What it Takes to Create a Democratic
School
(What Does That Mean Anyway?)
Mimsy Sadofsky
Note: I was asked to speak,
in a plenary session, at the International Democratic Education Conference
(IDEC), in August, in Vancouver, Canada.
This article is adapted from that talk.
The topic that I was asked to speak about tonight was
“Sustainable Democracy: Creating a Stable Culture in a Democratic School.” Yesterday, while I was here at IDEC talking
to people and making other presentations, I began to realize something that I
already knew but didn’t have a way of putting into context. Other people who are here have been talking
to me about the same thing. The problem I and others are having is, simply,
what do we mean by democracy? In
particular, what do we mean by democratic schools? An especially poignant moment for me was when an acquaintance
said, after chatting with the incredibly charming group from Korea that is
here, that Korea is reputed to have 200 democratic schools, but there is not a
single one where children are free from a pre-set curriculum. What do they mean by democratic
schools?
Even within the narrow realm of schools that I’m most
familiar with, which are Sudbury schools, there isn’t 100% agreement on the
answer to the question of what democracy in a school means. And clearly there is far from 100% agreement
here at IDEC. I realized yesterday that
my starting assumptions are not necessarily even known by many people
here, let alone shared. The first clue
was in a session that I gave yesterday morning, called “Starting a Sudbury
School.” I eventually realized that a
lot of the people that were there didn’t have any idea what a Sudbury School
was. Many people thought it was a
session about starting any school, so my content wasn’t terribly useful
for them. Since I didn’t really talk
about the aspects of a Sudbury school.
That might have been a more useful presentation for that audience. Later, a similar thing happened when I gave
another presentation called, “When Kittens Turn Into Cats”, a presentation
about what happens to people who grow up after a Sudbury education. We had an example of that sort of thing just
now, when we had a group of students and alumni from Windsor House on a panel talking
about life in school and after. You saw
the kittens and the cats tonight, which was very nice because it’s so
clear. When you see those students and
those alumni, what you have to look forward to when children go to schools like
ours is so palpably obvious. But once
again, my audience yesterday was not totally clear on where the kittens
were turning into cats, and why what I was presenting should be meaningful, at
least not in the beginning. So I
thought that tonight might be better if, before discussing creating a stable
culture, I talked about my own ideas about democratic schools.
First of all, as I said, no one knows what the words
“democratic school” mean. I could
experiment by asking a few of you what the phrase means to you, but I’m not
sure it would help that much because I think the ideas would all be so
different that we’d just be more confused.
So I’ll pretend I don’t think that you have different thoughts than me,
and I’ll tell you what I think the essential features of such a school are.
First, a democratic school must embody what we call in the
United States inalienable rights – they’re listed in our Declaration of
Independence: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. are considered the
inalienable rights for American citizens.
I think that a lot of the free world at this point considers these to be
inalienable rights, although it is expressed quite differently in different
cultures. Any government in the world,
hopefully, but certainly any government of the students in a fully democratic
school, is maintained and established in order to ensure those rights. In addition, systems of justice also are
established to ensure that everybody in the community has equal rights. That’s not an easy jump. It’s easy to say we want people to have
rights, we want democracy, but to understand exactly what the democratic
government needs to do, where the government comes into play, is often
hard. However, once you find a society,
of whatever size, trying to live within the rights we feel all people should
have, it becomes quickly clear that a justice system is necessary.
For me, democracy also implies a really solid determination
to treat each human being with complete trust and respect and to ensure the
dignity of that human being by not ever, ever condescending to them. I don’t think that’s what everybody means
when they talk about democratic schools so I thought I’d get that idea out on
the table. I think many schools and
groups haven’t sorted through this, and haven’t really gotten past the, “Oh
yeah democracy, that’ll be wonderful,” stage.
All that said, I want to digress a bit more before I launch
into how to sustain a democratic school.
I want to talk about parents for a minute. I don’t think parents who bring children to enroll, or to visit a
school with an idea of perhaps being interested in enrolling, are generally
looking for democracy. I don’t think
that’s in their heads at all. Parents
bringing in their children to consider our school are looking for an
alternative to what is mostly available.
