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Four Questions for Democratic Schools
by
Matt Hern
Director, Purple Thistle Center
Author, Deschooling Our Lives,
Field Day, & Watch Yourself
So I’ve been asked to write some critical
analysis about democratic schools for a book
specifically extolling democratic schools.
Sounds like a bar-room invitation to say
something rude – or nice – about someone’s
sister. The response obviously should be:
Just walk away. Politely decline. Thanks but no
thanks. That’s solid advice, and frankly
advice I wish I had taken many times. But of
course, once again, I will resist the temptation
to do the smart thing.
Before I start however, let me add a little
context.1 I have started, and for four years
run, a small free school for elementary-aged
kids with my partner. I worked at a largish
public democratic free school for some years. My
children both attended the same school. Selena
still works at that school. I have written and
edited books trumpeting DFS’s2. I have very
publicly identified myself as an ally and have
spoken around the world about the potential of
democratic schools.
All that said, I have some questions I want to
ask about all democratic schools, even (and
maybe especially) to the most innovative and
radical of DFS’s.
There are lots of basic and well-trod questions
that democratic school advocates and allies hear
often about structure and how kids learn best,
about the chaos and the noise, about the
re-integration of students into larger culture,
and many more. You know these questions and have
heard them many times. They are still worth
asking and talking about, but I want to ask some
more fundamental questions – queries that are
simultaneously more complex and more simple. I’m
only going to scratch the surface on them, but
maybe they will be worthy of further discussion.
Here are four intertwined sets of questions, in
no particular order:
1. Democratic schools may well be innovative
pedagogically: they offer students a wide range
of learning possibilities and the best schools
actively support kids in finding different and
often fluid ways to approach subjects, academic
and otherwise. One of most DFS’s great strengths
is their flexibility and ability to respond to
specific kids’ needs and capacities unencumbered
by enforced curriculums.
But DFS’s are not particularly innovative
epistemologically: that is to say they tend to
only superficially challenge our relationships
with knowledge. Democratic schools further
entrench the idea that learning should happen in
a professionalized and specialized environment –
that you need to go to school to learn. DFS’s
posit themselves as better places for kids to
learn and grow than the neighbourhood or home or
friends’ houses or library or park. Schools of
every ilk do little to undermine the idea that
they are the most legitimate places of learning,
in fact they often reify it.
Ivan Illich described this as professionalized
hubris, “The idea that man can do what God
cannot - namely manipulate people for their own
salvation,” and democratic schools very often
seem convinced that they are creating an ideal
learning environment that only their specialized
knowledge and training enables them to perceive
– it is the Development model of saving people
from themselves, undermining self-determination
while professing to support it.
This is exactly how John Holt described
education – he called it the business of
people shaping. And of course free
schools at one level provide a real sanctuary
from the vulgar manipulations of compulsory
schooling, but do they really undermine the
educative stance? Do they really challenge the
idea that learning has to be professionally
sanctioned? Do they really support kids in
becoming self-determining or is it just another
(gentler) kind of institutionalized dependency
they offer?
One of my favourite recent(ish) essays is by
Gustavo Esteva, Dana Stuchul and Madhu Prakash
called From a Pedagogy of Liberation to A
Liberation from Pedagogy3 that beautifully
discusses this thread: “We have been deceived by
the cult of experts to accept that living,
learning, and growing require expert expertise …
we have resolved that schooling yields learning,
that school-learning yields wisdom, and that
school-wisdom ought to yield quantitatively
improved living.” While democratic schools
frequently claim to refuse to act as experts,
the effect often appears synonymous, and even
pleasant schools fade into the constellation of
Foucauldian disciplinary institutions, governing
the lives of clients for their own good.
2. People often wonder if not sending your kids
to school – or not sending them to a traditional
school - isolates them, removes them from the
larger culture, insulates them from the roil of
social experiences, from the “real” world. You
have heard this argument, and the obvious answer
is schools clearly do the reverse: it is in
warehousing kids away with their peers and
separating them from the adult world that really
isolates them.
It is definitely true that most kids need
somewhere to go during the day. That’s really
the cold reality of the world we live in, and
for most parents, schools represent cheap
daycare. As Wendell Berry has said, “parents
only complain when school is let out early.”
That’s an infinitely regrettable and sad
comment, but even if we are to assume that our
society requires places for kids to go while
their parents are working, those places need to
become integrated with the community, or as Mary
Leue has said “semi-permeable.”
