For the past two weeks I have been writing about Summerhill School, the Free School/Democratic School movement, and I still find there is more to write and think about.
The schools systems of today focus too much on skills and knowledge. Yes, there is the customary, perfunctory mention of emphasizing values and attitudes, but let’s face it, it’s really just all about grades — even if the teachers, the principal or the school owner says otherwise, the system itself speaks louder than all of them. Get good grades and you’re ok. Get bad grades and you’re out. Get very high grades and you’re a superstar.
I also do not understand this idea of teaching values as a subject and giving grades based on it. For example, a school might have an item on the report card that says “Honesty.” How in the world can a teacher grade that unless they follow each child every minute of their lives?
Children easily see through falseness and hypocrisy. One day, my elementary kid came to me and asked, “Why is it that during school accreditation, the restrooms are extra clean and suddenly have soap and toilet paper? And why is everyone cautioned to not be loud and boisterous, and to smile and greet the visitors?”
And it doesn’t only happen in my child’s school but in a lot of major private and public schools. In fact, fictionist Gilda Cordero-Fernando wrote a short story about this phenomenon decades ago entitled “Visitation of the Gods” and captures to perfection the tragically comic way school personnel and officials pander to the “gods” of accreditation.
How can a school talk about honesty when it does things like this? Children get the message loud and clear and it doesn’t matter how many lectures the teachers give on honesty.
Or how about “reverence to God?” How do you measure that? How do you know if that merits an A or a B or a C or even a D? And what if the child believes in another god, or a goddess, or gods, or doesn’t believe in any god at all?
Words are cheap, and words in a lecture are even cheaper. The best way to teach is by example and experience.
This is why the self-government structure of Summerhill intrigues me. Everyone, even 5-year olds, get a vote — and teachers don’t get more votes than students. At a very young age, children learn that their voice matters. They learn to express their thoughts and ideas. They learn the value of cooperation, agreement, and keeping their word. They design their own laws, their own system of rewards and punishment, and even their own system of enforcement. By experience, not just by textbook, they learn how democracy works.
That is the central system and structure of a free school — not the subjects — those are left for the students to explore by themselves according to their interest. I think it is a far better teaching method than any bunch of lectures can provide.
I read about a teacher’s account of a student who came from a traditional school (I’m not sure whether this was Summerhill or some other democratic school — I cannot find the source anymore). When that boy found out that he could do anything he wanted in this school, he promptly went to the couch and slept.
That’s all that he did for the entire year. Every day, he would come to school, go to the couch, and sleep — and no one bothered him about it, not the teachers or other students. He was exercising his freedom to do it, and he wasn’t bothering anyone or impinging on someone else’s freedom. So he was left alone.
The following year, he proceeded to do that again. Until at around the middle of the year, he approached a teacher and asked how one becomes president of the self-government system. The teacher tells him that he has to get others to vote for him.
“Well, I want to be president,” this boy says.
“And how do you expect people to vote for you if all you do is sleep all day? People have to hear you. They have to know what you can do for them. They have to see that voting for you will be in their best interests,” replied the teacher.
So from that day forward, the boy stopped sleeping on the couch and began doing other things and interacting with the other student. He became active and popular and yes, he indeed became president shortly after.
Sometimes, like plants, all children need is space and time to grow and mature. All the nudging and shaping that we do often doesn’t really help and might even cause resentment and fixation on that which was denied them.
Let me leave you with this little food for though from A.S. Neill himself, “There is no case whatever for the moral instruction of children. It is psychologically wrong. To ask a little child to be unselfish is wrong. Every child is an egoist. The world belongs to him. His power of wishing is strong; he has only to wish and he is king of the earth. When he is given an apple his one wish is to eat that apple. And the chief result of mother’s encouraging him to share his very own apple with his little brother is to make him hate the little brother.
Altruism comes later, comes naturally if the child is not taught to be unselfish; probably never comes at all when the child is taught to be unselfish. The young altruist is merely the child who likes to please others while he is satisfying his own selfishness.”
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.
