Democratic Education Curriculum and Summation

(Author’s Note:  Christopher Quirk, Director of Easton County Day School, graciously allowed me to work closely with him on a proposal for a sustainable education community.  Part of this collaboration centered on a K-12 school.  This final exposition was a culmination of that collaboration in January, 2012.)

Democratic Education resets the conventional schooling structure and the relationships of adult to curriculum, child to curriculum and adult to child to where what is learned, when learning happens and how what is chosen to be learned is both child self-directed and adult-child negotiated.

In the conventional structure what is learned, the curriculum, is broken down into compartmentalized disciplines which are further broken down into subjects which themselves are divided into units which again are divided into smaller accumulations of specific facts and concepts available for the learner to take up into ready recall memory.  A basic outline of disciplines is as follows:

-English Language Arts

-Mathematics

-Social Studies

-Sciences

-Unified Arts (a sort of catch all for everything not included above)

The sociology of knowledge as discipline division is an inheritance of the specialization and expansion in knowledge from the late Middle Age European Classical grammar school trivium and the university quadrivium.  Indeed, the growth in the complexity of the sociology of knowledge under the agency of print dramatically increased information circulation, popular understanding and intellectual discovery requiring ever more differentiation of knowledge into distinct disciplines which were taken by generations of school folks as the basis for general study, preparing the young for a world where such knowledge was supposedly required.

However with the growth and societal saturation of electronic information technologies, three distinct effects must be recognized:  1) that the pace of information production exploded to the point where it is no longer possible, even if it were in times past, to hold the resulting amounts of information in memory; 2) that the need to hold information in human memory has been eliminated as these vast amounts are now stored in immediate access, digital memory; and 3) that the connectivity of digital media has broken down discipline barriers to recombine specialized knowledge at intersecting points.

Thus, it makes far more sense today for school folks to provide learning experiences whereby children can master learning rather than to master content, and what content is offered should take full notice of the recombination of specialized knowledge. 

To acquire learning skills in a child-decision-centered environment of a Democratic Education school is to provide a wide range of opportunities for children to engage using their native instincts and individual differences, their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, slowly gaining the skills as they test hunches/hypotheses, as they explore, discover and unfold, as they bring to consciousness through meta-cognitive development the mindfulness necessary for intentional learning decision making. 

It would begin with the readiness to acquire learning skills as the objective of an early childhood program while the acquisition of learning skills would be the focus of the elementary.  The mastery of learning would be the province of a secondary education.

To take full notice of the recombination of specialized knowledge is to provide an integrated, interdisciplinary thematic curriculum which at the macro-level can be ordered through Curriculum Strands, such as:

     -The Life Cycle in the Natural World

     -Communication Between Individuals and Within Groups

     -Identity Within Groups and Institutions

     -The Nature of Time and Space

     -Our Response to the Aesthetic

     -Our Relationship to Nature

     -Our Role as Producers and Consumers

     -Our Efforts to Live with Purpose.

Broken down into theme categories the curriculum strand of The Life Cycle in the Natural World, for instance, might include Ecology.  And the category Ecology itself can be broken down into themes such as:  Geography-life’s web of place and climate, and their affects on the development of plants, animals and people; Change-evolution and extinction, natural and man-made; Conservation-soil, air, water, energy; Micro and Macro Environments-explorations of the smallest and the largest ecosystems.  The curriculum strands and their theme categories and individual themes constitute the structural framework of the intentional learning community’s curriculum which the school constructors and governors are obliged to populate richly with resources and activities in order to  provide the knowledge sets open to child self-directed and negotiated learning.

The curriculum strands, as suggested above, would supply the knowledge categories youngsters engage in the abstract and in the experiential.  So, as a further example, within the curriculum strand of Our Relationship to Nature might be the theme category of Bugs and Other Creepy Crawly Creatures-explorations into insects and the role they play in ecosystems-whereby those exploring the theme could select a few square feet of property, describe the micro-ecosystem there, observe and note over a certain period all insects in the air column over the property, the creepy crawlers on and around the ground and under the surface to approximately 18 inches.  Then they would investigate to uncover the roles within that micro-ecosystem the creepy crawlers and flying insects have.  Having noted the findings, a report in a medium of choice would be produced and presented.  And on to the next theme, the next inquiry and on the education in this manner goes.

