(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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