School for Society 5: Be the Democracy You Want to Teach

Item 5: The reform movement itself must be democratic.

This element warns against adopting top-down structures where a reform movement relies on the work and motivation of a large group of activists/participants but decision-making power rests in a central leadership group or charismatic leader. Such centralized structures open any group committed to improving democracy to charges of hypocrisy. They also force those involved with the movement to confront the sort of contradiction that make it difficult for someone to continue on their current course. That can be a good thing when you want people to change, but if you want people to keep working as part of the organization that they have been, that sort of contradiction is counterproductive. Using democratic structures also allows the reformers to model what they advocate and demonstrate its effectiveness.

As such, this is a very important part of the model, but for a school it has to have some qualifications. Implied in a society’s need for schools to prepare its next generation to be citizens is the notion that, without formal schooling, many (if not most) children will not grow up with the knowledge and skills required to be effective citizens. If they could do it on their own, we would not go through the trouble of creating schools, and we could let everyone be self-directed citizens in their own self-selected learning communities. I’m not saying that anyone is actually arguing that we do not need schools, so I do not want to seem like I am ridiculing anyone here. I am just trying to establish as a starting point that students, in their lives as students, are still immature as citizens and need assistance preparing for the responsibilities that come with democratic citizenship.

This is not a rationale for the school to adopt or maintain a top-down structure or try to remove all aspects of democratic life just because students are not prepared for the full responsibility. That would be just as absurd as having no structure at all. One of the central ideas of Dewey’s democratic theory of education is that people learn by confronting and solving problems that are relevant to the goals and lives they have built for themselves. A school can not claim that it is preparing students to be citizens in a democracy and then never give them a chance to confront and work through the problems that citizens encounter in a democracy.

So what we have is a need to find a balance point, where students can meaningfully engage in the work of democratic citizenship while still having some guidance and safeguards to help them through obstacles that their relative inexperience create. Students need to be given a real voice in the creation of the school culture and program. At the beginning this may even include the design of the student institutions that will help organize that student voice. Will there be an elected student government? How should it be constructed? What eligibility requirements should there be for someone to serve? How will the representatives ensure that the voices of the students are being heard? Should there be advisory groups of students recruited by teachers and administrators?

Once the institutions for students to give their input have been created, those institutions have to have some kind of legitimate authority within the school community. While it might be appropriate for a staff council or a parents group to have some kind of veto, if that veto is always or often used students will begin to see their institutions of democratic participation as a sham, and refuse to participate. On the other hand, if the students see that their work is respected and helps form the basis of the school’s everyday expectations and norms, they are far more likely to accept and adopt those norms. The limits of the oversight veto power should be established through a combination of the formal rules of the school’s institutions and the informal norms of its culture and everyday practice. The exact nature of that mix will need to be determined by each school community, but it should be a through and detailed enough process that there are rarely surprises when the veto has to be used. Even if they disagree or are disappointed by the particular use of the veto, most students should be able to understand why it was used and whether there are any ways to overcome the problems that led to its use in the first place.

The students’ voice should also be considered in things like the subject matter and methods for its study. There are obviously requirements that need to be considered – whether those are based on state or local standards, or the expectations of higher learning institutions and employers, or the judgment of the knowledgeable educators who form the staff of the school. But within those requirements there should be space for a honest discussion. The problems is that as soon as you have more than two students in a room, you have at least two different visions of the best way to proceed. I have had my students “focus group” the content and methods we are going to use in a class, and facilitating such a discussion can be truly exhausting for a teacher. Indeed, the teacher might end the discussion having no more idea of what “the students” as a collective group want than when the process began. But if these exercises occur frequently, in a series of classes and contexts, the quality of the feedback should improve., and the teacher will get better at facilitating the process. In this way, it is not only the students who are learning to be more effective democratic citizens.

I have focused here on how the students’ voices can be legitimately respected in a democratic school culture, but that commitment should definitely extend throughout the school’s structure. Just as students can work with their teachers to help direct the course of individual classes and the school at large, the teachers and staff should be able to work with their administrators to shape the school’s culture, institutions, and mission. I do not want to imply that this is easy, but if a school is working to help the students develop an authentic voice, it should be possible to develop parallel structures for the staff.

If schools can really demonstrate the power of democratic citizenship, then they really can transform society and help a democracy realize its promise. We are not there yet, but the potential is there. I’m going to close out this post with a footnote I wrote in my thesis about one discussion in Dewey’s Democracy and Education:

Dewey criticizes “the educational practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment,” and argues for an “educational transformation” that will prepare citizens for “a truly democratic society, a society in which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure.” This transformation has been hinted at already. “The increased political and economic emancipation of the ‘masses’ has shown itself in education’” through the development of a public school system so that learning is no longer a “monopoly of the few.” But education has not yet given citizens the useful, practical education that prepares them for life in a democracy – “the revolution is still incomplete.” But Dewey is quite clear that he believes the revolution has the potential to succeed.

About Dave Thomer

Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.

July 5, 2013 @ 10:36 pm

Philosophy