In summary, then, an altered schooling structure that would make it impossible for the problems of conventional schooling to take root is defined:

     -by the mission to cultivate in all youngsters a solid psychological foundation for future growth and a cognitive dexterity for life long adaptability to life’s vicissitudes:  the healthy, happy growth in self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization so in this century and beyond mentally healthy citizens can leverage their good health in which ever way they discern is in their best interest and in the best interest of family, community, country and civilization;

     -by the twin pillars of Mindfulness and Empowerment supporting the mental wellness and cognitive flexibility mission emerging within each youngster as a consistent response to the learning environment rather than through compliance demanded of children by the adults in the class rooms;

     -by a realigned relationship of adult to child from adult over child to adult and child partnering each respectful of and acting on the wisdom each possess;

     - by the emergence and recognition of individual social, emotional and cognitive needs of youngsters as manifested and self-identified by them, not by an interpretation of child behavior by the adults in the class rooms, indeed, where the child is the definer of his and her own need and the decision maker as to how to satisfy the felt need, and where through a mentoring relationship based on the mutual respect for wisdoms of each the child will be helped to help him-herself to satisfy the full range of need;

     -by an altered relationship of adult to curriculum and child to curriculum where what is learned, when learning happens and how what is chosen to be learned is both child self-directed and adult-child negotiated;

     -by knowledge acquisition being child decision driven through an individual’s neurological constructions, interests, abilities, temperaments, learning and communication styles and rates of emotional, cognitive and social development individualizing curricula and yielding quality differentiated outcomes;

     -by occasioning learning experiences whereby children can master learning rather than to master content, and what content is offered takes full notice of the recombining of specialized knowledge through an integrated, interdisciplinary, thematic curriculum;

     -by the school being community self-governed.

Rockaway College is an altered school concept so defined.

The Democratic Education System

(Author’s Note:  Christopher Quirk, Director of Easton County Day School, graciously allowed me to work closely with him on a proposal for a sustainable education community.  Part of this collaboration centered on a K-12 school.  The continuing arguments set forth here were a culmination of that collaboration in January, 2012.)

The Democratic Education system is driven by individual social, emotional and cognitive needs of the students as manifested by them, not by an interpretation of them by the adults in the class rooms, indeed, where the child is the definer of his and her own need and the decision maker as to how to satisfy the felt need.  This goes against traditional adult over child power relation where the adult is the one to define child need and is the decision maker on how to meet the interpreted need with the result that a Democratic Education school would look quite different from what people have come to expect in schools in four critical ways. 

First, Democratic Education individualizes knowledge acquisition, that is, learning would be child self-directed:  The course of study over an entire residency can emerge unique to every child as each engages learning through his and her individual differences.  Children possess different neurological constructions, interests, abilities, temperaments, learning and communication styles and rates of emotional, cognitive and social development.  These natural instincts and individual differences drive learning tasks whether anyone likes it or not since that’s the biology of each youngster.  But the standardization of curriculum of the conventional, especially under the rubric of grade level standards, completely deny difference and in the end forces youngsters to work against their neurological constructions, interests, abilities, etc.  Indeed, the interventions and accommodations undertaken in the conventional setting to remediate learning differences among children attempt to have every youngster socially, emotionally and cognitively enabled to place in ready recall memory the same content at the same time with approximately the same outcomes, thus, demanding youngsters repress those elements of personality driving child need for different knowledge sets and different knowledge acquisition means, resulting in the denial of individual needs with the concomitant negative psychological impacts. 

Such differences in predispositions ought to be understood to drive differentiated knowledge seeking, acquisition and use yielding quality differentiated outcomes over the course of a term and over a school residency.  An authentic child learning self-directed system would put in the way of children the widest possible range of subject matter and let the children’s natural inclinations and differences drive what is learned, when it is learned and how what is chosen is learned. 

However, unlike the Sudbury Valley free school model of self-directed learning which removes the adult from almost all of the child’s decisions, the Democratic Education model of self-directed learning fully acknowledges the need for a mentoring relationship of adult to child where an adult mentor and a youngster enter a process mutually respectful of the wisdom of each to attain a common understanding of and an agreement on learning goals and the action steps required to reach those goals; this includes a mentor working with children on social-emotional, psycho-dynamic and learning deficit issues.  The agreements on what is undertaken to be learned and when and how learning is to happen is known as a “negotiated curriculum”.

Second, in-school engagement within a child learning self-directed community of a negotiated and a self-selected curriculum during a Democratic Education school day would be through the student choice of one or more of three ways:  through independent, individual or small group engagement with the materials and activities open to students, through self-selected small, whole group adult facilitated topic study or activity and/or through self-initiated one-to-one instruction either with another student or with an adult.  In the authentically child-decision-centered learning environment of a Democratic Education school the initiation of learning engagement, including instruction, is up to the child, based on a felt need to connect with the knowledge, the materials, the activities, the adults and classmates, rather than the fully adult initiated whole group classroom process of the traditional taking all decisions away from the youngster.

Third, the adults in the room of a child-decision-centered, child learning self-directed environment of a Democratic Education school have an additional role beyond being facilitators and mentors in self-directed study:  They are to model life long learning, passionate engagement and the meanings of collaborative work, goal setting, task acceptance and completion by undertaking learning activities of interest to the adult, inviting youngsters as helpers, as apprentices, in what is being done rather than as “students” being told what to do, and to in equal measure with the children of the learning community maintain behavioral norms according to both individual child and whole community needs through The Democratic Process, peer mediation, Non-Violent Communication (http://www.cnvc.org/) and LEAP (http://leapinstitute.org/).   