They are also sometimes – but far from always – looking for real
freedom. More often, they are only
looking for more flexibility.
Sometimes, but rarely, they are looking for respect for their child. Basically, if they have very young kids,
they are seeking what we are: a place for people to build their own lives from
scratch; a place where each person has no choice but to become self-actualized
and competent; a place where children can be in control of their lives.
Parents of older children want something else. They usually want a refuge for their
children. At no point have most of
these people thought to themselves, “I want a democratic school for my
children.” Far from it. They generally think, no matter what their
political persuasion, that democracy as a form of government stinks. Winston Churchill said, “It has been said
that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have
been tried.”
And it is true: nobody’s gotten any better form of
government yet, but in a school the amazing things is that you can have a
democracy that doesn’t stink. In
a school you can have a democracy that’s really grass roots and that works very
well.
When we talk to parents, we talk about the trust, the
respect and the overwhelmingly awesome responsibility of being in charge of
your own time and your own education.
We also explain the democratic structure, and the way justice happens,
as well as the level of responsibility for their own outcomes that this adds
for students, because they are also responsible for the functioning of a
community, and the making of the school into a community. But democracy is never the deal-maker for
parents.
What I think of as a democratic school implies complete,
uncompromised and utter intellectual freedom for each human being, tied up
tightly with total and uncompromising responsibility for the community. I’ll start with outlining some of the do’s
and don’ts for the founding process because some of them are really important
in order to sustain democracy: unless you know what you want your school to be,
you can’t create it to be a unified whole.
It needs to have a philosophy that is complete and congruent, one that
gets translated into the institutional structure when you build a school. A founding group of a school must measure
everything that they do, every decision that they make, against that ideal –
the whole ideal of how a school should be, how children should be educated, how
life should be for young people, so that they can grow up with the
responsibility we want them to grow up with.
It takes tremendous dedication and stamina from the people
who get the school going. Dan
Greenberg, who is one of the founders of Sudbury Valley and the one who has
written a tremendous amount about the philosophy of Sudbury Valley, gave a talk
on a similar theme to sustainability at a Sudbury Schools Workshop this
year. He ended it by saying “remember
you’re always a startup.” What I think
he meant by that was you always have to look at everything with fresh eyes and
measure everything against your ideal and work hard and solve every problem as
if it’s the first one you’ve gotten to.
That keeps the enthusiasm fresh for everyone.
I put it a little differently usually. What I say is that you’re on the cutting
edge, you are the avant-garde, and you should never forget that. Perhaps that’s the most exciting
reason to create a democratic school– unless you happen to have children, which
is the most exciting reason really. It
sounds like it couldn’t be true after all these years. Summerhill is almost 100 years old, but it’s
still just as avant-garde, just as exciting. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking now about
sustaining a democratic school. There
would be a formula; everybody could just follow a little list. But you can’t create a democratic school by
formula. No two democracies are the
same, no two sets of people are the same.
The rules will be different.
Different cultures have different values and these are reflected in
different schools. Don’t ever forget
that your work is cutting-edge, that you’re still doing work that is
extraordinarily creative. It’s out
there, it’s way out there. It’s what
society thinks is insane but you know it is totally sane and you must never,
ever agree with society or let anybody think that you think what you are doing
is weird.
The founders of a school have to be ready to dedicate an
indeterminate, but enormous, amount of time and they certainly have to be able
to dedicate perhaps a less enormous amount of money. But first, before they do that, they have to know exactly what
they’re doing. They have to decide on
what they want. If it’s a Sudbury
school, they have to read til their eyes fall out. But really if it’s any kind of democratic school, they have to
read til their eyes fall out because there’s a lot of literature. There’s a lot of literature beginning way
before the ‘60’s, but certainly increasing steadily since then, that points to
freedom in education as being the thing that is most useful for people in the
21st century. So they must absorb all
the literature that’s available and be prepared to write their own.
