THUMB NAIL SKETCH OF A DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION SCHOOL EXEMPLAR

Here suggested in general description is an exemplar of a Democratic Education school of four separate, sequential micro-programs, an Early Childhood, a Primary Education and a Secondary Education and an Early College.

 

Internal Built Environment

Physical space is perhaps one of the strongest transmitters of collective expectations in beliefs, attitudes, personal and interpersonal behaviors, and among the most consequential in either obstructing or assisting learning to the individuals occupying the space.  Moreover, for those with heightened sensitivity to light and sound, such as in Autism Spectrum Disorder, the very acoustic and illuminating properties within school spaces can greatly interfere with or encourage healthy activity and development.  

 

Thus, an exemplar would construct its internal learning spaces specifically to convey a home hearth sense of caring, security and relaxation as well as conveying an artisanal, imaginative, inventive and productive impulse: such would be as a warm, artist’s-studio loft. 

 

A loft environment would provide subdued general lighting, except in such as wood or metal working shop lofts and other spaces where safety requires brightness; both subdued and high intensity spot lighting would be employed over specific work stations, again with the exception of shop and other spaces requiring brightness.  Sound-reducing walls would be found in all lofts. Each loft would provide its students a sheltered quite space with subdued and spot lighting.  Common areas and offices would be as subduedly lighted as safety permits with work stations and desks spot lighted and as sound-reduced as possible.

 

Exemplar School Governance

A Democratic school would have a “Board of Trustees” securing the full funding of the institution and overseeing the global arrangements of management systems and policy formation and implementation, even in a public system. While the Board would be comprised of adults willing and able to proactively support the Communitarian-Libertarian, democratic nature of the institution and thus enthusiastically fulfill their obligations to the institution, it would of necessity have a sizable plurality of students assuring student body decision making at this level of the organization, 

 

A Democratic school would employ administrators to accomplish the executive functions of the institution as a whole under specific, democratic guidance of the sole school-wide policy determining body, the “All School Council”.  The Council organizes the common elements across the institution into a coherent educational establishment. And, among other duties, the Council oversees and coordinates program determined policies and management decisions, supervises and evaluates learning and psychological wellness systems, operates the school’s Restorative Justice Systems, oversees budget and business management structures, and sets, monitors and evaluates physical space and learning material needs against the school’s Mission.  Voting membership in the Council is to comprise an even balance between Secondary Education and Early College program students on the one hand (Early Childhood students are relieved of this self-governing obligation) and administrators and instructional staff on the other.  The Council would meet bi-monthly-more often when needed-forms committees to set meeting agendas and do its background work.  It operates by consensus where consensus means that all who vote can live with decisions not that all necessarily favor any. Meetings are always open to any member of the school community.

 

Each program, a kind of micro-school itself, organizes and maintains its functioning through weekly gatherings called Program Meetings.  Program Meetings assure coherent, successive progression of social, emotional and cognitive growth in students in each area of schooling responsibility by, among other obligations, setting, evaluating and supervising learning and psychological support systems against Mission goals and recommending to All School Council alterations needed to better meet goals, setting advancement criteria and benchmarks for passing from one level to another and out of school, identifying and setting rules and expectant behaviors consistent and inconsistent with  norms of the school, operates its Restorative Justice System, as well as working to resolve any and all immediate learning and behavioral issues.  Each program’s Meeting forms committees to set agendas and to accomplish its background work.  Votes taken in each Program Meeting are by consensus where consensus is defined as all who vote can live with the decision not that all are necessarily for any. 

 

Only the Early Childhood exemplar excludes its students from its Program Meetings while all instructional staff would attend. 