And fourth, Democratic Education schools are self-governing, like Summerhill.  As A.S. Neill states:  “Summerhill is a self-governing school, democratic in form.  Everything connected with social, or group life…is settled by vote at the Saturday General School Meeting. Each member of the teaching staff and each child, regardless of his age, has one vote…" (Alexander Sutherland Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, New York: Hart Pub. Co., 1960, pp 45-47.) 

In Democratic schools the community comes together in regular meetings of the whole to decide all issues. Adults and children have equal rights to speak and to persuade within community forums. Each has a single vote on questions up for community decision. The community can decide policies on such as curriculum and assessment, projects and assignments, graduation requirements and ceremonies, expectant behaviors consistent and inconsistent with the norms of the school as well as the means by which inconsistent behaviors are resolved.

Mindfulness and Empowerment: The Twin Pillars of A Different Path in Education

(Author’s Note:  Christopher Quirk, Director of Easton County Day School, graciously allowed me to work closely with him on a proposal for a sustainable education community.  Part of this collaboration centered on a K-12 school.  The continuing arguments set forth here were a culmination of that collaboration in January, 2012.)

The core problems discussed as “knocks against the way we school” can be addressed by recognizing an altered schooling structure that would make it impossible for the problems to take root, an organization built on the twin pillars of Mindfulness and Empowerment which in concert produce self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization which in synthesis result in mental wellness.

Mindfulness, a meta-cognitive property of mind, is a by-product of the child’s self-observation of the consequences of the strategies employed to work through situations and is critical for the development of self-regulation.  In formal learning situations mindfulness is consequent to the self-analysis of the results knowledge engagement occurs.

As Holt suggests, “Children’s first hunches about anything are extremely faint and tentative, the merest wisps of intuition that a certain thing may be so.  Each time children test one of these faint hunches and have it confirmed by experience, the hunch becomes a bit stronger.  What we might call a 5 percent hunch becomes a 10 percent, the 10 percent a 20, and so, slowly, all the way to the point where they will say with conviction that they know that such and such is true…” (How Children Learn, p 138)   Children continuously and unconsciously survey the consequences of their hunch testing, noticing regularities and patterns from the noise.  They begin to ask questions, to make deliberate experiments, sharpening their own awareness of the interplay of action, environment and results and in the process cultivate a reflexive self-regulation. 

But to develop the degree of self-regulation needed to intentionally obtain formal learning objectives children’s meta-cognitive abilities are required to move from the unconscious to a conscious awareness.  Bringing self-observations from the inner sanctum to a conscious level is undertaken through the continuous actions of play and the constant conversation with other children and adults within informal situations, not in classroom “discussion” where children tend to be guarded.  Conscious understanding develops in continuous play as the multiple experiential, immediate needs of social interaction or of individual engagement with play objects and with classmates unfold processes, applications and results and as children take particular notice of it all.  Conscious understanding in constant conversation develops when the child ready to reveal to others what has been uncovered makes connections among processes, applications and results as the child internally composes his and her speech.  

Indeed, as the meta-cognitive skills sharpen through play and conversation, self-regulation, which is built on them, increases, after all,  “Self-regulation means that a person is metacognitively, socially, motivationally and behaviourally active in his or her own problem-solving processes using self-observation, self-judgment and self-reaction to attend to information…”(“Self-Regulation”,

http://www.mindmatters.edu.au/resources_and_downloads/staff_matters/the_thriving_self/useful_information/self-regulation.html

Empowerment, a motivational predisposition of a power-felt psycho-dynamic, is a consequence of a positive developing self-esteem/self-advocacy dynamic.  Self-Esteem is about the deepest affective definition of self along the worthy-worthless spectrum which is the foundation of the ultimate survival sense continuums of hopefilled to despair, of actualization to suicide.  These self-judgments precondition self-efficacy.  Such is the case that Holt could say:  “How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task and I might add how they generally feel about themselves, whether they feel empowered or powerless, competent or stupid.  When we feel powerful and competent we leap at difficult tasks.  The difficulty does not discourage us…When people are down it’s useless to push...or urge…; that just frightens and discourages…more”. (How Children Learn, pp. 50-51.) 

Using the Holt formulation and extending it, the following can be said:  When we feel powerful, that is, when we judge ourselves worthy and hopefilled, we feel highly self-effective, and, thus, we leap at tasks, difficult and simple; and working through a heightened sense of self-efficacy, observing the positive consequences we feel our hope and our worthiness validated, which in turn generates a greater confidence in our abilities. And with greater confidence in our abilities we seek engagement, we self-actualize.

Thus, children when allowed their worth and effectiveness will be self-actualizing.  And when consistently children self-actualize over their schooling residency, they will, by habit, graduate as self-actualizing young adults.

The twin pillars of self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization, Mindfulness and Empowerment, emerge to their most potent in children when they are a consistent response to the learning environment, rather than through compliance demanded of children by the adults in the class rooms.  A schooling structure where Mindfulness and Empowerment emerge within each youngster as a constant environmental reaction to being within it is one allowing the growth of children in their own way and in their own time, one premised on redressing the full range of individual need, that is, in a Democratic Education system. 

