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