 

 

 

The Earl Childhood Program Exemplar

The Early Childhood exemplar would heterogeneously group students within several self-contained ungraded, mixed aged prepared lofts. These prepared environments would provide exposure and access to the widest concrete-kinesthetic knowledge in practical life materials, activities and play sets, sensorial keys and experiences of nature, of people, of art, of music, of language, of math and measurement, also in toys, such as building blocks, dolls, cars, trucks, planes, rail roads, as well as in other items such as sand and water tables.  There would be provided areas intended to stimulate and accommodate free, imaginative play as well as free individual and group physical play.  Specific engagement with the materials and the activities of the prepared environment would be wholly up to each child. 

 

The program focuses attention on individual child psychological and physiological development:  especially on autonomous self-regulation keyed to social-emotional, executive functioning and interpersonal behaviors, and on appropriate growth in gross and fine motor movement and in overall body capacities.  Staff would uncover individual student psycho-dynamic, psycho-social and neurocognitive baselines enabling mentor counseling and situational assistance points of departure and continued directed support. 

 

Direct instruction of subject content is not intended, but loft staff would be free to cooperatively aid a child or children to gain understanding when either requested by a student or students or when staff initiated intervention is granted agreement by a student or students.  A loft staff member or a student may offer to lead small group activities for voluntary participation.

 

A permeable border between Early Childhood and Primary Education would be set moving students who have gained program self-governance-determined advancement benchmarks regardless of age into the Primary Education program.

 

The Primary Education Program Exemplar

The exemplar of Primary Education would heterogeneously group students within several self-contained ungraded, mixed aged prepared lofts.  These prepared environments would provide exposure and access to the widest subject knowledge available in a school up the ladder of abstraction from the concrete-kinesthetic to an appropriate abstract in learning stations centered on the general areas of Literacy, Language, and Measurement and in specific areas of Earth, Space and Life Sciences, History and Geography, Music, Preforming and Visual Arts, Digital Sciences, Wood Working, Agricultural Science, Home Arts, and Athletics.  It would provide for free play with materials such as puzzles and games, costumes and theatrical makeup, paints and crayons, newsprint and paper, and in performance spaces, and indoor and outdoor playgrounds.  Specific engagement with the materials and the activities of the prepared Primary Education environment would be wholly up to each child. 

 

Direct instruction of subject content is not intended, but loft staff would be free to cooperatively aid a child or children to gain understanding when either requested by a student or students or when staff initiated intervention is granted agreement by a student or students.  A loft staff member or a student may offer to lead small group activities for voluntary participation.

 

Student subject knowledge acquisition of an exemplar Primary Education would be individual and emergent rather than being uniform and mandated:  the course of topic learning over an entire residency would emerge unique to every child as they engage the vast subject prepared environments through distinctive neurology, abilities, interests and communication styles.

 

However, a goal of Primary Education common to all children would be the development in each in their own way of competencies in receiving, processing and communicating written, oral and graphic information, including mathematical information, allowing each to comfortably accept secondary education.  These objectives would emerge over time from student-mentor negotiated agreements, situational student-staff cooperative assistance and individual student effort and would be based on felt student need to gain additional tools to explore more of the subject filled prepared environments than through mandated mastery on or before a time or an age certain.  

 

The program would focus attention on strengthening autonomous self-regulation, executive functioning, social-emotional management, and in developing behavioral habits of cooperation, Primary Education mentors would counsel for personal psycho-dynamic, psycho-social and neurocognitive development and subject seeking, selecting and learning issues while situational assistance would focus on individual student self-regulation, interpersonal behavior and neurocognitive functioning issues

 

A permeable border between Primary Education and Secondary Education would be set moving students who have gained program self-governance-determined advancement benchmarks regardless of age into the Secondary Education program.

 

The Secondary Education Program Exemplar

The Secondary Education exemplar would have students within an ungraded, mixed aged single setting developing high quality deliberative concrete through high abstract thinking, manual skills, oral and written language competency, habits of cooperation and subject topics of interest.   Mentoring and situational assistance would help individual students to retain and to further build autonomous self-regulation, Ego strength and psychological well-being, as well as aiding in subject seeking, selecting and learning issues.

