{"id":6713,"date":"2014-11-17T14:20:54","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T19:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/?p=6713"},"modified":"2015-05-01T13:51:42","modified_gmt":"2015-05-01T17:51:42","slug":"democratic-education-and-low-voter-turnout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/democratic-education-and-low-voter-turnout\/","title":{"rendered":"Democratic Education and Low Voter Turnout"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tby Jerry Mintz<\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\t \n<\/div>\n
\n\tAfter last week's record low turnout for the midterm vote there were a lot of articles reporting this and despairing the phenomenon. But the analysis of why this happens didn't ever get to the core of the situation: <\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\t <\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\tAs I said in one of my TEDx talks,<\/a> "<\/span>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? <\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\t \n<\/div>\n
\n\tWhy would we think that people who attended schools for twelve or more years would be prepared to vote when they didn't grow up participating in a democracy?  In fact, the training in 95% of the schools seems to be how to live and survive in a dictatorship.<\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\t
\"Jerry
Jerry Mintz<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\n\tYou would think this would be self-evident. Democratic schools are very successful and their graduates do amazing things. Most of the schools we help people start have a sliding scale tuition and are interracial and have a spectrum of students.<\/span>
\n\t \n<\/div>\n
\n\tRelated to all of this is bullying. I believe that no program will "cure" bulling in mainstream public and private schools because of their top-down, authoritarian nature.  In that situation there will always be people at the "bottom" who will be bullied by those above. But in democratic and non-authoritarian  learner-centered schools bullying is hardly seen. When it does happen, a democratic meeting about it can be called right away. Even in public at-risk alternatives, researcher Dr. Robert Barr <\/a>discovered a starting drop in bullying statistics when he looked at alternative schools in his research.<\/span>\n<\/div>\n
\n\t \n<\/div>\n

\n\tYou might wonder why research like this doesn't lead to drastic changes. I do, too. But I think that the current authoritarian system serves some economic vested interests and is also more akin to a religion. It is based on habits and  rituals and not very amenable to research or discussion. So that is our challenge! We know that learner-centered and democratic schools work. How do we get this across to the mainstream so we can truly have an Education Revolution?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jerry Mintz   After last week's record low turnout for the midterm vote there were a lot of articles reporting this and despairing the phenomenon. But the analysis of why this happens didn't ever get to the core of the situation:   As I said in one of my TEDx talks, "I think that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6715,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[240],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6713"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6720,"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713\/revisions\/6720"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.educationrevolution.org\/store\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}