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After a conversation I had with an AERO member about what I learned from my friendship with John Holt about the future of education, he suggested I write an article about it. Until now it has been very difficult for me to start on this. It is hard to be creative when under the stress of a crisis, a pandemic nightmare from which we are having trouble waking up. 

We’ve been advocating the Education Revolution since our founding 31 years ago. Our mission is to make learner-centered education available to people everywhere. With that in mind we have established a website that is #1 on Google for alternative education and for 15 years we have had an online course for people who want to start new learner-centered alternatives. This has led to the establishment of more than 100 new educational alternatives. We see them as seeds, models that can help spread the Education Revolution. 

Little could we imagine that practically overnight we would have gone from 3 1/2% of students homeschooling to 96%! Some may say it isn’t homeschooling, but there’s no denying that it is a whole new paradigm for most people. 

The whole idea of predicting the future is clearly a nearly impossible process, as recent events have shown. But it is important that we at least guess about the future of education in order to be better prepared to work with it.  

As you may know, many years ago John Holt, after trying to reform schools, gave up on them and wrote the book Teach Your Own, introducing the modern movement of homeschooling. I knew John fairly well and had many discussions with him about whether schools could be based truly on the interest of the learner, in a way similar to the concept that he had pioneered, “unschooling.” 

One question I asked him back then was whether he was OK with parents who did “school at home” in a very structured way. One example of that was the fundamentalist Christians who told me back then that they couldn’t unschool because of “original sin,” what they considered was the human tendency toward doing wrong and evil things. 

Holt told me that he thought that the students would teach the parents how to teach them. And if that failed they would just give up and send their children back to Christian schools. 

History seems to have backed Holt’s prediction. Today one of the fastest growing forms of homeschooling is unschooling. In fact, there are millions of Christian and formerly more structured homeschoolers who say they are unschooling. 

So how does this relate to our current situation? With perhaps more than 45 million of the 50 million USA students learning from home, and maybe more than a billion around the world, what will happen after this crisis abates? 

Of course the people in the traditional state school establishment are doing everything they can to maintain their control of education. It is a top-down, authoritarian approach that is not generally learner-centered. It is based on the idea the “teacher knows best” what students need to learn. They have given students homework. They are giving assignments online. They are doing “talking head” lectures. 

But this will probably get old fairly quickly. One survey showed that more that half of the families and students are already ignoring this approach. The problem is that the teachers do not have a monopolistic, captive audience as they do in school. The student can vote not to do it with their feet or their fingers and their parents will get tired of making them do it. This could have a very interesting result, as teachers will finally get feedback on the effectiveness of their approach. This may help many teachers to realize that a learner-centered approach is more effective and could positively influence the education system. 

Meanwhile what has been happening at home? For one thing, children will be much happier. They will be learning how to entertain themselves, to do more things that interest time. In some cases this will be by using the Internet, but in others it will be completely offline, with fantasies, games, play in their yards, etc. As Holt suggested, their children may teach them how to teach. 

One might say that this is just like summer vacation, but for many wealthier families it isn’t at all! They were used to sending their children to summer camp the moment school was over. Now they have had to learn to live with them, listen to them, do things with them. 

What about growth in learner-centered education? Of course many of our schools have gone online, as have the traditional schools. Some have found ways to continue to be interactive, even have democratic meetings. In some cases outside families have discovered our learner-centered schools and their numbers have grown. But many of our schools are used to being low-profile and haven’t been discovered. We need to think about this. 

One dramatic example of what is starting to happen is with one of our member organizations and an AERO Conference sponsor, Outschool, a provider of supplementary and homeschool curriculum and activities. As this process began to unfold they had they had 8,000 students and 1000 teachers, with a large spectrum of offerings online. But in the first week of the outbreak they suddenly gained 25,000 students and were seeking 5,000 teachers! I haven’t heard from them recently and don’t know what their numbers are now. Obviously, as people discover that this approach exists, it could grow quickly. 