It only makes sense to even try to form a democratic school
if you can fully understand and fully articulate the model you’re interested in
creating. Otherwise, it will not be
sustainable. Even for those who do
fully understand and fully articulate it, it may not be sustainable. Other forces may intervene – like
governments, which many of the schools, or former schools, represented here
have been harmed by. (They talk about
it a lot, and we should all pay attention, because they’ve smacked up against
the government and have been smacked badly.)
So I guess what I’m saying is you need extraordinary
founders, very strong in character, to found a democratic school. And the founders group has to be on the same
page. The have to have a coherent idea
of the school they are founding. They
have to have talked it over, and fought it out, until they are on the same
page. They have to view their
enterprise as serious and most particularly as not crazy or a crazy
crusade. Not weird. And that’s not easy. You have to be very careful even about the
clothing you wear when you present your school to the public or meet the
public, as well as the rhetoric that you use, so people will see you as
reasonable, as possible, as within reach, so people will see that you are not
on the fringe, but on the cutting edge.
There’s a big difference. The
founders have to present the ideas as they are – as normal, normal as apple pie
or water – while still remembering that they are avant-garde. I just can’t say it enough times.
I’m going to read the little motto from Starting a
Sudbury School.1
I read it yesterday but I don’t think there’s any number of times that
you can hear this that are too many.
Maybe potential founders could get a
taste of what it is like before they actually commit themselves to it, by going
into a commercial laundromat, getting inside one of those industrial dryers,
putting it on an hour-long cycle – and having it get stuck and go for a week
instead.
When I look at many of the people here
who have gotten stuck in the dryer for so long, they still look fine. There are a lot of us here in that
situation. I can’t believe that they
look so fine and I think one of the reasons is that sustaining a democratic
school is vital and sustaining work also.
None of this can be done without money. You have to have the time and the money to
devote to it. And there will be
expenses. You need money to get the
word out, to make mailings, to print posters and to rent a site so people can
see that you’re for real. None of this
can be done without remembering that you’re also running a business – crisply,
precisely.
To sustain a democratic school you have to find a way to be
legal in whatever government you live within.
You have to be able to create a literature that, along with other pieces
of literature you decide are important to your group, is used to represent you
everywhere – to the public, to the government agencies you brush up against, to
the realtors you’re working with so they know what kind of people you are –
strong, firm, articulate, idealistic.
And once a school opens, the money that comes in will go to endless
public relations activities to help it grow – to expenses that are not
negotiable like utilities or rent.
They’ll be unlikely to go to staff salaries, heaven forbid.
The staff of a new school are very likely to be the
founders. That’s another thing a
founder must be totally prepared for.
People think staff should be paid and it’s a really nice idea, but
forget about it. After the school opens
the founders cannot drift away. They
can’t be background people. They have
to continue to be foreground people.
They can’t depend on hired adults who have not been thinking about the
model and internalizing it for a long time to keep it going. The school will be too fragile for years and
years so they have to be prepared to devote years and years.
What the school itself needs to become a democracy and sustain
itself over the long haul is to make sure that the power resides in the people
who are there day-to-day. The power has
to stem from a legal framework, documents that have been drafted with
attorneys, by-laws. There has to be a
strong adult presence, but not to tell kids what to do. Rather, to model for kids what grownups are
like. The adults have to be articulate
and unafraid to take harsh stances and do the right thing and to speak for the
right thing. There have to be adults
who have a strong and unified vision of what the school will be and are going
to make sure it doesn’t drift away from that if they can help it. And once again, these must be adults who
never condescend to students. Adults
who are not afraid of creating a democratic structure while waiting for
students to be interested in helping them with it.
These adults have to set up a School Meeting structure and
make sure it’s serious by treating it with reverence. They have to have clear operating rules of order. They have to have meetings where only the
Chairman is addressed; where there are no personal attacks, and no
cross-conversation, and no disrespect.
