Category: News

“Today many communities across the country are facing new threats of instability, unaffordability, disempowerment, and displacement. As communities and policy-makers alike consider these threats, there is an emerging opportunity to develop strategies… that can help create inclusive, participatory, and sustainable economies built on locally-rooted, broad-based ownership of place-based assets.”COMMUNITY CONTROL of Land and Housing. Jarrid Green, Democracy Collaborative.

It’s 2006 and I’m sitting in a library, in a living room, in a Free School at 8:30AM, recording a group of six year olds who explain how they use democracy to settle disputes about collective resources. In this case it’s a boombox they have recently purchased with class funds. They tell me how it’s important to listen when people cry, and to find a solution together that is fair for everyone. I spent the next two months of that year with my crew interviewing children and adults from Vancouver to Tuscon to Albany who practice radical cooperation in the educational setting, culminating in the two disc audio documentary I Want to Do This All Day: Redefining Learning and Reinventing Education. We found that kids in Free schools and Freedom Schools feel agency in their communities. In the best cases, they know that equity is not possible without looking to the past, telling the story, and taking time to heal. Because of their education, they know what its like to have control over their resources, to share, and to hold actual decision-making power.  

Over a decade later the concept of community control is flying around my city, Philadelphia. Community control of public education, of affordable housing, of land, of food. What kind of world can we create when people make their own decisions about what they need, and how their resources will be spent? I can’t help but remember the children at the Free Schools practicing self-determination on a daily basis. A quick study of the history of compulsory schools shows us how integral education is to the formation of our white supremacist capitalist society. The pain and horror of Indian boarding schools, enslaved children being tortured and killed for reading, and factory style classrooms have taken up new forms in our current system. As before, folks survive because of their community’s collective care, boundless love, creativity & resourcefulness. We can not create an inclusive, participatory, sustainable world without Black and Brown children and their families in control of their own communities. 

I Want to Do This All Day: Redefining Learning and Reinventing Education was co-produced by Amber Woods and Althea Baird in 2008. It is now available for a ten-year anniversary re-release price of five dollars. Or pick up a free copy at the AERO conference in Portland, June 2019. Check out the project website dothisallday.org for a link to stream. For more writing on the project from Althea Baird, check out page six of this issue of Education Revolution Magazine. 

See John Merrow’s Article Here.

Well, maybe, John!

It reminds me of when I was talking to a student at Sudbury Valley School. He said, “I’d rather be in an authoritarian military school than in a school in which the teachers let you help decide some of the rules, with them leading the process. I’d rather know who my enemies are!”

So I believe very strongly in real democratic process. In that process I fully expect that the meeting WON’T come up with the same decisions the staff might have made. I believe in my bones (and from experience) that the meeting will come up with BETTER decisions than authority figures or students would make by themselves.

And indeed, yes, our culture has come to crave authority because those students grew up in an authoritarian system. This is much like the Russian public got so used to dictatorship that they had trouble with freedom and gravitated back to having an authoritarian leader to tell them what to do.

One of my staff members did some research and discovered that voting participation in the United States began to drop as the public school system grew, and it didn’t really correlate with anything else.

I once did a consultation with a school that wanted me to demonstrate democratic process. On the way over I realized that the oldest student was 5 years old! I thought that I would have to create the agenda for them. It was my public school roots speaking to me. When I started the process and explained that a democratic meeting should talk about “what might be a problem in the school, or what might be a good idea for the school” every hand went up and the agenda was instantly made. Among other things they decided that nobody should eat chocolate after the morning because it had a caffeine-like substance in it–this was brought up by a 4 year old. Another 4 year old brought up that he thought that is someone had a cold they shouldn’t go out in the cold. This was passed. I have a video of the whole consultation, called “Pre-School Democracy.“

So. I feel you went some of the distance but not all the way there.

Jerry

Dear APDEC2019 & Democratic Education Community,