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.