The School Meeting has to have the purse strings and this is hard. It wasn’t that way during the set-up period,
and in fact it wasn’t necessarily very democratic during the set-up period,
because the only people that you wanted in the set-up group were people who
knew they wanted the same thing.
Democracy in a start-up group can keep a school from forming, because
people could move in with other ideas and take over. It was run like a business during set-up, and it has to be run
like a business afterwards, but a democratic business. The loss of control that the founders feel
when that happens is unnerving.
The School Meeting is where the buck stops, and where
everything must be considered.
Everything that has to do with institutional structure and rules stems
from the School Meeting. The School Meeting
must also be totally professional.
Probably the first School Meeting Chairman of any school is a staff
member. We at Sudbury Valley have
year-long terms for School Meeting Chairman, which is a long time, and many
schools don’t have that kind of term, but the truth is the person who is the
School Meeting Chairman has to be making a serious commitment because s/he is
really the CEO of the school. The tone
of the early Meetings must be set by the adults. This is no place for namby-pamby adults. Kids are learning from the way adults
conduct themselves every day in the School Meeting and all the rest of the
time, too. They see one’s humanity,
one’s warts, and one’s strengths. They
learn to debate from watching the grownups set examples, to be strong and to be
idealistic. No one should ever debate
at anything that is not their personal best.
There’s no point in it. Kids
should learn from the best people the school can get; the adults are
models. Students will buy in to their
roles as they realize it’s useful to them.
Maybe they want something, maybe they want space, maybe they’re worried
about their rights being protected and they’ll start making rules and policies
and set up structures. The staff has to
wait for that. Meanwhile, the
administrative set-up of the school does stem from the School Meeting and from
people who are selected to do various jobs.
Part of that happens because people form special interest groups.
A school has to have a judicial system that’s taken
seriously. There are going to be
problems between people. It just
happens. That’s the way life is. It’s important to understand the elements of
a fair judicial system. Since most of
us are goodie-goodies who don’t do that many things wrong, we rarely brush up
against the law. Also, though the legal
systems in our countries may be designed as fair, it doesn’t always look all
that fair to us when we see it happening, and it seems very convoluted. The founders themselves have to understand
what a fair judicial system is and they have to be able to help the School Meeting
form one. I personally feel nothing is
more important than this. The judicial
system is where the rubber meets the road.
It’s where the things that restrict people’s freedoms have to happen,
because unrestricted freedoms might be infringing on the rights of others, or
be unsafe, or illegal, or destructive.
A fair judicial system is one that allows a person to be
free, that protects freedom because it guarantees that freedoms won’t be
restricted unnecessarily. But it’s also
where you give up some of your freedom for the common good, and that hurts, so
there has to be a reason for it.
Therefore: It’s vitally important that the judicial system stem from the
School Meeting, where students become aware of the relationship between
restricting freedom and maintaining freedom through community laws.
Designing the legal system, discussing each piece of it, is
a big part of the curriculum of a new school.
That’s an education in democracy that you can’t purchase for any price
anywhere and those kids who are in new schools know it. The founding kids are pioneers, no matter
how many other democratic schools there are.
They’re still pioneers because they’re doing it their way.
Now I would like to talk for a few minutes about what I feel
the features of a judicial system are because I think new schools in particular
have to understand why they shouldn’t shortcut them. To do that I have to look at Sudbury Valley’s judicial
system. I have seen other schools with
good judicial systems that weren’t exactly like ours but they match the main
criteria of ours. They protect the
system of due process. Nevertheless our
system is the one that I know in my bones and love dearly and I’d like to talk
about it for a minute because I think that creating a good judicial system is the
most important part of sustaining a democratic school.
First of all, as rules are passed by the School Meeting,
they have to be assembled somewhere into some kind of lawbook. At some schools the lawbook has very few
rules. The truth is that “always do
everything right and never do anything wrong” is a perfectly good rule and
should cover all circumstances; or the Golden Rule should cover all
circumstances. But we’re all a little
too human for those to be enough. Our
school has a lawbook that contains several pages of rules governing
behavior. Some are pretty esoteric
ones. We have a popcorn rule that says
you can only have popcorn indoors if it’s in a sealed container. We have a popcorn rule because we had too
many popcorn messes and people were tired of it, so eventually we outlawed
popcorn, and then we took a step back and allowed it to come to school if
people would eat it outside (which you can do for, oh, maybe a month or two of
our school year). Lovely weather where
I live. The popcorn rules came about
because of common sense, and evolved because of better common sense.