 

Inquiry Project Based Learning would be a preferred learning structure.  Students would engage the vast knowledge world open to them through individual or cooperative small group inquiry projects. Projects would be developed, implemented, presented and feedback given through participation in Subject Lofts, i.e., richly resourced subject-area prepared environments, where members act together to achieve individual or common project objectives and where Loft members through demonstrations and presentations share the knowledge gained by their projects. There would be a number of Subject Lofts inhabiting their own spaces and facilitated each by at least two Learning Specialists: They would cover areas such as Outdoor Education, Physical Science, Mathematics, Social Science, History, Geography, Letters, Fine Arts, Music, Performing Arts, Foreign Language Arts, Electric, Electronic and Digital Sciences, Carpentry/Woodworking, Metal Working, Agricultural Science, Home Arts, and Athletics. 

 

Secondary Education students would initiate all inquiry projects rather than rely on staff directed assignments. Prior to the start of each and every inquiry project, students would consult with their staff mentor, the learning specialist most appropriate to the possible project and fellow students in the Subject Loft most relevant.  Having decided on an inquiry topic, students would outline the project stating an inquiry question, the methods to be used to answer the question, the product the inquiry intends to generate and the criteria for project success in the form of performance assessment rubrics, i.e., qualitative statements describing specific standards against which students can self-assess and others when requested by a student can employ to evaluate a student’s work.  In completed form, students would present the project plan to both the student’s mentor and appropriate Loft learning specialist and then begin the project.

 

A student may request the Loft group within which he/she is working to evaluate a project at any stage of its undertaking using the student’s own criteria for success rubrics. Mandated formal evaluation of completed projects by staff is not intended: however, individual students may request a formal assessment from any staff, especially from the student’s mentor or the learning specialist of the Loft in which the project was undertaken.  Students and their mentors would be obliged to save project proposals, project products and any evaluations for portfolio construction demonstrating student work and satisfaction of advancement criteria.

Occasionally there may be a need felt by students or observed by the learning specialist for direct instruction of project skills or of assessment methods or of common subject content or of other information.  In these cases, a student, a group of students or the learning specialist would call a narrowly targeted, short duration Loft seminar for student voluntary participation to fill the need.  Also, a learning specialist may work singularly with a student on specific skills or subject content when requested by the student.  If a learning specialist sees the need to work singularly with a student, he/she may offer, but it is ultimately the student’s prerogative to accept or reject the offer.  There may be felt a need by students, especially, or by the learning specialist in a Subject Loft to gather students together for facilitated conversations on topics of interest.  Here a student, a group of students or the learning specialist would offer for student voluntary participation a narrowly targeted, short duration special seminar.

 

A permeable border between Secondary Education and the Early College would be set moving students who have gained program self-governance-determined advancement benchmarks regardless of age into the Early College.

 

The Early College Program Exemplar

The exemplar of an Early College would have students within an ungraded single setting. 

Young program scholars would have opportunities for deep, cooperative, scholarly inquiry into questions of curiosity, interest and passion within the customary semester terms September to June, as well as great many occasions to enhance oral and written language competencies, and to if chosen, work through physical materials to explore learned concepts in the Secondary Education’s Loft shops.

 

The program’s mentoring focus would provide sensitive feedback on self-actualizing young scholar decisions and to counsel when self-regulation conflicts arise. While immediate situational assistance is not formally included at this level, Early College instructors are free to offer assistance, but it is ultimately a student’s prerogative to accept or reject the offer.

 

Development of inquiry course offerings would be an immediate and a vital obligation of the Early College’s self-governance structure; however, a “Great Question” Liberal Arts approach might be preferred.  An example of a Great Question might be:  “How did the eighteenth century European belief against Superstition and Fanaticism affect the construction of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment?”  This Great Question would describe and analyze the development, meaning and effects of the European Enlightenment belief in Rational Religion and in the dangers of Superstition and Fanaticism on the framing of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Other Great Questions might be:

How does Dark Matter Matter?

