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Democracy in education

This talk was given by AERO Director Jerry Mintz on September 22, 2012 at TEDxYouth@BFS.

When I was 15 year old I wrote this poem about the school I was going to:

I hate this darn unthinking school

Which professes to teach you the Golden Rule–

“You fool me and I’ll make you a fool”

Against this I will rebel

 

Many’s the time when I’ve hated to stay

When the bored, boring teacher had nothing to say.

But “No!” says the teacher, “You can’t go away!”

And this I will also retell

 

So I learned what the bored, boring teacher had taught

And, thusly, I learned to be bored on the spot.

And ever since, I’ve been bored at the thought

Of the trash that the school has to sell

 

Oh, I’m sure education in school’s not all bad

And I’ll know things of interest when I am a grad.

But the camouflage job on the interest is sad

And the learning won’t set very well

 

And so every morning at just 8 o’clock

I rush in the school and behind me they lock

The door to my prison, and I start to walk

Through the prison, from cell to cell.

 

So you can see, I already had a bad attitude back when I was 15!

I think I know where that attitude came from: when I was very young our family would visit my mother’s parents in Boston every week or two. My grandfather, William Blatt, was a lawyer, and occasional judge. He had been president of the Massachusetts Law Society, but his real passion was writing and philosophy.

When we visited them, my grandfather would sit down with me and ask me what I wanted to learn. That simple act was the most powerful influence of my idea of how learning should take place. People probably thought he was crazy, talking to a seven year old about atheism, agnosticism, about what makes things humorous, the ego, id and superego, the causes of the world wars, Einstein’s theory, great discoveries in science, anything I wanted to know. But I remember these things to this day.  It seemed perfectly sensible to ask me what I was interested in, what I wanted to learn.

My grandfather also wrote epigrams, little sayings that appeared every day over the headlines of the Boston Post. In fact, to honor him we recently published a book of his epigrams with cartoons made by Albert Lamb.  Here are a couple of my favorites.

1: We get so used to slavery that we regard our manacles as ornaments.

2. If you always do as you are told you will always be told what to do.

They are still relevant after more that 60 years.

Not long after that I wrote that poem I organized some of my friends into a group we called “The Thinker’s Club.” We met at each other’s houses. They were all the elite students from the school except for me. They went on to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. We got together about twice a week and our agenda was to brainstorm any questions we wanted to discuss, without censorship. There were no adults involved. If we didn’t know the answers we went out and found guest speakers, or went to see rabbis, ministers, and philosophy students, etc. I now realize that this was the first school that I started.

A comedian on Saturday Night Live told the story about a university dean who said: You know, at our college we teach one year of language in one day. One year of language in one day!

When asked how they could do that he said, “Well, you know when you take a language in school and a year later you only remember four words? We teach those four words!”

Of course we laugh because we assume that people don’t remember what they learn in school. We also assume that children hate school. But why do we accept this? Modern brain research shows very clearly that children are natural learners: the brain wants to learn.

I think people’s negative school experiences carry over to their jobs for the rest of their lives! I think people accept jobs they hate because they are used to schools that they hate. In my experience, graduates of learner-centered and democratic schools usually find jobs they like to do.

If your child says he or she hates school—listen to that! It means something is wrong with their school and you need to get your child out of it and find an alternative! An alternative school is one which is based on the interest of the learner and empowers them to make decisions about their own education.

We who are involved with learner-centered approaches believe that children are natural learners. If you believe that, forced homework, competition for grades and high stakes testing make no sense and are exactly the wrong things to do, as Chris Mercogliano will describe in his talk.

In fact, when you force children to learn things they aren’t interested in it tends to extinguish that natural ability to learn. The human spirit is very strong, so students may resist that extinguishing for many years. But after five or six years the first paradigm becomes self-fulfilling, and students appear to become lazy and not interested in learning for its own sake.

That interest can sometimes be rekindled in the right environment. But in democratic schools we often observe a period of detoxification that takes place in students coming from traditional schools. Detoxification is a period of expression of anger at having been forced to learn things they weren’t interested in. Generally the longer they were in a coercive environment the longer it takes to recover their natural ability to learn. But after that there can be an explosion of self-motivated learning.

How fast can a student learn who hasn’t been forced to learn? We once had an intern who had been unschooled—he was always able to follow his own interest. At 16 he decided to go to college, but in order to get in to the college he chose, one of the tests he had to pass was algebra, and he had never been interested in algebra, never had studied it. So he decided to study algebra on his own—for one week—and aced the test, even taught it to others. So now we have a ratio: What is supposed to take a year took a week, a 52 to one ratio for an unschooler.

So, if students are able to have the freedom to follow their own interest, what happens when you have a whole group or whole school of them? This is where democratic process comes in. The democratic meeting insures that the freedom and rights of the individual do not encroach upon the rights of others in the group. And it goes beyond that. The interactive process usually comes up with better solutions than any one individual could. It is a learner-centered process for a group.

