Democratic education is a theory of learning and school governance in which students and staff participate freely and equally in a school democracy. In a democratic school, there is typically shared decision-making among students and staff on matters concerning living, working, and learning together.
History
The first major writer to discuss a nascent theory of democratic education was Leo Tolstoy who operated his own democratic school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia in the late 19th century.
“Don’t be afraid! There will be Latin and rhetoric, and they will exist in another hundred years, simply because the medicine is bought, so we must drink it (as a patient said). I doubt whether the thoughts which I have expressed perhaps indistinctly, awkwardly, inconclusively, will become generally accepted in another hundred years; it is not likely that within a hundred years all those ready-made institutions-schools, gymnasia, and universities — will die, and that within that time there will grow freely formed institutions, having for their basis the freedom of the learning generation.”
— “Education and Instruction,” Leo Tolstoy, 1860.
The primary theorist, however, of what developed into democratic education is John Dewey. His works on the relationship between democracy and education became foundational literature for the broader progressive education movement.
The oldest existing democratic school is the Summerhill School in Suffolk, England founded in 1921. A.S. Neill, its founder, wrote a number of books that now define much of contemporary democratic education theory. Following a critical government inspection in 1999 the then Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett issued the school with a ‘notice of complaint’ over its policy of non-compulsory lessons, a procedure which would usually have led to closure; Summerhill chose to contest the notice which went before a special educational tribunal in the Royal Courts of Justice in London with the school being represented by a noted human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC. The government’s case soon collapsed and a settlement was offered. This offer was discussed and agreed at a formal school meeting which had been hastily convened in the courtroom from a quorum of pupils and teachers who were present in court. The settlement was much broader than could have been decided on the judge’s authority alone as it made provision for Summerhill to be inspected using unique criteria in future which would take account of its special educational philosophy.
Sudbury Valley School, a democratic school founded in Framingham, Massachusetts, United States in 1968, continues to be the model practiced by dozens of Sudbury schools around the world. Certain facets of the Sudbury model separate it from other schools that refer to themselves as “democratic schools” or “free schools.” The following features apply to the Sudbury Valley School, see: de-emphasis of classes, age mixing, autonomous democracy, order and discipline, values education, evaluation, the role of adults, diplomas, pluralism and political neutrality, the existence of rules of order, the rule of law, universal suffrage, protecting the rights of individuals.
The Albany Free School was established in Albany, NY in 1969 and still operates today. The Albany Free School’s founder, Mary Leue, corresponded with Summerhill founder A.S. Neill about her plan to take his experiment of radical freedoms to a different demographic: the inner city. Leue went on to create The Free School in Albany’s urban south end with the idea of making these freedoms and democratic principles accessible to children of the poor.
The SchuelerInnenschule, a democratic middle school serving children between the ages of 9 and 19, in Vienna, Austria was founded in 1979 by a small group of parents wanting something different for their children and wanting to follow in the footsteps of the Glockseeschule in Hannover, Germany. At about the same time two ground schools, the Free School of Hofmuehlgasse and the Schulkollektive in WUK, were founded also using the same basic education models. All three of these school are the oldest democratic schools still in existence in Austria.
Since 1993 there has been an International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) which is held in a different country each year. In 2008, the first EUDEC (European Democratic Education Conference) was held in Leipzig, Germany.
Practice
Pedagogy
Democratic schools do not have compulsory uniform curricula. Instead, these schools place emphasis on learning as a natural product of all human activity. They assume that the free market of ideas, free conversation, and the interplay of people provide sufficient exposure to any area that may prove relevant and interesting to individual students. Students of all ages learn together; older students learn from younger students as well as vice versa. Students of different ages often mentor each other in social skills.
In democratic schools, students are given responsibility for their own education. There is no pressure, implicitly nor explicitly, on students by staff to learn anything in particular. Students are given the right and responsibility to choose what to do with their time and attention.
Because the curricula are different for each student, democratic schools do not compare or rank students. There are no compulsory tests aside from those that individual governments require and those that colleges require for admission.
Some schools — mostly in the United States — offer a graduation procedure for those who wish to receive a high school diploma. Students who choose to use this option often must present a thesis on how they have prepared themselves for adulthood.