Now we get to the trickiest part: What will happen as things normalize? 

Many families will desperately want to go back to the traditional system. It’s what they grew up with and what they were used to. The people in the educational establishment will also want to get their power and control back. Their school finances and paychecks depend upon that. That will undoubtedly account for most families and students. 

However, there will be a certain percentage of people who will have noticed that their children were happier learning a home, that there was less family strife. They may also have noticed that their children found some very creative things to do, perhaps things they never thought they were capable of. Those people may not be inclined to go back to the status quo. If they decide to continue homeschooling, or look for a learner-centered school, this could be the tipping point.  

Please send any feedback or comments to JerryAERO@AOL.comThe article may be copied or forwarded with a link to EducationRevolution.org

I am going to talk about what is wrong with most of our schools and school systems – and then what democratic education can contribute to improving things so that we can face the challenges presented by the fourth industrial revolution. I will refer to my own experiences as a teacher and inspector in England.

What’s wrong with what we have now? Well I think that the English philosopher Bertrand Russell and the American philosopher John Dewey were correct when they said that conventional authoritarian schools offer the choice of becoming either submissive or rebellious – and that neither provides a good preparation for living in a democracy or taking responsibility for your own life. The same idea is expressed in the 2016 policy document of your own ministry of education entitled “The New Ukraine School.” (Part of a major programme of reform in a remarkably progressive direction in Ukraine since 2016.) It lists the qualities required by young people today and tomorrow all of which I agree with – creativity, critical thinking, goal-setting, teamwork, communication. It powerfully describes the failure of your existing school system to generate these skills. At present most schools just stuff kids heads with more and more out of date information and then test their memorisation of it. Thereby generating maximum anxiety, mental ill-health and damaged well-being – none of which is conducive to deep and meaningful learning. This sounds familiar – just like England!! The Ukrainian document creates an unforgettable metaphor in describing a typical Ukrainian school student as being “like a stuffed fish. It looks like a fish but it cannot swim!!” I guess that we are here today because we agree with this point of view – to some extent anyway.

To reinforce the point I will repeat a few words from the brilliant piece that won this year’s Scottish Schools Young Writer of the Year Award. Written by a 16 year-old, Harriet Sweatman, it speaks for millions of British and probably Ukrainian young people trapped in our anxiety ridden, testing obsessed, PISA performance driven day prisons that we call schools.

She writes ‘…We are told that if we are not fit to work, then we are worthless. There is no love in learning any more…we envy the people who have left school already… Whatever happened to expanding your horizons? Assignments where you can research what you want count for nothing…Finding out who I am and what I care about is unimportant. I have been flattened by a concrete curriculum so structured and unforgiving that I have forgotten how to function without it. With no bell throbbing at even intervals and no grading to build our lives around how will we cope?…They say that high school is the best years of your life – but not in this world, where qualifications matter more than personal qualities. I feel that I have grown backwards, as if I know less about myself and who or what I could be than when I started…The curriculum must release its chokehold on the throats of this nations’ children and let them breathe…But for us it is too late. For now, we just have to wait until the final bell rings and we walk out of the school door for ever.’

Twenty years ago at a Council of Europe conference on how to teach democracy and human rights I said that ‘learning about democracy and human rights when I was at school was like reading holiday brochures in prison’ and that ‘you can’t learn to swim if you are not allowed in the water!’ Democracy and respect for human rights require skills as well as understanding, they have to be practised in the everyday life of the school and not just talked about by teachers. According to Harriet nothing has changed.

In my experience young people need time and space to discover themselves, to find their interests and passions, to learn from each other, to create their own identities. In our schools we do not allow this and we even pursue our students into their homes with homework. This is why Yaacov Hecht and I are demanding that at least one day per week in all schools should immediately be negotiated around the interests and questions of the students – we call it the 20% campaign. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it – the state still has 80%!