Virtually by definition schools describe
themselves as specialized learning institutions:
specially designed and separated for optimal
learning, as ontologically distinct from “the
world,” and therefore “for kids.” But is
institutionalizing kids for 6 hours per day, 5
days per week, 10 months a year for 12 years
really the best we can do? Instead of
replicating isolationist schooling is there
another way for kids to spend their days, are
there other ways to localize places for kids
within the context of community?
Sure most DFS’s do field trips and road trips,
spend lots of time in the park and visit
libraries, but do they really break the school
mould, do they really transcend the schooled
impulse to hide kids away from adult concerns?
Do they really strengthen local community, or do
they become mini-communities into themselves?
3. I have visited democratic free schools all
over the world, and of course one of the core
issues they all face is funding. That’s hardly a
surprise, but too many schools roll over on this
issue, either directly or indirectly. Democratic
schools have to be about challenging domination
– fighting for justice and equality. That’s
clear and fundamental. If DFS’s are only
available to a few – if they are one more
privilege for those who are already vastly
privileged, then what does that do? It reduces a
potentially liberatory project to one more
lifestyle option, one more yuppie choice. And
that’s not just a money thing. All too often
free schools are only available either for those
with enough disposable income to come up with
several hundred dollars a month tuition or those
with compensatory social capital and mobility.
Democratic schools cannot replicate social
inequities, they have to be explicitly about
undermining them. Without that as a core
principle they just become another brick in the
wall of white privilege. I’m not talking about
this as an independent v. public funding thing,
it’s a deeper and more fundamental question than
that, it’s about intention. I know it’s a real
hassle – I’ve been intimately engaged with these
questions for a long time – and there are very
few easy answers – but we have to be actively
and aggressively struggling with it, or we’re
just creating better lifeboats for the lucky
few. Do you think DFS’s are actively looking to
create a better world, or just a better
childhood for a few privileged kids?
4. My final question, and one that is of course
bound up with my previous comments, is whether
democratic schools are interested in liberty or
freedom. I want to understand freedom as an
explicitly social freedom – that is to
say a freedom to something, not just a simple
freedom from. When the idea of a wider social
freedom gets reduced to individual
liberty it becomes a much smaller and colder
thing.
Liberty is the logic that allows for economic
globalization, for the Castellian Space of
Flows, for individualized, disconnected
consumers trolling “free” markets, for a better
deal. Freedom is something else again, bound up
with community and a richer conception of what a
free society might look like: one which relies
on the principles that none are free until all
are, and that discipline and commonality are
inseparable.
Schools both construct and reflect the world we
live in, and sometimes I wonder if free schools
rely on an atomized individual, one who is
fiercely protective of his/her own rights, but
largely ambivalent to the social structures
within which those liberties are nourished. Are
democratic schools really interested in kids who
are able to exist in community, as committed to
the liberties of others as they are to their
own? What are democratic free schools preparing
kids for? What kinds of visions of freedom are
they articulating?
* * * * *
I remain faithful to democratic free schools. I
think there is a lot of room for deepening and
widening our analysis and these questions
instinctively suggest solutions, or at least
responses. These are hardly questions or
challenges that we haven’t met head on and
often, and I think the answers are in the
asking. There are many failings and
contradictions in all our projects, but that
hardly means we should stop trying. I am
convinced that democratic schools are part of a
better future.
I often quote Cornell West who once said that
there is a huge difference between Optimism and
Hope. If you’re not optimistic you’re not paying
much attention these days. Optimism is a
spectatorial category, watching and cheering on,
but Hope is participatory, a feet-on-the-ground
thing, trying to get something done, trying to
build something. As Isabelle Stengers, a
brilliant philosopher of science once wrote: “To
hope is necessarily to think against power.” I
think that’s a really important thing to say,
and that’s why I remain very hopeful about
democratic free schools and will continue to go
a long ways to support them: they are at heart
hopeful projects.
1 This is something like saying ‘No offense, but
…’ You know when someone starts off a sentence
with ‘No offense..’ you are about to get
offended. I realize this is more or less what I
am up to but let me be here. I think it matters.
2 I am also going to more or less
interchangeably use democratic schools
and democratic free schools, and often
shorten it to DFS. In Field Day I made
a distinction between the two, and I still think
that interpretation is viable–that schools can
be democratic, freedom-based (free) or both -
but for this essay I am mostly going to conflate
those terms. I think you’ll understand.
3 Its currently available on the Shikshantar
website at:
http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/gustavo2ls3.htm
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