I read your first two articles about the democratic school idea with interest; I’d heard before that the most successful schools in the world are in the countryside of Columbia, because exactly they’re that kind of school, and I agree that it’s difficult to get kids to assent to a pre-arranged agenda on what to learn, and much more effective if I bring them ten things I’m interested in and let them ask questions, and based on their interest level, eventually find something that we can both research together in depth and enjoy learning about. And really this is true of adults as well as kids alot of times, people don’t want to be told what to care about, they want to choose, but are often informed by what others they encounter are passionate about.
But by your third article, I found myself at odds with the quote that suggested that children are like trees, to be left alone in the open air with fresh water and sunlight. A few years ago a young person mentioned a similar position, saying that because he’d heard everything he needed was inside him, he wasn’t going to learn anything from books or listen to any teachers.
When I look back on how I developed, I realize, I didn’t listen to my parents or teachers either, because I didn’t trust them, they seemed relatively lost as far as meaning-of-life, and seemed to be significantly different from me. But I didn’t grow up in the fresh water and sunlight with the trees, either. In the density of the Bronx, New York, I discovered the libraries, and the book stores, and I was hungry for leadership, for teachers whom I was intrigued enough by to want to learn from, who seemed to have something I didn’t understand, and something that would help me become who I was in the process of choosing to become.
Because in the Bronx, in the 1970’s, it wasn’t a pristine and healthy forest of a world, it was a dense urban jungle immersed in poison, from the processed food to the ideas of limitation flowing through my peers and the living examples set before me, so perhaps the biggest reason I needed leaders and teachers when the animals in the jungle didn’t, was that I needed to learn how to transcend the mess around me, and I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel; the wheels of philosophy (and yes religion) that I eventually found were things I’m sure I never could have single handedly invented. I’m grateful that I get to stand on the shoulders of sage teachers whom I chose as my leaders, grateful that I was given the tools of reading and writing to be able to appropriate my heritage, and grateful for who I am now and the path to the open sea of light that my river of life eventually found its way out to.
Children left alone without guidance toward their “better” nature conjures images of Lord of the Flies.
“In the long ribbon of clouds and rain in the flow of the seasons of time, among the ten thousand things hearts naturally of themselves warp lengthwise away from the deep green azure of pure life; unhappiness of misfortune can appear, to clog up and cloud the speech, life growing incorrectly; with guidance of genuine teaching from hearts lined up in the ideal, honest, and simple, simmering in correctness, with no deficiency, storing up right into a mountain and never letting it decrease, not allowing it to slip away or be harmed by rejecting, refusing, or shirking Heaven’s assignment of responsibility to follow inner nature or casting aside Earth’s lengthwise destiny, in the ten thousand places there are none who injure their harmony, their peaceful unity never injured by clouds of war, Heaven and Earth with no controlling master, no controlling master other than the true Self in its continuous transformation within the emptiness, with the school’s great teaching all-embracing, explaining and training in order to protect, to guard the barrier of their secret treasure, and to bless their mutual destiny”. (from the Daoist scripture the “Book of the Five Talismans”)
I think part of the problem and objection to traditional state-run schools is the scale of the operation; it’s inappropriate. No human mind is qualified to govern “the world”, whether that’s twelve people or even a “school district”, but we’re all qualified, and some might say obligated, to govern ourselves, and our families.
Whales sing songs that they learn, modify, and pass down not to a local whale school district with a whale core curriculum, but to their progeny; and a new what doesn’t invent his song sitting alone in nature, it is something informed by the whale library of ancestors, via his local community; the fact that the human child’s “power of wishing is strong” is not a case for leaving children without guidance and leadership, when the poisonous examples many of our culture has left for them require a correction. I agree that we can’t “teach” ethics”, but we have an obligation to exemplify it, all the more so when some or most of our culture are selling kids on a set that is less than ideal for their own ultimate happiness and counter to the flourishing of the tree of life. I often remind myself and others that we are living at the leading edge of a grand experiment of this many people living this close together this far out on the limb of disconnection in the human hubris we call “modernity”.
-charlie5
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