The ‘other way’ that I found both necessary and possible as a teacher could be described as ‘democratic education.’ What do I mean by Democratic Education? I mean two things. The first I call SPDM (student participation in decision making – choosing what and how they will learn.) The second I call SPDDM (student participation in democratic decision making – about how the class and school communities will be managed democratically and with respect for human rights. These school communities of learning and decision making should not be too large. Maybe 150/200 maximum. The number that can attend a school meeting and know who everyone else is. In my experience even large schools can be broken into ‘schools within schools’ of this size. These in turn should be made up of groups of perhaps 30 maximum where it is possible for everybody to speak.

Both are needed for young people to discover their own purposes and to be able to create their own identity. This is already important and will become more so as the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds. Its artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning threatens the capacity of work or rather full-time paid employment to provide security of identity for most of us as much of this paid employment will cease to exist. Only a few per cent of people will be required or know how to create and develop the high-tech world that is advancing like a tsunami. The rest of us supported by some form of universal basic income, trialled with success in Canada and Finland, will need to be able to create our own identities for ourselves. It could provide us with time to enrich our own lives and the quality of our democracies. Schooling as we know it does not help young people prepare for this. We need another kind of school where young people can discover and develop in freedom their own talents, purposes and passions and at the same time learn to manage democratic societies which respect human rights. Coercive authoritarian schools do not and cannot do this.

Some small private democratic schools like Summerhill or Sudbury Valley provide us with models – ‘pioneers of possibility’ I call them. These fully democratic schools share certain features though no two are quite the same.

Those of us working with the majority of young people in our state school systems will have to be more ‘fox-like’ and opportunist.

“The New Ukraine School” document refers to schools needing to become places that no longer reproduce the poverty ladder but instead leverage social equity, consolidate communities of creative and responsible citizens who are active and enterprising. This is all great – BUT – why there is no mention of democracy – or human rights. I am puzzled by these omissions and hope to discusss them with you later in the conference.

The task of creating the necessary change is not easy. It will be a struggle to change the ‘stuffed fish’ schools. It will cause anxieties for teachers and uncertainties for parents and students. We have to be supreme opportunists!! How we do it will depend on how we can adapt the two key principles of curriculum choice and democratic learning communities to the realities in which we find ourselves.

Some school students are already demanding changes to the school curriculum. Not all young people are as depressed as Harriet Sweatman. OBESSU (the organising bureau of European school student unions) has been arguing for change for 40 years – but with little effect. They have been waiting for a uniting issue such as the overwhelming imperative of resisting climate change. I am very excited by the ‘Greta Thunberg phenomenon’ where demand for school change is indeed being driven by the students themselves led by the courageous sixteen year old from Sweden and now spread to 36 countries at least. I am sure that you have all heard of her school climate strike movement. I joined 1500 young people in my home town of Brighton a few weeks ago. Many of the young strikers that I spoke to knew more about climate change than their teachers, parents or political leaders. In the UK 200 academic experts in the field have backed the students in the press. In Germany Angela Merkel has contradicted German Education Officials to support the students as has Leo Varadkar in Ireland! In the UK the government and most head teachers threatened the students with punishment. That will not stop many more young people participating each week in hundreds of towns and cities worldwide. Is this happening in Ukraine yet?

School change is also being driven by parents in many countries – for example the first Sudbury School in England, on whose board I am proud to sit, and many similar schools across Europe and the World. Thirty five new schools in France alone. Perhaps a thousand democratic schools world-wide.

My own story is one of opportunisn, communication and learning to find friends, to create change at the teacher level – first as a class teacher, then a senior teacher and later as a school vice-principal.

Why did I bother to look for another way?

