Wise Talk

This slim book serves as a great introduction to the Democratic School Movement, and it is a movement. There are democratic schools of various kinds all over the world. There is no simple definition but all schools that claim to be democratic have meetings. Depending upon the school members may, or may not be required to attend. Likewise, what the meeting has power over varies from school to school. At Sudbury Valley the community has control over every aspect of school life. On the other hand, at Summerhill, the oldest democratic school in the world, the children have no control over the appointment of staff or whether a child should be kicked out. The school belongs to Zoe Neill Readhead, the daughter of the founder A. S. Neill. She controls the purse strings which is not democratic, but Zoe maintains that if the school had been run by a board of governors it would have caved in and collapsed when the British Government threatened it with closure in 1999.

From the histories of other schools described by Jerry, it does seem that to be successful schools need strong, charismatic leaders. But this is probably true of any kind of organisation that operates outside conventional norms. One essential point is that whatever kind of choices are given to children, they must be real. Children are not fools and won’t lend their energies to being conned. So, when setting something up it is important to be clear what power is available and then do nothing to undermine or circumvent it.

For Jerry, the heart of any democratic school is the school meeting. He is distrustful of meetings that rely on consensus and favours a method used by the Iroquois Confederacy. A whole chapter of the book is devoted to Iroquois Democracy. The Iroquois used a system of majority voting, but after a vote those in the minority would be invited to talk about why they had made their choice. Anyone would then be able to make another proposal and the process would continue until no-one had anything more to say. In this way a minority would not be sidelined or excluded by a vote going against them. The process is more communal and not adversarial. As Jerry says in the penultimate chapter :

The meeting process, and democracy itself, is not a science it’s an art.

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