Knocks Against The Way We School

(Author’s Note:  Christopher Quirk, Director of Easton County Day School, graciously allowed me to work closely with him on a proposal for a sustainable education community.  Part of this collaboration centered on a K-12 school.  The foregoing arguments set forth here are a culmination of that collaboration in January, 2012.)

Some of the knocks against the way we school are:

     -schooling systems are primarily adult driven;

     -behavioral compliance and memory are emphasized over experiential learning, the manner by which, especially young, children learn;

     -solutions to defined problems come from within the dominant schooling paradigm, essentially doing the same thing but expecting different results;

     -the full range of children’s needs are unaccounted for in the delivery of instruction and in schooling system design;

     -schooling is not designed for wellness in 21^st century life.

To the growing horror of nativist elites of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the United States was hosting a large migration, especially, from Eastern Europe.  Social convention of adult presumption of authority over children matched the need the adult elites saw for the masses of immigrant children to be Democratized along with having to be civilized, meaning, mostly, developing correct sanitation habits as well as habits of thrift, hard work and obedience to civil, “democratic” authorities.  Schooling became the means the elite adults chose to tame the wild, immigrant child:  Under the romance of mass production as a means of processing the large numbers of urban children through the system, adults from the intellectual, governing and commercial elites formed the schooling system we have today. 

The adult fascination with mass production and scientific management formed the mass schooling in America.  Adults taking pages from Classical Education divided the world of knowledge into “subjects”.  Looking to parse time and children into subject slots of the school day determined a certain schedule, driving the schedule for the school building and for an entire school system.  As the 20^th century professionalized education, it was the adult needs for credentials, standardization of practice and compensation defining preparation to work, working conditions and pedagogy.  These are no minor issues:  the profoundly negative consequences of forcing children to function in systems designed for adult convenience and adult notions of adult-child relationship rather than children’s needs can be seen in our schools everyday, and are most severe for children at the “tail ends” of the curve (those who are gifted, those with disabilities, and gifted children who also have disabilities).

One of the most evident examples of adult driven systems is the focus on compliance and memory.  Such focus is easiest for adults both on a practical level (it is easier to grade tests than to develop student self-assessing skills, or for portfolio development and review, or to facilitate discussions) and because it matches where adult energy tends to be, more sedentary.  But, more important than convenience is that these adult command and control systems over children are a direct consequence of the dominant understanding of childhood and of parenting.  Our nation and society have had well over a hundred years of blistering analysis, commentary and counter-arguments to our system of formal learning yet it remains constituted much the same as it always has.  And while one can argue that contemporary formal learning structure is deeply embedded in our civilization having been firmly planted in the late Middle Age European grammar school-university system, the single most effective explanation of the seeming paradox is the resistance to fundamental change in social attitudes of and practice in child rearing which presumes total adult power over the child.  Please to remember the theory in law which makes children subservient to adults in the school building, in the school system, is “in loco parentis”, in the place of parents.

In Italy over one hundred years ago, Maria Montessori viewed very young children in learning environments constructed by adults of the time unable to grow children mentally or physically healthy, for these environments were looking to satisfy adult need, not child need.   Repulsed by what she saw, she devised a theory and a method of formal learning based on the satisfaction of actual child need.  Unfortunately today, her Method has been captured by the adult social habit to rule over children and is being employed, again, to satisfy adult need not child need!  Montessori schooling is presently one of the fastest growing education movements, but it is so because it offers a safer environment, a more defined adult over child discipline environment, than conventional schooling.

Yet, as Maria Montessori observed children are best suited to be interacting with and exploring their world.  They are dishonored by having to sit in rows or in groups on the floor listening to adults for large chunks of time.  More, as John Holt points out this is not the way children learn:

     “[Holt would bring his cello into school letting the children have a turn

     ‘playing’ it]…almost all little children attack the cello in the same way.

     They are really doing three things.  They are making the machine go.  They

     are enjoying the luxury of making sounds.  And they are making scientific

     experiments…They have to pile up quite a mass of raw sensory data before they

     begin trying to sort it out and make sense of it…It doesn’t take a child long…to

     grasp the basic idea of the cello, the relationship of the bow, the string and the left

     hand.  But while he has been figuring this out, he has been ceaselessly active.  One

     could say that he is having too much fun-a weak word, really-playing the cello

     to want to take time to figure it out.  A scientist might say that, along with his useful

    data, the child has collected an enormous quantity of random, useless data.  A trained

    scientist wants to cut all irrelevant data out of his experiment.  He is asking nature a

    question, he wants to cut down the noise, the static, the random information, to

    a minimum, so he can hear the answer.  But the child doesn’t work that way.  He

    is use to getting his answers out of the noise.  He has, after all, grown up on a

    strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make

    sense of a tiny part of what he experiences.  His way of attacking the cello problem

     is to produce the maximum amount of data possible, to do as many things as he can,

     to use his hands and the bow in as many ways as possible.   Then, as he goes along,

     he begins to notice regularities and patterns.  He begins to ask questions-that is

     to make deliberate experiments.”