How can one render unto Caesar when Caesar is wrong?

Why is the child mother to the woman?

Is reality really real?

Can Spacetime truly bend?

 

Completion of program self-governance-determined graduation requirements would grant students a high school diploma, an Associate of Arts degree, and, if desired, an opportunity into a four year college as an upper matiiculant to complete a Bachelor’s degree..  The course of inquiry in the Early College would be wholly the choice of individual students.  But, if students choose to continue with formal study and to transfer to a Bacheloriate program after graduating from the Early College, they would work with their mentor to structure their study to satisfy general university core requirements.   

 

There is intended to be no formal assessment of Early College student subject content learning either during or at completion of courses.  However, the program’s self-governance structure might consider the expectations of the world beyond the exemplar’s walls requiring some demonstration of accumulated knowledge when it considers requirements for advancement and for graduation.  With such decisions in hand, Early College student-staff mentor conversations must, as much as possible, unfold in students a clear understanding of program self-governance-determined criteria and satisfaction of criteria for advancement and for graduation.  Also, these conversations should unfold agreements between student and mentor on the progress of satisfying criteria and an agreement on the constitution of complete satisfaction of criteria allowing the student to graduate. 

 

In the ideal world, a Senior College into which Early College graduates would enter along with young adults from other institutions would be established moving students onward within The Communitarian-Libertarian Hybrid frame to complete their undergraduate education.  However, this outline provides education only through an Early College.

 

Students in each program would live and work well together proceeding at their own pace and cooperatively working with their staff mentors, immediate instructional staff and schoolmates to satisfy community determined criteria for advancement to the next program level and, ultimately, to graduation from the school having taken from the store of human knowledge through a school that which is of interest, of passion, of felt need fulfilling the promise of a Democratic Education.

FOUNDATIONS OF A DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION SCHOOL MODEL

(As of this writing, early August, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to play high havoc with “in-person” schooling in the United States.  Education authorities are adjusting their plans for this school year and years to come accordingly with many continuing remote instruction either full time or as blended learning.  However, the face-to-face school is wholly anticipated to continue as the expression of the social institution of Education as the too entrenched current social organization of labor demands the custodial function of the in-person school to endure in excellent health well into the future.  This paper firmly assumes the need and thus the further existence of the in-person school.)

 

Democratic Education may be characterized as a Communitarian-Libertarian Hybrid.  The hybrid structures a Communitarian, interdependent culture, governance and member support and a Libertarian student subject seeking, acquisition and use.  Personal success in living and working well within the organization is contingent on adult-youth egalitarian management of institutional administration, policy and social control accomplished through equality of rights, negotiation and mutual agreement between and among adults and children while individual student subject success is contingent on a high degree of personal self-determination supported by the mutual aid of other students and community staff.  Contemporary examples of The Communitarian-Libertarian Hybrid center mostly on the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA, (www.sudval.org/) and its modeled schools, on Summerhill School in Leiston, England, (www.summerhillschool.co.uk/) and to a lesser extent on Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, (https://antiochcollege.edu/).. 

 

To assure the communitarian-libertarian habits of mind, behavior and expectation promised by the model, students ought to grow through schooling intentionally constructed to engender and express these traits.  Herein stated are the foundations of such an endeavor,

 

History

The antecedents of today’s Democratic Education schools go back to the early twentieth century with the Modern School Movement and Progressive Education and Francisco Ferrer, Mildred Johnson, Gertrude Ayer, Maria Montessori, and Alexander Sutherland Neill.  Ferrer in Spain looked to develop children’s knowledge and skills according to each student’s abilities rather than through drilled instruction and uniform lessons. (Avrich) The Spanish educator's ideas in the United States combined with Progressive Education’s emphasis on self-directed student learning and learning by doing sparked the Modern School Movement establishing schools beginning in 1910, one of which was Mildred Johnson’s Modern School in the Harlem of 1934. (Perlstein) Additionally, as a direct consequence of the Progressive Education of the moment, Gertrude Ayer’s New York City’s PS 24 in the Harlem of 1935 featured experiential learning, self-directed projects and democratic classroom living among other Progressive pedagogy. (Perlstein)  