To improve learning, to open minds, to think for yourself, to develop curiosity and collaboration, to respect diversity, to see through the violent snake oil of demagogues and xenophobes encouraging us to look for scapegoats for social and economic difficulties

My ideas were grounded in a long tradition of progressive child-centred education in England though this is substantially ignored in our current teacher education. It is encouraging to find some of these ideas in “The New Ukraine School” and other documents that Ira has sent me. The idea that curriculum and learning should be a partnership between pupils, teachers and parents. That teachers and pupils should relate as friends without fear – and logically that means reducing coercion. Straight from the AS Neill Summerhill song-book!

In my first post as a young teacher I was able to bring about change at class level and then at school level. I trained as a primary school teacher because I liked the idea of being able to create an integrated curriculum which would take into account the interests of the children. But I couldn’t find a school with a vacancy. I found a secondary modern school with a progressive head teacher. Secondary modern schools exist in England in those parts of the country that test children at age 11 to decide which 15-20% should go to grammar school or gymnasium, for the academic conveyor belt to university, and which should not. For aspiring middle class parents and their children ‘failure’ was a catastrophe and destroyed self-confidence. In order to attempt to repair this damage my job was to teach all the humanities subjects to one class of 35 of these failure kids, which made me responsible for 65% of their curriculum.
At our first meeting on my first day as a teacher I arranged all the chairs in a circle. Although all the subjects concerned had given me a prescribed curriculum with the tacit approval of the head teacher I ignored them. The headteacher wanted me to experiment with the creation of an ‘integrated’ curriculum. What he did not expect was for me to do this with the children making the decisions. I sat in the circle and introduced myself. I explained that History was about the past, Geography was about different places and the people who lived there, Religious Knowledge was about what people believed, Social Studies was about how people lived together in groups, and English was about how people communicated. I explained that anyone could ask questions and discuss what I had said but please only speak when you are holding the ‘special book.’ One boy immediately said ‘…I think that covers everything in the world. Does that mean we can learn about anything we want to in the world.’ ‘Well I suppose it does’ I replied making sure I was holding the book before speaking.

And so it began. Individuals and groups began projects on a wide range of topics. The ‘special book’ was replaced by an elected class chairperson. Our lessons were on five mornings per week and one whole day – Friday. We agreed by majority vote to have a short class meeting at the start of every day with a longer meeting on Friday afternoons. The need for a class secretary quickly emerged to keep a record of decisions made at class meetings. Gradually many jobs were created and during the two years we were together everyone did more than one. Projects could last as long as they lasted but it became a rule that when a project was finished the owner would give a short lesson to the rest of the class and make a display that would appear in the class ‘newspaper.’ The newspaper began as the back wall of our classroom but quickly grew to cover doors, cupboards and windows. There were many sections each with its own editor.

I said that I wanted to be the class teacher, helping everyone with their learning, and although I could also be the class policeman if I had to be I would rather not be. It was soon obvious that to manage such a hive of activity some rules would be needed. These were discussed and voted upon at Friday meetings. I used these discussions to introduce ideas such as the ‘rule of law’, democracy, one person one vote, minority rights etc etc. Many class laws were created. Some I agreed with and others I thought silly – but almost always I accepted the decision of the meeting unless it broke the school rules or the laws of England. Of course when you have laws you have to decide what to do when they are broken. This led to the creation of the ‘class court’ with elected magistrates and the class jury. Some of the laws I would never have thought of in a million years – such as the ‘five minutes quiet’ law. If five people found the classroom too noisy they would put their hands up and the elected class ‘timekeeper’ would call for 5 minutes quiet. If anyone spoke during these minutes their name would be noted by the class ‘book keeper’ and they would appear before the next Friday court if they were noted five times or more in a week. Many laws were created and the system worked brilliantly.