    (John Caldwell Holt, How Children Learn, Revised Edition, Reading, MA:  Perseus

    Books. 1984, pp 71-75.)

The consequences of the conventional adult driven schooling are that with needs grossly unmet children are emotionally hobbled and psychically scarred, resulting in outcomes different than adults expect, or if the outcomes are according to expectations they have come at a great psychic expense to the child.  This leads to hand wringing and a demand for solutions.  Unfortunately, the solutions that result exchange one ineffective model for a different ineffective model and get largely similar results.  These solutions emanate from those most tightly wound into the dominant system’s paradigm.  It is the paradigmatic trap, the inability to conceive through a competing paradigm.

Therefore, both the initial model and the solutions fail to account for not only how children learn, but also for how they function.  School children in every grade are generally expected to simply behave in the way that would make adults most comfortable.  For this reason, basic needs are ignored.  An example will suffice.  Children who are deemed by the adult in the room to have difficulty paying attention are scolded to “pay attention” with little understanding by the adult of the individual child’s social, emotional and cognitive operations.  More, the very notion of not “paying attention” is considered abnormal by the adult but, in fact, may be the normal means by which a child engages the world:  It is known as “switching”, where concentration switches from one thing to another thing to another to another in sometimes quick succession eventually coming back to the first cause for concentration.  Nevertheless, multiple daily scoldings happen and then “interventions” and “accommodations” are placed on the child based on what is manageable within the school environment.  In other words, the interventions and accommodations are not specifically suited to the child’s actual need!  Children are expected to organize, concentrate and prioritize with no actual understanding by the adults of the individuals’ social, emotional and cognitive properties. 

The costs of these failures in the system are particularly pronounced at this time in history.  But it was not always so.  Youngsters not fitting into the mass schooling production system as late as the 1920’s could drop out to go West and find gainful life-time employment on the ranches, on the farms, in the factories, on the seaports or in the oil fields.  Even in the factories, the mills and the mines of the Northeast and in the factories and mills of the Mid-West a youngster could drop out and be alright.  The Great Depression, of course, changed all that, although the West hadn’t completely closed, but by the mid-1930’s it had.  Then, the Second World War and the post-war industrial boom brought the drop-out a middle-class life, with family, two cars and a suburban house.  But, from the mid-1970’s onward to today, the de-manufacturing of the country, the high productivity gains of modern corporate, petro-chemical, industrial agriculture and the rise of competitor countries’ ability to produce natural resources less expensively have closed the former “cooling off” places for the drop out, to the point that, presently, a youngster leaving school drops out to the street, and to all attending that environment.  The labor selection function of modern schooling once doing well, for some time now, has turned dysfunctional. 

Thus, formal learning is required to turn its attention to preparing youngsters for life itself, not for jobs or careers.  To have as the goal of formal learning the social utility of a disciplined, trained workforce is to give to education the conventional meaning which is a far too narrow, counter-productive and harmful one for 21^st century America and which continues the dysfunction damaging to all youngsters and to the nation and the society. Schooling ought to be looking to the larger function of socialization, of providing the society and the nation with healthy citizens capable of making their own decisions.  Or to sum it up:  The goals of our intentional learning communities ought to be to cultivate in all youngsters a solid psychological foundation for future growth and a cognitive dexterity for life long adaptability to life’s vicissitudes.  Indeed, schooling should be about the healthy, happy growth in self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization.  In the end it’s all about taking care of the psychic side of life, for once that is healthy, the rest will follow in good order.  The 21^st century and beyond need mentally healthy citizens who can leverage their good health in which ever way they discern is in their best interest and in the best interest of family, community, country and civilization. 

Defining Democratic Education

A term unfamiliar to others demands an explanation. And, that is so with “Democratic Education” as it is a model of formal learning known to only a few in this country.  Indeed, to fully understand what would be going on in Rockaway College requires at least a glancing understanding of the principals of Democratic Education.

The foundation of Democratic Education rests in two areas: its understanding of children as learners and of school governance.  This model of formal learning is premised on all children having different gifts and talents which powerfully drive individual knowledge seeking, acquisition and use without adult coercion to do so, a self-selection of what is learned, when it is learned and how what is chosen is learned ultimately creating an individualized and emergent rather than a uniform and mandated course of study for each youngster over a term and over a school residency.  Democratic Education premises its school governance in the immediate learning community through democratic participatory practices where adults and children have equal voices and equal community decision-making powers.

Yaacov Hecht (http://www.yaacovhecht.com/) developed the principles of Democratic Education in the mid-1980’s and in 1987, in Hadera, Israel, he founded the first Democratic Education school.  To spread the word and to advocate for this model of formal learning he founded the Institute for Democratic Education (http://www.democratic.co.il/en/).