 

Contemporaneously with Progressive Education, Ferrer and the Modern School Movement, Maria Montessori in Italy saw children striving to satisfy their immediate needs as motivating individual learning behavior. She noticed what she called “sensitive periods”, those times when a child’s mind is more in need of acquiring a specific knowledge set than at other moments.  Further, she observed how powerful and energetic natural curiosity was for learning, to the point where no adult need force a child to learn, especially during the sensitive periods. From these observations, she developed her “Method”.  (Montessori)

 

The Method centers itself in adults preparing a learning environment for children filled with material and activity calculated to resonate with each sensitive period. In the Method adults do not tell children what to do beyond an initial explanation on how to use the prepared environment. As children engage the elements of the prepared environment, the Method’s teachers consciously observe how each child interacts with the materials and the activities ascertaining each child’s needs and if required altering the environment-the material, the activity, even the spatial arrangements within a classroom-to put in the way of the child the elements to satisfy the child’s needs.  (Montessori) The Method became the driver of schools called Montessori.

 

In 1923, a psychologist, A.S. Neill, having twice moved a school he founded in Germany two years earlier, relocated again into a house in Lyme Regis, England, called Summerhill.  In 1927, Neill and Summerhill School moved once more finding their permanent and present home in Leiston, England. (http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/history.php)  In Summerhill, children were/are freed from psychic barriers to self-actualization: they were/are allowed to be themselves.  Neill’s school is a setting where formal learning is driven by innate ability, desire and interest, where imaginative play is of greatest importance, lessons are optional and social control ordered by the school community through a democratic process of adult and child having one vote on issues open to community decision. (Neill, 1960.)

 

However, the psychologist’s and Summerhill’s influence would flower only after the release of Neill’s Summerhill: A radical approach to child-rearing in 1960.  Mary Leue, founder of The Free School in Albany, NY, Daniel Greenburg, founder of Sudbury Valley School in Framingham MA, and many other Americans in the 1960’s, including the founders of the public Lehman Alternative Community School in Ithaca, NY,  latched on tightly to Neill’s notion that the freedom from adult coercion to choose that subject engagement which affects the child individually, that which is of interest, of passion, of felt need, must drive learning for only under such freedom can the child grow to be the well-adjusted adult the child was meant to be.  They also fully appreciated and accepted Neill’s belief in and Summerhill’s practice of the democratic form of school community self-governance as necessary to securing that freedom.  These “free” or “open” schools, then as now, gave youngsters both the responsibility to define what it means individually to be formally educated and to collectively govern the community in which they were free to learn and grow in their own way and in their own time to their own ends.

 

In the early1980’s, Yaacov Hecht in Israel like many before came across Neill and Summerhill. (Hecht, p. 31, and pp. 32-35).  The psychologist, his 1960 book and his school made clear to Hecht the main components of his vision of a democratic school:

     “.  A choice in the areas of learning; the students choose what they want to learn and how.

      .  Democratic self-management.

      .  Evaluation focusing on the individual-without comparison with others and without tests and grades.

      .  A school where children grow from age four until adulthood (eighteen or over).”

         (Hecht, p. 34)

 

Hecht took his main components from Summerhill extended them to day schools, as Neill suggested only residential schools could provide the conditions for a democratic education, embraced access to the widest and the deepest of human knowledge available through a school, as Summerhill tended to circumscribe a good deal of instruction to state endorsed curricula, and founded The Democratic School of Hadera.. From Hadera, Hecht popularized his ideas, founded and helped to established schools throughout the globe under the collective label of Democratic Education. (Hecht, pp. 243-322, and 323-357.)