I was afraid that when the head teacher found out what I was doing I would be fired. On the contrary because several parents noticed the transformation of confidence in their children they began to inform him how happy they were with my methods. Head teachers love to hear good news from parents! He was a bit worried that I wasn’t doing much formal teaching though and as there were six other parallel classes working in a more formal way he decided to give all seven classes a verbal reasoning test. I was embarrassed when my class scored more highly than the others – but he was relieved and let me continue to go my own way. This of course created some challenges with my colleagues whose students began to ask why they did not have class meetings and a class court. I realised I needed to explain what I was doing to rest of the humanities team. They were mostly young but with more experience than me and it is to their credit that far from treating me as a lunatic they also began to try some of my class democracy. After the first year instead of being fired I was put in charge of all seven classes as they moved up to what is our Year 8. We introduced the democratic approach to the whole year group. An elected year council was created to organise inter-class sports, quizzes, discos, parties, trips etc. The whole teaching team were volunteers which was great and included some fresh from college. Relations with the heads of subjects who realised they were losing control of their curriculum areas became more difficult however and I learned some ‘political’ lessons that were useful when I moved to more senior posts.

I am still in touch with some 60 year-old kids who were in my first class for those two years 1969-1971 and they have helped me to write a book about the experience. Several went on to university despite their initial academic failure at 11. All remember with pride our co-created class democracy and freely chosen curriculum. All say it changed their sense of failure and helped them to believe in themselves again. All say it helped them create a strong sense of purpose and identity. One actually became a head teacher himself with a strong belief in ‘student voice.’ We have shared some vivid memories a few of which I will mention here if time allows. The day the head teacher brought visitors to the class when I was not in the room but the class was working quietly without me – Andrew explaining that ‘our teacher is a bit soft so we have a class government and laws or it would be chaos in here!!’ Or the time we were visited by a national newspaper and I forgot to get the head teacher’s permission. Or the time the class gave lectures on class democracy at the local teacher’s college. Or the time the class defended one of its ethnic minority members who was going to be excluded from the school for stealing. My two years at the school ended with the creation of a school council for the whole school of 1500 students.

Next I will say a little about the creation of a Community School where democratic change at community level was brought about; where school and community became ‘turned on’ to themselves and each other through democratic structures and processes growing out from the school. In my case this began as a bet between myself as vice-principal and some older students of a rural school serving a country town supporting stone quarries and sheep farms. They found the town boring and said there were only about 20 clubs and societies with few open to young people. I bet them that there at least twice as many. They conducted a survey. They found over 100 organisations!! The students council and the parents association invited them all to a massive conference in the school to explore how the clubs and societies could be more available to young people and how the resources of the school could be more available in return. The results were amazing and led to many new organisations such as a community newspaper run jointly by students and adults and a community orchestra with all ages playing together. Both these organisations still exist forty years later. All the activity was and still is managed and coordinated by a Community Education Council always chaired by a school student. We went on to help create an English Community Education Association to create change at national level.

After this I became a school inspector. Not my best career move as I did not like much of what I saw . But I was able to encourage creative practice wherever I found it though on the whole national policy was pushing in the opposite direction. More and more testing and all the other anxiety generating uncreative nonsense we are all too familiar with. But – it gave me the opportunity to help to defend the most famous English ‘pioneer of possibility’ – Summerhill School which in 1999 was threatened with closure by the then chief inspector. It was the only case where a threatened school has defended itself against inspectors in court. And we won!! It was high point of my career as an inspector though it did not me make very popular with the chief inspector who shortly afterwards was forced to resign!

I will conclude by mentioning examples of where opportunism made it possible to change policy at city and national school system level in England.

15 years ago with a team from the University of Sussex we created student councils in all the secondary schools of Portsmouth, a deprived city in the affluent South with poor and declining academic performance. These councils met together and formed COPS – the City of Portsmouth Students. This has now evolved into a not for profit company called UNLOC which employs 10 young people and provides training in student participation across the South of England. A colleague who was at the first COPS meeting 16 years ago is today in Rwanda spreading the work of UNLOC in Africa.