A striking feature of democratic schools is the ubiquity of play. Students of all ages — but especially the younger ones — often spend most of their time either in free play, or playing games (electronic or otherwise). No attempt is made to limit, control or direct the play — it is seen as activity every bit as worthy as academic pursuits, often even more valuable. Play is considered essential for learning, particularly in fostering creativity. The pervasiveness of play has led to a recurring observation by first-time visitors to a democratic school that the students appear to be in perpetual “recess”.
Governance
The primary system of governance in a democratic school is a form of direct democracy similar to the New England town meeting. Often, all aspects of governing a democratic school are determined in school meetings. School meetings pass, amend, and repeal school rules, manage the school’s budget, and decide on hiring and firing of staff. Each individual present — whether student or staff — has one vote and most decisions are made by simple majority.
Oftentimes, various aspects of school administration are delegated to parties selected during school meetings. These may include elected administrative clerks (who may be elected from staff or students) and committees of volunteers.
School rules are normally compiled in a law book, updated repeatedly over time, which forms the school’s code of law. If a school member commits an infraction, for example by harassing or hurting another member, or by mismanaging a delegated responsibility, the problem is dealt with through the school’s judicial system organized by school members. Usually, there is a set procedure to handle complaints, and most of the schools follow guidelines that respect the idea of due process of law. There are usually rules requiring an investigation, a hearing, a trial, a sentence, and allowing for an appeal.
Theory
There is no unified body of literature that spans multiple disciplines in academia on the subject of democratic education. However, there are a variety of spheres of theory that address various elements of democratic education. The goals of democratic education vary according to the participants, the location, and access to resources. Because of this, there is no one widely agreed upon definition.
Political
As a curricular, administrative and social operation within schools, democratic education is essentially concerned with equipping people to make “real choices about fundamental aspects of their lives” and happens within and for democracy. It “is a process where teachers and students work collaboratively to reconstruct curriculum to include everyone.” In at least one conception, democratic education teaches students “to participate in consciously reproducing their society, and conscious social reproduction.” This role necessitates democratic education happening in a variety of settings and being taught by a variety of people, including “parents, teachers, public officials, and ordinary citizens.” Because of this “democratic education begins not only with children who are to be taught but also with citizens who are to be their teachers.” Another definition is noted for its controversy because it views democractic education as “an education that democratizes learning itself.”
There are a variety of components involved in democratic education. One author identifies those elements as being a problem-solving curriculum, inclusivity and rights, equal participation in decision-making, and equal encouragement for success. The Institute for Democratic Education identifies the principles of democratic education as,
- The interaction between democratic philosophy and education,
- Pluralistic education,
- School administration by means of democratic procedures,
- Education based on respect for human rights,
- Dialogic evaluation,
- Dialogic relationships, and
- Critical social thinking.
The “strongest, political rationale” for democratic education is that it teaches “the virtues of democratic deliberation for the sake of future citizenship.” This type of education is often alluded to in the deliberative democracy literature as fulfilling the necessary and fundamental social and institutional changes necessary to develop a democracy that involves intensive participation in group decision making, negotiation, and social life of consequence.
The type of political socialization that takes place in democratic schools is strongly related to deliberative democracy theory. Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss, two theorists of the political culture of deliberative democracies argue that in its cultural production deliberative democracy requires “an open-ended and continuous learning process in which the roles of both ‘teacher’ and ‘curriculum’ are missing. In other words, what is to be learned is a matter that we must settle in the process of learning itself.”
The political culture of a deliberative democracy and its institutions, they argue, would facilitate more “dialogical forms of making one’s voice heard” which would “be achieved within a framework of liberty, within which paternalism is replaced by autonomously adopted self-paternalism, and technocratic elitism by the competent and self-conscious judgment of citizens.”
Edward Portis offers a critique of what he terms ‘democratic education’ but his use of this term can be better understood as civic education. Portis contends, as many democratic education practitioners and theorists would, that a compulsory curriculum that claims to imbue in its students ‘democratic virtues’ actually does exactly the opposite. Portis argues that because politics and popular rule is rooted in the public deliberation of competing ideas and conceptions of social life, to pretend that certain values can be taught in the traditional sense—through mass compulsory education—subverts the democratic nature of the process. There is no such thing as a ‘proper’ education for democracy in this sense.