 

The Keystone:

The keystone of Democratic Education is in the cultivation of as well-balanced a developing psychology in each youngster as possible within a highly supportive egalitarian community.   As Neill points out, “If a child is free to approve of himself, he will not usually be hateful.  He will not see any fun in trying to make an adult lose his temper…” or to make another child unhappy, for that matter. (Neill, 1960, p  l9)

 

The principal means taken by the model to cultivate a well-balanced psychology is through an ever strengthening individual Ego consequent of a student’s self-determined learning aided by the mutual assistance of fellow community members, youth and adult.  A strong individual Ego builds confidence in youth's abilities to move through the world in his and her own way, to deal well with challenges the world throws up, to recognize the needs of others and to support others in whichever way they will accept without reproach if support is declined, to recognize the needs of self and to seek and accept support in meeting these needs, to construct and work through independent and interdependent relationships and to know which is necessary and appropriate in situations.  Also, such a strengthening cultivates high levels of emotional intelligence enabling a youngster to regulate feelings, even in tough circumstances.

 

Ego strength lives in the cultivation and use of an individual’s Autonomous Self-Regulation, a system of conscious personal management guided by the feeling that the behavior, the emotion, or the cognition being regulated is affected for reasons a person values, finds meaningful, and wholly endorses.

 

And healthy development of Autonomous Self-Regulation capacities unfolds within formal school settings as a direct response to a supportive learning community’s ability to satisfy the basic psychological needs for Relatedness, Competence and Autonomy.  Relatedness should be understood as close, affectionate relationships with others built on the reciprocity of factors like trust, empathy and personal habits of cooperation.  The Communitarian interdependence structured by and fully anticipated in individual self-endorsed cooperative habits of mind and behavior secures Relatedness in each of a community’s members, child and adult.  Competence is to be understood as the conscious awareness of doing well in applying and efficiently executing a range of or a specific skill or ability.  Here, the Relatedness fully fixed within members of a supportive learning community encourages risk so individuals can explore, experiment and test without negative sanctions until an inner assurance is built that one feels competent. Autonomy is to be understood as the development of the Self as an independent identity from others, as the deep inner sense of empowerment, as the ability to function independently without control by others.  The very nature of the Libertarian aspects of Democratic Education, the right to choose that which affects the individual, the searching for personal interest, the following of subject passion, along with the cultivation of Competence makes fast the sense of an empowered Self.  (See Deci, et al, 2008, for discussion related to the Self-Determination Theory grounding the above.)

 

Democratic Education unfolds Relatedness, Competency and Autonomy sustaining a well-adjusted Autonomous Self-Regulation, leading to a strong Ego and, ultimately, to a balanced psychology in students through the twin schooling processes of Supported Self-Directed, Negotiated, Cooperative Learning and School Community Self-Governance.

 

Supported Self-Directed, Negotiated, Cooperative Learning

And School Community Self-Governance

As the title indicates, the scholarship process in Democratic Education of Supported Self-Directed, Negotiated, Cooperative Learning is broken down into four elements integrated in practice, separated for explanation 

 

“Supported” is the provision of two formal counseling structures, a long term mentoring and an immediate situational assistance, to help youngsters become aware of and place into reasonable perspective internal and external behavioral and performance expectations and how to manage and channel anxieties, frustrations and anger when undertaking to fulfill expectations:  Here, students engage in a close mentoring relationship of adult to youth where a trained instructional staff mentor and a youngster enter a process mutually respectful of the wisdom of each to cooperatively work on student social-emotional, psycho-dynamic, neurocognitive  and behavioral issues, on subject seeking, selecting and learning issues, and on common understandings of and agreements on specific learning and developmental goals and the action steps required to reach those goals.  The immediate assistance structures a trained instructional staff member and a student cooperatively working together on present situational self-regulation, interpersonal behavior, neurocognitive functioning and specific topic learning issues.