Another example of opportunistic change this time at national level. By chance in 2001 I found myself as an adviser to the minister’s adviser for the creation of a democratic citizenship curriculum for English schools as a result of work that I had been doing for the Council of Europe. Put simply I argued that if you wanted students to learn about democracy and human rights you have to practise them in school and not just talk about them for examinations. The minister agreed. But he was attacked by the chief inspector and the right-wing press for threatening to lower standards while kids wasted time in democratic meetings and decision making. I was asked to carry out some research to see if schools that were already trying to be more democratic had worse academic results because of this practice. I found 20 out of 3500 English secondary schools that had created many many different way to involve students in decisions around their learning and the management of their classes and schools. My findings were encouraging. Schools that were more democratic than most actually had better examination results, better attendance and fewer exclusions for anti-social behaviour when compared with the average for schools in similar socio-economic environments. This became known as the Hannam Report. It is still available online and in several languages – though not yet Ukrainian. Anyway – The planned curriculum changes went ahead though they have since been undone by recent conservative ministers.

We need much more of this research and good work is being done such as the enormous meta-review of Mager and Nowak at Innsbruck University.

Work at Aarhus University in Denmark is demonstrating causality and not just association.

Later I had the opportunity to persuade another minister to change the law to enable students to sit as members of school boards. Research shown that schools who implement the opportunity had improved governance as a result of listening to the students.

Finally I should just mention that there are exciting projects beginning in several countries as well as Ukraine. The Sympraxis project in Greece is a good example and great ideas are emerging in Finland, New Zealand and Singapore.

The Council of Europe through its Norwegian Wergeland Centre is doing good work with New Ukrainian Schools right now here in Kiev. Are any of you from these schools? I would love to hear your side of the story and perhaps we could chat afterwards.

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned, is the importance of not being alone. I think our potential power is something like the mathematical square of the size of our group of like minds. As the song says ‘one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so’ whereas two have the strength of four, three as nine, etc etc. Find some friends. Choose them carefully – then study the behaviour of the fox!! There is always something that can be done. Unlike teachers in my country you have a government policy framework that wants you to be innovative, to create a new and better way.

We must resist the dystopian Orwellian future that the Belorussian writer Evgeny Morozov describes as ‘digital feudalism.’ In this version of the future elites will be able to use artificial intelligence to extend and maintain their wealth and position. In alliance with authoritarian states and with the right algorithms, they will keep tighter and tighter control over the innermost thoughts and behaviours of the rest of us. A fear of the ideas of Xi Jin Ping is driving the young people onto the streets of Hong Kong right now. You could almost see our current authoritarian school systems as perfect preparation for this future!

I believe that another way is possible. If we succeed we can make creative use of the immense increases in productivity and free time offered by the fourth industrial revolution. We can adopt the ideas of the circular and sharing economies to create more equitable, humanly fulfilling and environmentally sustainable societies that are grounded in democracy and human rights. We can use the productivity of artificial intelligence rather than be used by it. We can delay singularity for ever. We can focus on things like empathy which it cannot emulate. Democratic education can and will help us to achieve this – I think we really have no choice – I have to be an optimist despite my age – I have seven grandchildren! – we need not just the new Ukrainian School but the new European School and the new International school. A new kind of school for planet Earth. Nothing is more important.

Thank you for listening!!

I think most of us would agree that our school system could stand to improve.  I believe this proposal, if followed, will have a profound impact, leading to significant improvements in both our most challenging and our best schools.

Proposed: Our schools should follow the lead of the democratic education movement and implement school-wide participatory management!

That means: invite every single person in the school to join the School Improvement Group (SIG), which will meet regularly with the goal of making that school the BEST possible learning institution it can be.  Every teacher, para, counselor, cafeteria worker, administrator, parent, secretary, custodian, support staff, and especially every student, is welcome!  Only requirement is that the person must participate regularly and respectfully.