The word ‘democracy’ is one of the most over-used words these days, which tends to water down its meaning. But ‘democracy’ in this case means something very specific to people in democratic schools: the empowerment of a group of people to make real decisions in their meeting, and whatever is decided in that meeting actually happens. I think that the best way to prepare students to participate in a democratic society is to have them grow up in democratic schools. Why do we have them experience 12 years of a dictatorship and then expect them to be ready for democracy?

We have developed a form of democratic process that we learned from the Mohawks of the Iroquois confederacy

The Iroquois confederacy was the model that Jefferson and Franklyn used when they created the plan for democratic decision-making for the United Colonies of North America. Well, that was what they called our prospective country at first. I actually saw Franklyn’s original letter at the Archives in Washington. At that time the only other models around were kings and queens, monarchy.

Back in the late 1960’s I visited the Mohawk Tribe in upstate New York and learned how the Iroquois made decisions for their confederacy. In their approach the minority was honored and allowed to say why they voted against the majority if they wished. They or others could then ask for more discussion with new and hopefully better proposals. If nobody asked for a re-vote the community was saying that the final proposal was acceptable.

We developed a process based on that approach which I have demonstrated in many places around the country and around the world. When I go into a democratic meeting I am fully prepared to advocate for my point of view but I am also confident that the power of the meeting, the combining of all those free wills, will come up with something better, something we all never thought of. It takes a little longer than pure democracy but the decisions seem to be made more effectively. And with more authority.

I have sometimes heard this approach called unstructured. But a true democracy has a very complex structure. Sometimes I compare it to Penn Station at rush hour. It looks like chaos to those who don’t understand it, but actually every single person has a place they start from and a place they expect to get to. In a democratic school virtually everyone knows about all the decisions that have been made. Now that’s pretty structured and disciplined! The power of the democratic meeting is something to behold.

Let me give you an example of a demonstration that I did for a small school in Virginia. In the meeting the girls complained that they wanted a girls room rather than a unisex bathroom. That was voted on and passed. But one person voted against. When asked why he pointed out that the school would be moving in three weeks so it would be a waste of money and could be applied to the new building. Of course in the revote it wasn’t passed. When this happens in my demonstrations it is very important because people realize that decisions are not foreordained or made in stone.

With democratic process the participants learn how to listen to every voice. When we were organizing Brooklyn Free School we would have meetings in people’s apartments every two weeks. We encouraged people to bring their children, but they would often run off to play amongst themselves. At one meeting people had brought three six-year-olds. I told the group that I was sure these children had opinions about what the proposed school should be like. So they were asked to come into the meeting. When they realized that we knew they had opinions, one six year old said, “It’s very important that the school not be too clean or have new furniture. If it did, we wouldn’t be able to run around and jump and have fun. People would worry too much about the furniture!” Of course he was right. But who else but a six year old would have thought of this?

I learn something new every time I am asked to demonstrate democratic process. I’ll give you a few unusual examples:

In India I was asked to help democratize a school with 2500 students! Nobody in the United States has ever asked me to do that. Eventually we established a system in which each class would have a representative lead a meeting in their classroom and votes on the issues on the agenda would be taken the votes tallied. Those representatives would bring their votes with them to be totaled in the parliament. So it wasn’t a representative system in the usual sense, and all the students could have the experience of speaking in a relatively small group situation.

Not long after that I was asked to demonstrate democratic process in a school we had helped to start in our school starter course. The oldest student was 5 years old! Even though I’ve done this many times, I’m always shocked at the power of the results, because I did not grow up in such a system. As I drove over I had serious doubts about whether this would work. I was thinking that at least I would have to make the agenda for them. As I walked in I heard a 2 1/2 year old screaming MUMEEEE! Well, when they gathered around the table I told them that at a meeting we could talk about good ideas for the school or problems in the school. Immediately most of the hands went up. We had our agenda, about such subjects as not going outside if you had a cold and it was cold out, and not eating chocolate in the afternoon because it had a caffeine-like substance in it: That was brought up by a 4 year old!

My organization, the Alternative Education Resource Organization,  has helped to start more that 50 new educational alternatives in the last few years.

Probably the biggest revolution that could take place in schools all across the country would be to simply have the classroom door open and have a worthwhile place for the kids to go if they don’t want to be in class.

This is already the case in the School of Self-Determination, an inner-city public school with 600 students. In this school, the students have a constitutional right to leave any class they want, without explanation. The decisions at this school are made by a democratic parliament. The kids also interview the teachers before they are hired (the teachers get to do practice classes, and then the students vote on which teachers are going to be hired). And where is this school?   Inner city Moscow, Russia!

My mission is to promote the Education Revolution, to make learner-centered, empowering education available to students everywhere. I will help anyone who wants to change the system from within, but personally I think we are more likely to change it by creating good models outside the system.

Democratic process is not hard to do. Let me show you what I mean: Who here in the audience has some ideas or proposals on how to make education really learner centered and empowering of students?

If you have some ideas, come on stage. (A dozen people come on the stage and sit in a circle)

This is how it starts!