 

“Self-Directed Learning” places the locus of all subject decisions squarely within the individual student where each accepts responsibility for taking from the vast store of human knowledge available through a school what is wished to be known, the scope of knowing, when and how knowing is to be undertaken as well as determining the duration, outcome and success of any learning activity and the course of learning for a school quarter, term and entire residency.

 

“Negotiated Learning” leads students to navigate among intrinsically motivated inclinations, internal school community requirements and external social community obligations of achievement so students can determine their own course of advancement within the school, for graduation from the school and for life after graduation.

 

“Cooperative Learning” is the process of students working well together with other students and community adults through internalized habits of cooperation to achieve both individual and common learning and personal development goals. 

 

Thus, the Democratic learning structure develops mental wellness supporting the readiness and the actualization to choose the immediate and long term objects of study and the means of one’s own scholarship, to ask for and receive as well as to offer and have accepted assistance in study selection and acquisition, and to find one’s interest, passion, purpose and acceptance within community.

 

Now, Democratic Education students cannot assure themselves the close support, the self-direction, the cooperation and the collegiality, or the exposure and the access to the widest of human knowledge through a school from which to choose promised by the model unless they can safely anticipate these conditions as routine and as fundamental to the very existence of the school in which they are enrolled.  Such guarantees are to be found in the processes of School Community Self-Governance.

 

School Community Self-Governance is where learning community adults and students come together in meetings of the whole using a Democratic Process to decide on issues open to community resolution:  where adults and youth have equal rights to speak and to persuade within community forums and where a one person-one vote process settles issues in areas such as curriculum and instruction, achievement and assessment, projects and assignments, benchmarks in learning and developmental progress, graduation criteria and demonstrations satisfying the criteria, rules and behaviors consistent with and in violation of norms of the school as well as the means by which violating rules and norms are resolved, and in management issues as in some community self-governing schools, hiring staff, budgetary and fund raising issues, facilities maintenance and record keeping.

 

(While many in Democratic Education argue to include all ages in the entirety of school community self-governing processes, this paper maintains that ordinarily children up to the age of about eleven years given proper conditions will develop well in self-direction, negotiation and cooperativeness but will not have yet sufficiently developed the reflective faculties enabling the distancing of self from immediate experience necessary to objectify and to consequently analyze their own and other’s global and particular interactions within and around school environments against the needs of the community and the individuals in it and then provide means and methods of better satisfying those needs through organizational construction.  Consequently, these ages, the paper holds, are unable to meet the totality of self-governance duties.  Thus, full student participation in self-governing processes begins at Secondary Education age.  However, Primary Education ages should be capable of participation in their social control rule and norm making and in adjudicating rule and norm violations in an appropriately structured Restorative Justice system as well as democratically governing a range of immediate learning issues.) 

Democratic School Design

Good examples of Democratic Education schools here in the U.S. tend to be very small micro-schools, a single ungraded setting of say thirty or fifty or even seventy-five students with an age spread from as young as four to as old as nineteen covering early childhood through secondary education.   Learning communities of this size can easily support development of individual autonomous self-regulation and Ego strength while employing direct democracy governance, the vehicle of community self-governance.  Indeed, in a micro-school, staff and students have immediate and ready access to each other during all parts of the school day enabling comfortable long term mentoring and immediate situational behavioral and subject knowledge assistance while the school itself can effortlessly come together in regular meetings of the whole institution to resolve issues open for community decision.  Additionally, these tiny communities can effectively unfold in both students and staff the greatest sense of common ownership of the school and what goes on within it. 

 

These micro-environments are socially and educationally viable regardless of setting and they are fiscally sustainable as program offerings in public or private school settings adjunct to a general education, especially in low population density school districts.  However, they, as a rule, tend to be too small in student enrollment for comfortable medium to long term fiscal sustainability as stand-alone private or public schools, especially in low density districts.   