A brief history of Democratic Education can start with Francisco Ferrer, as my friend and colleague, Cooper Zale, maintains: “The ideas of ‘non-coercive’ and ‘learner-led’ schools have roots in the educational philosophy of Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer (1859-1909)…” (see “What is a Democratic-Free School?”, http://www.leftyparent.com/blog/category/our-ongoing-strategy-for-learning/) 

Ferrer looked to develop children’s knowledge and skills according to each student’s abilities rather than through drilled instruction and uniform lessons.  He opposed religious and nationalistic indoctrination, “but frequently instructors [in Ferrer schools] would instill values of liberty, equality, and social justice into students, and Ferrer’s textbooks had a general antistatist, anticapitalist, and antimilitarist line.”  He was a firm believer in what today is called life long learning which impelled him to institute adult classes at his schools. Ferrer’s ideas in the U.S. sparked the Modern School Movement which started a handful of schools beginning in 1910.  The small number of Modern Schools shrunk as the founders either died or moved on with most closing during the 1920’s.  The Ferrer Modern School in Piscataway, NJ, was the longest lasting, not closing until 1953. (http://themodernschools.wordpress.com/)

I certainly would agree the antecedents of Democratic Education in the U.S. are with Ferrer and the Modern School Movement.  But, these were reactions in education to the moves by the American industrialists of the Guided Age to concentrate power, to be authoritarian bosses in their factory fiefdoms.  Indeed, the revolt against being controlled by bosses found its way into the schools, as after all they were instituted along the same lines as the hierarchically disciplined factory, mill and mine.  But, I suggest, the Modern School Movement was a reaction to its time dissipating and disappearing as history rolled on.  Then in another time there came to the surface another group of folks reacting in the same vein to a similar creeping authoritarianism.  And in the arena of formal learning they discovered their own path to rebellion, to restructuring the process:  They found A.S. Neill and Summerhill.

From Mary Leue, founder of The Free School in Albany, NY, to Daniel Greenburg, founder of Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts and to many other Americans in the 1960’s, there was a flat out rebellion against the authoritarian conventional school.  Like the progressive educators of John Dewey’s time, the rebels were looking to structure schooling as a mirror opposite.  Thus, the confluence of vectors in time and in culture landed Alexander Sutherland Neill and his book, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing on an American shore prepared to take from it everything fitting their rebellion.  And so, regardless of Neill’s insistence that day schools could not be free schools at all, the Americans of the 1960’s founded free day schools. 

These “free schoolers” latched on tightly to the freedom in Neill’s notion that freedom to choose means doing what you want to do, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the freedom of others; they largely ignored the limitation on freedom imposed by the need to fully respect in action the needs of others.  They as well focused on freedom in Neill’s idea that freedom to choose that which affects the child individually, that which is of interest, of passion, of felt need, is essential for only under this kind of freedom can the child grow in his/her natural way, by expanding the scope of “that which affects the child individually” to include a good deal of the adult prerogatives in Neill’s own school, Summerhill, especially in hiring and firing staff. 

Under their rebellious zeal to construct a mirror opposite of the authoritarian conventional school free schoolers fixated on elevating child impulse over self-regulation and, thus, confusing and excusing license for freedom.  Free Schooling includes self-selected learning and community self-governance, of course, but it extends far greater sufferance to child impulse than Democratic Education ever has to date.  And it is this which marks a divide between the two.

Hecht like many before credits Neill and Summerhill with opening his mind to children’s self-selection of learning.  What Hecht saw when he visited Summerhill during the 1980’s were the youngsters’ ability to choose what to learn and when to learn what was chosen to be learned and the school’s policy of non-compulsory instructional class attendance.  He also observed that the willingness of children to engage in conventional instruction and learning offered by Summerhill when they were given the responsibility of class attendance resulted in successful knowledge acquisition:  he saw that even conventional learning happens well when children decide for themselves to, in my words, freely accept the conditions of inclusion in such instruction. 

What Hecht also found was the control over the relationship life of the school being vested in a school community governance structure using a democratic process.  Neill’s contention, carried on by his daughter, is that only in a residential school, where there is a social life, can there be a self-governance of relationships applied.  Day schools, Neill insists in his book, have no equivalent to residential life and therefore have nothing over which to govern.  Neill did not consider what in this country is called “student life”-clubs, intramural sports, school socials, etc.- embodying the spectrum of living necessary for community self-governance and thus, student governments, which are everywhere here tasked with governing student life incapable of governing interpersonal relationships within a school.  Yet, Hecht took away an appreciation of the power of a school community to regulate relations within it. 

Thus was born the foundations of Democratic Education:  the unique biology, unique gifts, of each child as fundamental drivers of individual education, a student-decision-centered learning environment and a full participatory governance of the relationships within a learning community.

Rockaway College employs these Democratic Education principles in the service of the spectrum of Gifted and Talented.

Rising Out of Bereavement Through My School Project

Bereavement, I was told by a good fiend, is not Depression.  But, I replied, I know Depression and it certainly feels the same.  My friend admitted that, yes, symptoms are pretty much the same, but the cause makes a difference.  Well, I’ll take his word for it.

