting place for the conference, and minibuses for transportation and field trips, as well as food. The cost to participants was 50 pounds for the ten day conference! It was decided that instead of a two or three day conference, this would be a ten day conference, and it would be during the summer so that there could be a sort of living situation of the participants, not only to discuss the democratic schools, but also to create a temporary international democratic school at Sands School. I had been in regular communication with Jessica and Rachel through mail, fax, and telephone.

We brought three American students. One of them was Mariah Moates. She is a 14 year old homeschooler from Virginia and had been wanting to go on an AERO trip for a long time. Her great interest is ballet and dance. In anticipation of the trip, she had read the book Summerhill, knowing we were planning to go to Summerhill after the Sands Conference. A second participant was Jeff Donovan, 13, from Spokane, Washington. He is a homeschooler and we met his family earlier this year at the NCACS conference in Chicago. The third American was Stephen Sandford from Missoula, Montana. He had participated in the international summer camp in France last summer and wanted to go on another adventure with AERO. He's 12. Seven years ago, I helped his mother establish an alternative school in Missoula. We were joined at Sands School by the fourth participant in our group, Nicolas Malaquin, who had also been a participant in the summer camp in France. His parents had driven him over from their home in France. He is 13. Other people whom we had contacted to arrange for their participation in IDEC included Albert Lamb, an American living in England who is a former Summerhill student and teacher and whose children also had gone to Summerhill. We had also contacted Oleg Belin, a teacher at the Stork Family School in the Ukraine.

Our group went by train from London's Heathrow Airport, arriving in Totnes about three hours later. The Sands School is right in the village of Ashburton and has several acres of grounds which include several out buildings, a basketball court, a tennis court, and they had resurrected their table tennis table just for me so I could teach table tennis to the conference participants. Most of the people were camping out at the campgrounds. Our group was able to stay in the school with our sleeping bags. Groups began arriving from places such as Israel, Austria, and representatives of schools in New Zealand, and Japan.

The students at the Sands School had the option of whether to participate but it seemed that most of them were participating. Nothing was really scheduled for the first day and people just informally met and talked to each other. The next day we had a meeting which was one of the most extraordinary I've seen at any conference. The girls had hired a parent of one of the Sands Students to help them through a process in which the entire curriculum of the conference/demonstration school was to be co-created.

We met in the large tent. In front of the group were placed three large bulletin boards. On one of them were written the dates and times available for presentations during the conference. The second one was blank except for the days of the week. We were asked to write down any ideas we had for workshops we could give or ones which we would like to have given. Then one by one each person explained what these presentations would be. Then they were placed on the second bulletin board until the entire space was filled up for the first five days of the conference. In addition, on a third bulletin board, people placed other activities which were not really time sensitive but which they could offer or would like to see offered.

This then became our schedule. Incredibly, virtually all of these events came to pass. They included such diverse activities as rock climbing, David Gribble's workshop about the schools he visited around the world, cave exploring, a trip to the moors, swimming and cliff diving, pottery and sculpture, a workshop I did on the decision making processes at different schools, a trip to visit the Park School, an elementary alternative in Totnes, as well as the Open School which is a distance learning and homeschooling center which uses the Internet and faxes, and a visit to Schumacher College, all of which are on the grounds of the former Dartington Hall School. Schumacher is a seminar center which is environmentally oriented.

There was a also a workshop ongoing in a new sport called Tamburelli which is similar to badminton and uses a shuttlecock but the bats are made of modified tambourines. The kids there absolutely loved this sport and I think it would be worthwhile for us to bring it to other places in the world. Right now there are only a few hundred participants. Adam Cohen, one of the students at Sands School, was promoting this sport. I also had an ongoing workshop in table tennis and taught perhaps 25 or 30 people during the conference. We also had two tournaments.

Mariah did a workshop on homeschooling which was well attended and created great food for thought. She had been taking college classes since she was 10 years old and on her own had become interested in reading Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies, as well as becoming a very good and serious dancer. Some of the older Sands students who attended her workshop wondered if they would have the same self-discipline to do such a similar thing. Sean Bellamy, the head teacher of Sands School and I also discussed this and wondered if there was some aspect of homeshcooling that might be missing or needed to be incorporated into the process of democratic schools to further empower learners to go off and really pursue their own directions.

Two days into the conference, Albert Lamb arrived and did a workshop on Summerhill which was very well attended. Jessica and Rachel were quite disappointed that no Summerhill students or staff had come to the conference and also no representatives from Sudbury Valley School in the United States which had been one of the founders of IDEC. There were some organizational problems with the conference, but I think these were far outweighed by the form which the conference took. Wonderful international friendships were created. Mariah talked long hours into the night with students from Israel and has been invited to come there and visit, for example. Jeff organized one of the the table tennis tournaments. I had first taught him table tennis at the Chicago conference where, for lack of a table, we put a couple of conference tables together and strung a makeshift net across them. I love teaching table tennis because in a very real way table tennis is an international language and also cross-generational. Anyone can play and it gets a variety of people together. And because my teacher (Lim Ming Chui) was one of the best in the US, I can often double somebody's ability to play in just a few minutes, thus reinforcing their confidence in themselves as learners.

During the conference we tried to make use of their computer communications but their good computer had been stolen a while back so the one we used was not very good for e-mail. Nevertheless, we set up a discussion coordinated through the Open School about democratic education vs. homeschooling. On the other end were students who were studying through the Open School, including one young man who had Tourettes syndrome and who was skeptical whether he could function in any school. The Sands students who were participating in online discussions invited him to come visit and felt that the students there would be understanding of of his situation.

More that half the time we were having serious problems with the computer and getting e-mail but one day when we were setting up the follow-up discussion, on the second day, we didn't have any technicians there at all except for the youngest student at Sands School who was 10 years old. He proved himself to be quite fluent in this new language, having grown up with it. He did a very good job connecting us up with the Teliweb Network, which is sort of an alternative to the internet being used in England for students.

On another day a group of us went to Nathan Gribble's house to connect on the internet to the MOO that Puget Sound Community School has set up to see if people would like to talk to us at the conference. We did have a good discussion with Andy Smallman, the Director of PSCS. At a general meeting we also discussed where next year's conference would be. It seems they have put it pretty squarely in my hands. Several ideas were thrown out, including having it in the United States. We also talked about having it in Russia or in the Ukraine. This is something we need to start working on right away.

In quality, I think it would be really hard to top what happened in this year's conference. It was a true demonstration of an international democratic alternative school and a tribute to the vision and organizational ability of the students who helped create it. In the future, I think, it is very important that this kind of level of student involvement in the creation of the conference be maintained.