 

In the view of New York City’s Department of Education, especially during the Mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013) small schools are preferred for the best educational service to children.  A viable small school according to the NYC DOE has an enrollment of four hundred students.  But, setting aside the lack of youngsters in low population density areas for a four hundred student alternative to conventional setting, student bodies of that size, especially, intended as a single self-contained ungraded Democratic Education setting would confound effective self-direction, thwart negotiated, cooperative learning, overwhelm psychological and behavior support systems, make direct democracy self-governance unattainable, and destroy community controlled behavior systems.

 

Timely ease of initial resource access and ready availability to resources from which one has been working are at the heart of self-directed learning.  Student bodies the size of New York City’s defined four hundred or more in a single ungraded setting would create resource scarcity greatly frustrating the capacity, the desire and the movement of self-direction in learning engagement.

 

Additionally, just by the force of numbers, the type and the depth of connection among students themselves and with staff, building and maintaining the reciprocal trusting, empathetic and deeply respectful relationships necessary to fulfill the Democratic Education promise cannot happen.

 

More, a weekly All School Meeting, the Democratic Education governance structure, of four hundred students plus all staff is too large of a body to maintain an attentive orderliness and too differentiated in self-determination and cooperative capacities, not to say in interest and attention spans, to unfold a thorough individual participation in the democratic formation of school policy and management issues, no less to cultivate the ownership feelings in each and every member of the school community necessary for highly effective community self-governance.

 

Finally, the self-governance systems of social control of community members, from direct democratic rule-making to the adjudication of rule breaking and misconduct, forthrightly assume the permanent presence of congenial order which will be broken at times, but restored once inappropriate behavior has been adjudicated.   Now, the chaos causing interaction of a micro-school’s say fifty youngsters, especially, when energetic all at once, ripples the assumptions, but the intimate nature of the relations within a micro-school finds ready peer pressure either to allay the bad behavior or to feel comfortable in supporting a formal complaint to the judicial system, thus, keeping the assumptions and their systems whole.  On the other hand, the freneticism engendered by the energetic exertions of four hundred, especially when all at once, would in itself, notwithstanding the presence of a democratic judicial system, cause a host of bad behaviors far more supported than impeded by peer pressure nullifying the assumptions, collapsing the effects of democratic community social control and, by force, transforming the basis of social control to a top-down, authoritarian model, negating nearly the entire structure of a Democratic Education school.. 

 

Thus, a conundrum sets itself between a questionably unsustainable tiny micro-school and a disastrous large small school within the population density necessary for a fiscally sustainable stand-alone private or public Democratic Education school as assumed by New York City’s Department of Education.  The solution appears to be to reduce the NYC DOE enrollment some, still assuring enrollment producing economies of scale for the institution as a whole, and to divide the single ungraded, mixed age setting into micro-program enrollments in Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary Education and Early College.  Not so incidentally, breaking a sizable student body into ungraded mixed aged micro-programs keeps the benefits of older children modeling and helping younger, keys to successful single setting micro-schools, while creating a far more focused individual student assistance according to the particulars of developmental stages than is usual with a single mixed age setting of four to nineteen year olds.

 

Therefore, a Democratic Education, i.e., Communitarian-Libertarian Hybrid, exemplar for population dense areas would be a single school of four separate, sequential micro-programs:  an ungraded, mixed age Early Childhood program of say fifty students from approximately four to six years of age; an ungraded, mixed age Primary Education program of around seventy-five students from approximately seven to eleven years of age; an ungraded, mixed age Secondary Education program of about seventy-five students from approximately twelve to sixteen years of age, and an ungraded Early College program of roughly one hundred-twenty five .students from approximately sixteen years of age.. A Democratic Education exemplar for low population density areas would still break the student body into schooling levels of Early Childhood, Primary, Secondary and Early College but would, obviously, enroll many fewer in each level and consequently might combine levels, such as Early Childhood and Primary, and Secondary and Early College, resulting in a program resembling more of a single ungraded mixed-aged micro-setting than its high density sibling. 

 

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