Democratic education theorists of the sort whose work underpin democratic schools, rather than those who analyze something akin to civic education (see Gutmann, et al.) would fundamentally agree that democratic values cannot be taught in the traditional sense. If children are to ever learn how to be citizens of a democracy, they must participate in a democracy (see Greenberg 1992). This argument conforms to the cognition-in-context research by Lave below.
In addition, this argument converges with various literatures concerning student voice, youth participation and other elements of youth empowerment.
Cultural
One of the first theorists and practitioners of democratic education was the novelist Leo Tolstoy who founded a school for peasant children in Russia.
The most prominent theorist to voice what has become a common justification for uniform, mass-education and critiqued Tolstoy’s philosophy, was Émile Durkheim in his lectures at the Sorbonne in 1902-03. Durkheim was the father of modern sociology and developed the sociological/anthropological school of Functionalism. These lectures have since been published under the title Moral Education.
Durkheim argued that the transition from primitive to modern societies occurred in part as ‘elders’ made a conscious decision to transmit what were deemed the most essential elements of their culture to the following generations. In Moral Education, Durkheim makes the case for an education system that preserves social solidarity by instilling three principles of ‘secular morality’ in children: what he terms a spirit of discipline, attachment to social groups, and self-determination. In the process of arguing how to instill these principles, he makes an extended argument on how punishment should be used in the schools. In this section, Durkheim described Tolstoy’s theory as an example of a philosophy of education that doesn’t seem to use punishment as a mechanism of cultural solidarity formation and transmission:
According to Tolstoy, the model of ideal education is that which occurs when people go on their own initiative to discover things in museums, libraries, laboratories, meetings, public lectures, or simply talk with wise men. In all these cases, there is no constraint exercised; yet do we not learn in this way? Why can’t the child enjoy the same liberty? It is then only a matter of putting at his disposal that knowledge deemed useful to him; but we must simply offer it to him without forcing him to absorb it. If such knowledge is truly useful to him, he will feel its necessity and come to seek it himself. This is why punishment is unknown at the school of Iasnaia Poliana. Children come when they wish, learn what they wish, work as they wish.
He then argues that, in fact, punishment is found even in this type of system through subtle mechanisms of social behavior. It should not surprise any students of Durkheim to see how he argues for a social/cultural rather than an individual/rational explanation for punishment and self-regulation:
If the child misbehaves by destroying his playthings…the misbehavior is not that he has thoughtlessly and rather stupidly denied himself a way of entertaining himself; rather, it consists in his being insensitive to the general rule that prohibits useless destruction… Only disapproval can warn him that not only was the conduct nonsensical but that it was bad conduct violating a rule that should be obeyed. The true sanction, like the true natural consequence, is blame.
Durkheim touches on a point later made by democratic education writer George Dennison in The Lives of Children: much social regulation that exists in free society takes place in the course of maintaining our relationships with each other. Our desire to cultivate friendships, engender respect, and maintain what Dennison terms ‘natural authority’ encourages us to act in socially acceptable ways (i.e. culturally informed practices of fairness, honesty, congeniality, etc.):
The children will feel closer to the adults, more secure, more assured of concern and individual care. Too, their self-interest will lead them into positive relations with the natural authority of adults, and this is much to be desired, for natural authority is a far cry from authority that is merely arbitrary. Its attributes are obvious: adults are larger, are experienced, possess more words, have entered into prior agreements among themselves. When all this takes on a positive instead of a merely negative character, the children see the adults as protectors and as sources of certitude, approval, novelty, skills. In the fact that adults have entered into prior agreements, children intuit a seriousness and a web of relations in the life that surrounds them. If it is a bit mysterious, it is also impressive and somewhat attractive; they see it quite correctly as the way of the world, and they are not indifferent to its benefits and demands.
Durkheim, however, uses this point in the service of an argument for social facts to be communicated through the authority of teachers in traditional formal schools rather than through the ‘natural’ social relations of democratic life. In fact, he continues his argument on the role of punishment, even the history of corporeal punishment, by demonstrating that it is the product of modern mass-education systems.