And it must be made clear that those who choose not to participate as full-fledged SIG members are still part of the school improvement process, in that their voices – their thoughts, feelings, ideas – will sometimes be requested and will always be welcomed and appreciated!  The British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote “The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at.”  Thus the more perspectives that are offered and considered, the better ‘our school’ will become!

Pretend you’re the principal.  First off; the (everyone is invited) invitation ALONE will make your school a better place! You have just told all the people in your school that you think they are worthwhile.  That you believe they have something to contribute. Right now, in every school in the country, there are quite a number of people who feel marginalized and are wondering if they are good enough – or who outright feel that they are NOT good enough!  Your simple act of letting the people in your school know you want to hear their opinions validates them!   Makes them feel more worthwhile. Makes them feel better about themselves! And when people feel better – especially when they feel appreciated – they perform better!

Feeling that you are worthwhile is one of the most basic of human needs.  Another basic human need is the need to belong.  The need to feel included.  Connected. And especially the need to feel that you are a significant part of something good!  And, look at it: to be a part of a group whose committed mission is to make that school the best possible place it can be; hey, that’s a good thing, so that means that you are a part of something good!  

So BOOM, right off the bat, everyone in the school has a boost in two of the most basic human needs!!  And, in fact, I believe that before long you will have a triple win going on, in that you will have new perspectives and ideas available from people who have a new and improved sense of self, and who are living within a new and inspired school-wide collective energy!

The members of the SIG will spend many hours evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the school, analyzing why something is working well or not, and offering well thought out suggestions on how best to expand or make even better the things that are working well, and how to improve or fix the issues that need fixing. They will look at curriculum, school regs, behavioral expectations, food, extra-curricular activities, counseling and mental health services, the school-community relationship, and anything else that is brought up.   

The principal does not relinquish any power!  With respect to the District Superintendent and expectations from the state or federal government, the principal still has the final say in the school building.  But now her or his decisions will be better informed.

Oftentimes principals and teachers want to introduce new and creative programs or courses into the school or the classroom. (I would guess the same is true for superintendents.)  But their jobs – including dealing with mandates from ‘above’ – are extremely demanding; and as such they usually don’t have the time and/or the energy to ‘add one more thing to their plate’.  Here’s where SIG can step up!  SIG members can put in that extra time in order to research, analyze, problem-solve, and just generally work out most of the kinks and logistical issues. They can then present to the principal a report which gives her or him (a) the info s/he did not have the time to compile, and (b) probably some specific suggestions on how to deal with would-be roadblocks and then effectively implement the program.

Thus initiatives which would otherwise have been impossible to accomplish will now see fruition!  

So what kinds of results can be expected if you institute an all-invited SIG in your school?  Increased feelings of self-worth.  A happier and healthier school culture.  Better curriculum – more interesting; more relevant and meaningful!  More course choices! More music and other Arts. More apprenticeships and experiential learning.  More extracurricular activities. More productivity.

Less violence and/or disruptive behavior. Better interpersonal relations – both intra-group and intergroup. 

Less depression.  Less drug and alcohol use.  More optimism and hope!

A stronger school-community relationship, wherein both will be healthier and happier places.

Improved reading and writing levels.  Increased attendance and higher graduation rates.

On an individual level, some of the students who excel as SIG members will be young folks who are already doing well in school.  Others will be students who have been mired in the background, maybe even somewhat invisible, who will step forward and shine. And there will be ‘at risk’ kids (sometimes considered ‘trouble-makers’) who will become trouble-fixers and problem-solvers!

Furthermore, and of extreme importance, SIG participants are experientially learning how to maximize their potential as life-livers and leaders! They’re learning effective communication skills – i.e. the importance of (1) assertive (instead of aggressive or timid) expression and (2) active listening.  They’re learning how to keep their minds open and look at issues from every angle – and how to analyze and synthesize, and work with others to develop creative solutions. They’re learning the responsibilities of democracy and voting. These students will be better prepared to live fulfilling lives, and to be highly informed and productive citizens!  

Roger Dennis