But since having such an intimate relationship with my mother’s death last May-at her side for all of her dying and especially when she drew her last breath-I continuously feel sad, near tears most of the time.  I sleep a lot:  I stay in bed for upwards of ten hours just to move to a recliner to fall asleep a couple of hours later.  I do not shave or bath for days.  I eat irregularly, overeating for a few days, near starving a few days.  And I’ve wondered if the sharp pains in my ankles preventing me from walking for days aren’t a physical expression of this whole thing.  I need a lever, something emotionally powerful enough to break the Depression and let me get on with living.

Levers are activities undertaken intentionally knowing they produce positive feelings.  Such positive feelings being the motivational foundation for powerful action will allow an individual to put all coming on him into proper perspective, to see opportunity, rather than burden, to be enabled, then, to comfortably, and healthily, deal with each and every circumstance, including the terrible loss of a mother.  The idea is to over time leverage the positive feelings continuously re-enforcing the good feelings until operating from the positive feelings becomes almost routine. 

Under the might of Depression, regardless of cause, starting a lever action is very difficult:  as I keep on saying, Depression paralyzes the easiest things from being done and the hardest things, forgetaboutit.  But, as if by heaven sent I came into the orbit of two educators working at the same school in the great state of Wisconsin a bit over a month ago.  Through our budding friendship I have rekindled the passion for serving those like my son, the Twice-Exceptional, the most orphaned of disability groups in our country!  And it is that re-fired flame which has levered me enough from the Depression for me to again take another crack at translating my school concept on paper to brick and mortar.

I originally developed the school concept through the years 2003 to 2005.  I called the institution of learning for the Twice-Exceptional Rockaway College in that I had the intention of siting it near where I live in Rockaway, New York City, and in that it housed an integrated progression in social, emotional and cognitive development through early college.  I thought to establish two major units:  Rockaway College School containing a unified pre-school/kindergarten and an elementary school; and Rockaway College holding a personal growth secondary education intake in The Venture School, the secondary education program in The Lower School and the early college in The Upper School. Graduates of the Upper School having gone through The Lower School would earn both a high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree.

During the last big push to establish the school, 2005-2007, I relied on parents in my immediate neighborhood to be the development, fundraising and start-up team.  Unfortunately, they were very disinterested in the whole project.  Now, I’m turning to professional educators for teammates.

My intention is to use this blog to detail the project.  Then, having identified communication venues targeting professional educators, especially in and around New York City, where I live, I would place ads, or notices, or whatever, in these venues asking the interested to read the blog posts, and if what they read sounds something with which they would like to be involved, to email me at ljfayhee@gmail.com, so we could talk.   

So, to kick the detail off let me give a brief history of the project.

Conception:  I discovered “Democratic Education” in the late 1990’s, but got down to work in Democratic school program development in earnest during 2000-2002 helping an “interest based” school, The Backporch School, Denton, Texas, form an outdoor education program.  However, I got really down to business during the New York City Democratic School start-up group between 2003 and 2005 when I collaborated to produce The Brooklyn Free School (BFS) and a New York City New Century Schools’ application for the “School for Democracy”.  Most of that time I was learning by doing in that while I had the outlines of what Democratic Education was about, the particulars where not yet in mind.  As time accumulated, my understanding of the processes did as well.  Thus, by the end of the two year endeavor I had both the outlines and a good deal of the particulars of Democratic Education in mind and down on paper as my Rockaway College concept. 

At this point, I had yet to become as knowledgeable about the population Rockaway College is to serve as I would, the spectrum of gifted and talented and, especially, the Twice-Exceptional.  I had only a general notion on how Democratic Education could serve the needs of the Twice-Exceptional as well as the others on the spectrum of gifted and talented.  But, I felt I had sufficient grasp of what I wanted to do and the student population I wanted to serve for me to collect folks in my immediate neighborhood to help develop Rockaway College as an application for a NY State Charter or one of the new, small schools NYC Department of Education was developing at the time, or a private, independent community school.  I started the Rockaway College Project in June 2005 as an administrative structure through which to construct the school. 

Outreach:  I “got educated” to the Charter Law, the application process and all the attending details preliminary for formal application for both Charter and for a new, small City public school.  In fact, I spoke with just about everyone who was anyone in the NYC Department of Education having anything to do with Charter Schools and with the new, small schools at the time, 2005-2007, including one of an eventual  two short conversations with the then Chancellor.  Additionally, I went for advice and guidance to the New York City Charter School Center which remains a non-profit helping those in the Charter School Movement here with all sorts of issues pertaining to the spectrum of Charter School needs.  Also, I took most of the free fundraising classes offered by The Foundation Center in Manhattan.  More, I had been at the beginning of The Brooklyn Free School and witnessed how the founder went about establishing it.  So, I felt prepared to facilitate a Rockaway College development, fundraising and start-up group applying as a public entity or establishing itself as a private community school.  The one thing I lacked was people to form the team.

The founder of the BFS lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a hipster family residential area. He was a member of a local food co-op which has something like five thousand members.  It has a newspaper.  So, he authored a number of articles about the features and the benefits of Free Schools, asking interested parents to come to information meetings he scheduled in nearby venues. From these meetings he formed a start-up committee of parents who had committed their children to attending the school.  I figured I should do the same in my immediate community.  The neighborhood here is rather self-contained on the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula.  It has many families but they send their children out of the community to go to school.  I thought this area ripe for a school, even if it were an alternative one for a unique population.