Punishment has not always been utilized to ‘teach’ the right ways of being a member of society. In fact Durkheim cites a number of ethnographies of various hunter-gatherer groups in demonstrating that ‘primitive’ societies in fact effectively socialized their children without the use of punishment in formal education systems. This evidence has since been confirmed and expanded.
Durkheim’s ultimate point is that modern societies are so complex—so much more complex than primitive hunter-gatherer societies—and the roles individuals must fill in society are so varied that formal mass-education is necessary to instill social solidarity and what he terms ‘secular morality’.
True education begins only when the moral and intellectual culture acquired by man has become complex and plays too important a part in the whole of the common life to leave its transmission from one generation to the next to the hazards of circumstance. Hence, the elders feel the need to intervene, to bring about themselves the transmission of culture by epitomizing their experiences and deliberately passing on ideas, sentiments, and knowledge from their minds to those of the young.
The dawn of civilization coincided with the dawn of a self-conscious reproduction of social values deemed necessary or essential for social solidarity:
In a word, civilization has necessarily somewhat darkened the child’s life, rather than drawing him spontaneously to instruction as Tolstoy claimed. If, further, one reflects that at this point in history violence was common, that it did not seem to affront anyone’s conscience, and that it alone had the necessary efficacy for influencing rougher natures, then one can easily explain how the beginnings of culture were signaled by the appearance of corporeal punishment.
Michel Foucault took up the issue of corporeal punishment in his famous works on ‘total institutions.’ In Discipline and Punish, focusing primarily on prisons but including modern schools, Foucault described the transformation of violence since the Enlightenment from a public spectacle to something much more subtle and insidious. Foucault argues that modern schools are used to transmit ideas to the young by claiming a privileged position to declare what is true, normal, and healthy. Rather than resorting to the violence that Durkheim detailed since the dawn of modern mass-education, Foucault argues that corporeal punishment has simply been replaced by forces much more difficult to notice than the force of blows and the whip of belts.
Democratic schools attempt to avoid any form of overt or covert enculturation outside the democratic process. Recognizing that one’s ‘natural authority’ in the eyes of children is ultimately dependent on one’s authenticity, teachers at democratic schools avoid tricks and enticements to induce any learning that isn’t requested or desired. The only socialization that takes place explicitly is that recognized by the process of democratic deliberation. The fact that a group of individuals—students and staff—must live, learn, and work together in the same space requires a system of governance. That system, as is the case in most countries and communities that respect principles of human equality, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, is a form of direct democracy.
Cognitive
The ‘practice theory’ movement came at a time when there was also a renewed interest in child development and a refining of the theories of Jean Piaget, the foundational child psychologist. Although it is adduced that Piaget was mistaken. The experience of Sudbury model schools showing that a great variety can be found in the minds of children, against Piaget’s theory of universal steps in comprehension and general patterns in the acquisition of knowledge: “No two kids ever take the same path. Few are remotely similar. Each child is so unique, so exceptional.”
Jean Lave was one of the first and most prominent social anthropologists to discuss cognition within the context of cultural settings presenting a firm argument against the functionalist psychology that many educationalists refer to implicitly. For Lave, learning is a process ungone by an actor within a specific context. The skills or knowledge learned in one process are not generalizable nor reliably transferred to other areas of human action. Her primary focus was on mathematics in context and mathematics education.
The broader implications reached by Lave and others who specialize in Situated learning are that beyond the argument that certain knowledge is necessary to be a member of society (a Durkheimian argument), knowledge learned in the context of a school is not reliably transferable to other contexts of practice.
Economic
Beyond the explicitly political implications, economic implications of democratic education converge with the emerging consensus on 21st century business and management priorities including increased collaboration, decentralized organization, and radical creativity.
Schools should be democratic, not education
Sudbury schools contend that values, social justice and democracy included, must be learned through experience as Aristotle said: “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” They adduce that for this purpose schools must be institutions in which all persons possess, at the point of entry and from the moment they enter, all the individual rights adults have in the country and, encourage ethical behavior and personal responsibility. In order to achieve these goals schools must allow students the three great freedoms—freedom of choice, freedom of action and freedom to bear the results of action—that constitute personal responsibility.