(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 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.
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