To attract my neighbors to the project I wrote a series in our local community paper entitled “Square Pegs” telling the stories of children I knew in the schools where I taught who drastically needed a different way of formal learning.  I thought that the parents I wanted to attract would read these stories, identify with the children and thus would be much inclined to come to the information meetings I would schedule and from there they would be enthused enough to work to establish the school in or near the community.  I concluded the series with a brief outline of the Rockaway College concept. 

In concert with the last edition of the series I put together three follow-up meetings at one of the local parish halls.  I plastered the entire community with flyers and placed notices in the local community paper.  Occasionally, I was told by folks I passed while about the neighborhood attaching flyers to posts that they enjoyed the series, but very few people came to these information meetings.  Ultimately, the response was wholly negative by way of three sentiments:  1) We, parents, are fine with where our children are going to school and see no reason for such a different school; 2) Children need to be forced to do school work and we are very happy that now schools are getting serious about making kids do their work and we need no school which lets children do what they want; 3) We would be interested in your school if it were already working, but as it isn’t, we’re not-we do not want our children to be guinea pigs. 

During the time of these information meetings I found out my talking about this institution as “an alternative school” was a mistake.  It turns out about four years prior to my efforts there was a small special needs alternative City public school established on the outer boundary of this community.   Unfortunately, most of these special needs children were severely emotionally disturbed and the school folks were unable to cope with the constant disruptions and the more than occasional fights, all of which alarmed this community and brought much neighborhood opposition to the school.  Combining solid community opposition with an inability of the school folks to address the needs of those attending led the City to close the school and from then on the word “alternative” was wholly associated by the folks in this community with “crazy” special needs children and out of control schools.  So, as I was eventually warned, this community was about to raise holly hell against it if this school were to even look like it might come to be in or around the immediate area.

Still, I had hope, and so I returned to the person helping me in the Charter School Center looking for advice on the next step.  He said that as it turns out with these groups, there is one person who by default takes the responsibility to do the paper work.  Okay, I said, and returned home to begin the application work.  Unfortunately, almost immediately I discovered that while it might be true that one person is left by the others in the group to do all the work, there really needs to be a group, as much to demonstrate community support for the school as there being the governance/administration of the proposed institution in place at application time.  And, as it was so well shown, this endeavor was actually on the verge of being vocally, and other ways, opposed by almost the entire community; so, the inability to form a parent team definitely counter-indicated community support, no less than the absence of governors and administrators.  However, the even bigger hurdle came crashing down on me just as immediately as it became painfully clear that my entire Democratic Education design was well beyond authorizers’ parameters.  And no matter the way I tried to reconfigure it, the design remained beyond the Charter pale as well beyond the pale of the City’s parameters for one of their new, small schools.  I should have known it because the application to the City of a modified Democratic School, The School for Democracy, the one developed by the NYC Democratic Education start-up group, was turned down.   But, hey, one never knows unless one tries.  I tried, and was just as unsuccessful.

Second try at Charter:  Having no community support seemed not to have dented my thick skull as once again in the fall of 2008 I began talking to everyone who was anyone in the NYC DOE having anything to do with Charter Schools, even having a second short conversation with the then Chancellor.  I did have a conversation with the then head of the City’s Charter office who voiced support of most of the ideas I presented to him.  But, the happiness his words brought was dashed on the materials I collected to again prepare to write the application.  Although revised, these official documents essentially repeated the negatives I had faced before.  So, with reality solidly in my face, I folded the attempt to establish this school, as Charter, as a new, small school and as a private, independent community school in my immediate neighborhood.  However, one item in the material I found of interest and put it up front for later:  The first people to be recruited should be those who will form the inaugural board of trustees…ah, the money folks first-must remember that.

2e advocacy:  I spent the remainder of 2008 through 2010 going deeper into Twice-Exceptionality, revising my school concept as I learned more and doing the advocacy politics which eventually led to my co-authoring legislation recognizing 2e as a class of pupil throughout New York State in need of service differentiated from the mainstream.  All along I remained on the look-out for anyone I could snag who might help establish the school, especially being sensitive to the money folks.

Snagged a money guy!  Here was my thinking:  This school needs money; Republican politicians have money; when a Republican politician came into view I introduced myself.  In early August 2010, I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the Republican candidate for our Congressional District.  As it was, and is, he lives in my immediate neighborhood.  After his loss in the general election in November I visited him at his home frequently. It turned out he has 2e in his family.  So, over about an eight month period we explored Twice-Exceptionality, the school and how to finance it.  Unfortunately, whatever money he had or who ever other money folks he could find went into his successful run for the seat in a special election in September, 2011.  With this disappointment, I stopped working on getting the school into reality.  Still, I remained on the look out for helpers.

And then came along my Wisconsin angels and off I go again.  Over the upcoming weeks I will be posting details of the Project.