The people who make the judicial system function at Sudbury
Valley are called the Judicial Committee.
We have two clerks who are the administrative people on the Judicial
Committee. They’re students, and
they’re elected by the School Meeting four times a year. It’s a hotly contested position. It’s also the hardest job in the
school. You have to have meetings every
single day at 11 o’clock and you have to meet until you’ve done everything you
can do for the day. And sometimes
that’s til 11:30 and sometimes it’s til 12:00 or 12:30 and sometimes it’s til
3:00 or 3:30. So clerks have a huge
responsibility – looks great on a resume, looks great on a college application!
And then there are five students who are picked by lot so
that they represent kids of every age and who serve for a month, whether they like it or not. And there’s an adult staff member who serves
once every couple of weeks, so the adult is the one that’s always sort of new
and isn’t part of the ongoing relationship in the JC. That’s fine because it keeps staff who are very outspoken and
opinionated from having too much influence.
The Judicial Committee considers written complaints – only. When it assembles at 11:00 everyone finds out
what complaints have been written. The
clerks decide what to do first. The
investigations are carried out really carefully. Sometimes it’s about running in the hall, and there are two or
three people involved. You call them
all in and you ask them, and they say, “Sure, I did it,” and they get
sentenced. But sometimes it’s something
that is serious and you investigate it very carefully, one person at a time and
take notes even.
After the JC feels it knows what’s happened in any given
case, a report is written and voted on.
On the basis of that report, charges can be filed but only charges that
are actual rules that can be pointed to in our lawbook. You can’t charge somebody with doing
something that you sort of wish was a rule.
You can change a rule, or make a new one in the School Meeting, but you
can’t change it on the spot in JC. You
have to change it much later. A person
can plead guilty or not guilty. If they
plead guilty, they’re sentenced on the spot usually. People accept their sentences and they move on. If they plead not guilty, they can have a
trial. That doesn’t happen for a few
days. It gives them a chance to decide
whether they’re really guilty or not.
Sometimes justice is served by a trial, sometimes it isn’t. We don’t have very many trials.
Not every school has sentences. We feel that the sentence has two purposes. One is paying your debt to society, but the
other is putting the incident behind you.
I don’t think sentencing should be abolished, but I do think that it’s
not the sentencing that’s the most important thing in changing the behavior of
those kids who tend to misbehave, which we always have plenty of. The most important thing is hearing a group
of people of all ages calmly and dispassionately listening to a case, no matter
how trivial it is. It makes people
feel, “Oh, maybe this isn’t such a great idea after all,” or at least it makes
them feel like they don’t want to be sentenced anymore.
What does it mean for your life if you grow up as part of a
democracy that has been sustained? It
means you know you’re empowered. It
means you know how to behave. It means
you know how to be serious when you need to be and have a heck of a lot of fun
when you don’t. It means that you
inhale a sense of values that will serve you well for the rest of your life and
make you a valuable friend, employee, student, parent – you name it.
To sum up sustainability in a democratic school I’m going to
go back to something I didn’t talk much about today. You have to keep it going by constant recruiting and public
relations. You have to create beautiful
and informative web sites, and your own literature. And you have to remember at every moment that you’re creating
forever and ever a beautiful institution that gives children responsibility and
treats them like human beings. It’s a
very rare thing still. That means
you’re on the cutting edge, and being on the cutting edge is never easy. It’s cold, it’s hostile out there, it’s
lonely. You’re the subject of constant
attack and yet it’s quite exhilarating.
Your ability and the ability of the other people in your school or group
to remember these things and to always work at the top of your abilities is
what sustains the school.
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