He held that the primary reason children did not learn in schools was fear: fear of getting the wrong answers, fear of being ridiculed by the teacher and classmates, fear of not being good enough. He maintained that this was made worse by children being forced to study things that they were not necessarily interested in.

Main Features: Curriculum, Pedagogy & Governance

I generally see a school model in terms of these three aspects, essentially what is being learned, how it is being learned, and who is making the decisions on what and how and managing the other aspects of the school as a functioning entity. Again in the conventional conception of a school, curriculum is predetermined by some “higher authority” and presented to the students by a teacher in a classroom through some form or another of instructional pedagogy. The school governance is assumed to be hierarchical like a factory where the principals are the “bosses”, the teachers are the “workers”, and the students are the “product”. The unionization of many teachers reinforces that assumption because it frames teachers as “labor” and the principals and administrators above them as “management”.

But in a typical democratic-free school the components of curriculum, pedagogy and governance are constituted quite differently, and are laid out below…

* The role of adult school staff: As long as the students do no harm to others, they can for the most part do whatever they want with their time in school. The adults that staff the school (which depending on the school may or may not be referred to as “teachers”) are there to facilitate keeping this basic freedom in place and are available to the students to assist as needed. Beyond this, the adult staff and the students are both involved in running the school to the extent of their ability and interest, usually by the forming of committees and bringing the most important decisions to a general school meeting.

* Access to school resources: Students are free to spend their time however they wish and access all the educational resources – library, lab, kitchen, nature, and adult staff – available in the school. Where improper use of certain equipment or venues can be dangerous (or cause damage), students generally have to pass some sort of minimum certification (agreed to by the community) for using that equipment or venue.

* De-emphasis of classes: The classroom is no longer seen as the focal point of the educational process. Depending on the school’s particular rules of engagement between the adult staff and the students, the adult staff may suggest or even initiate classes (which students may choose to attend); but at others, like Sudbury Valley, adult staff can only respond to a request by one or more students to start a class.


* Age mixing: Students are generally not separated into age-groups and allowed to mix freely, interacting with those younger and older than themselves. This is considered much more natural than the conventional school age segregation and promotes opportunities for informal mentoring between older and younger students providing real opportunities to learn from others and/or be of value to others, and all the opportunities that presents for enhancing ones own self-esteem and self-image.


* Governance & administration: The school is run by the democratic process with all the students and adult staff as participants with an equal voice and vote. There is generally a regular all-school meeting where the most important issues are addressed and resolved. Other administrative functions are handled by committees, again including both adults and students. A key aspect of the curriculum and pedagogy is learning democracy by experience, including experiencing the rights, responsibilities and consequences as fully functioning individuals within a community.

* Hiring and firing staff: In some democratic-free schools, like Sudbury Valley, the students and current staff hire and fire staff through the school meeting. In other schools this function is performed by the adult staff only.


* Order and discipline: School rules and regulations are generally made at the school meeting. All students and adult staff are equally and personally responsible for how they conduct themselves and interact with others in the school community. Every school has some sort of agreed process for students or staff to bring alleged rule infractions or other wrongs to the general meeting or some sort of “justice committee” for adjudication and assignment of any disciplinary action. These processes can even rise to the level of a school meeting deciding to expel a student. Again, a key aspect of the learning is participation in the maintenance of order and discipline and dispensing justice as part of a “jury of peers”.

* Evaluation: Students are generally not assessed, evaluated, graded or otherwise compared with one another, but of course can ask fellow students or staff for feedback on how they are doing. The assumption is the primacy of self-assessment for a self-directed learner.


* Graduation: There is generally some form of graduation and/or diploma available to students who wish for such, or feel the need for such a document for their further education or future job applications. The process differs from school to school but can involve presenting your “case” for graduation to the school meeting or to some sort of duly constituted “jury” for adjudication.

In summary, the curriculum is completely in the hands of the individual student. The pedagogy is one based on self-direction, plus the real experiences one has fully participating in all aspects of a democratically run community. The governance model is intended to mirror that of the adult society the students will be participating in.

Pros & Cons vs Other School Models

The arguments for democratic-free schools are based on their compatibility with a larger democratic society as well as the natural human learning process, and include…

* Allowing young people free rein to explore and focus on developing their unique talents to the fullest (particular if those talents fall outside the mandated academic learning in conventional schools) without the distraction of external learning mandates

* Providing young people the opportunity at a much earlier age to be fully functional people participating in a “real” community that includes both youth and adults

* Giving young people the opportunity to “learn by doing” to be active and effective citizens in a democratic country where active political participation is critical to the maintenance of a democracy, but has tended to wane in recent decades

* Enabling a community that includes some democratic-free schools to have a fuller spectrum of educational choices (along with conventional and “holistic” schools) to provide to families within that community

* Establishing an educational venue that, based on its use of democratic process, can continually adapt and evolve to meet the continuing needs of its students, their families and the larger community

* Creating an educational venue that is ethically consistent with acknowledging young people as full human beings with inherent worth and dignity comparable to adults, as those rights were laid out in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

The arguments against democratic-free schools are generally based on the model’s incompatibility with educational standardization, plus conventional expectations and assumptions that most young people are not yet capable of directing important aspects of their own lives. Those arguments include…

* That young people do not inherently know what is best for them developmentally and need to be directed in their development by more mature members of their larger community

* That students will take their liberty as license to waste their time on activities like socializing or playing video games and not properly prepare themselves for college, jobs and other aspects of adult life

* That subjecting teachers and adult school staff to student feedback and participation in school governance dishonors and disrespects those adults as elders and proper authority figures

* That not subjecting young people to external and at times what may seem like arbitrary authority will not properly prepare them to abide by such authority in real work situations they are likely to encounter as adults

* That democratic-free schools cannot be judged on conventional school assessment metrics based on student knowledge of standardized curriculum and therefore cannot pass muster as U.S. public schools.

Advocacy & Support

Finally, if you are interested in learning more about democratic-free schools, including finding one locally to enroll a young person, or even starting one, I’m aware of at least two organizations in the U.S. that are focused on supporting this educational model…

* The Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) was founded in 1989 by longtime democratic educator Jerry Mintz. AERO promotes democratic-free schools, and provides support and networking for people trying to start or manage such schools. It maintains a list of such schools in the United States and around the world. It offers consulting on democratic school process, school starter classes, and mounts a yearly national conference drawing democratic educators and advocates from around the country and from other countries as well. Attending one of their usually four-day conferences would be a great way to introduce yourself to this educational model and some of its key practitioners.

* The Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA) was founded in 2009 inspired by longtime Israeli democratic educator Yaacov Hecht. Its staff represents a younger generation of democratic education activists, and the organization provides an online community, consulting, advocacy, and a clearinghouse for innovative programs and resources that support democratic education. I had the privilege of participating in some of the early discussions and meetings with founder Dana Benis and other leaders of the organization that led up to its launch.

Schooling without compulsory law would still exist, that I have no doubt, and it would still have the selecting function. It would just be that those attending would be the children of the upper classes making their way in the process of maintaining their class status.

I appreciate his point and it is a very compelling line of thinking that is shared by most progressive legislators and other progressive people. To have a truly egalitarian society where all our children have the opportunity to succeed and make a better life for themselves, we need to have an education system where all kids are required to go to school. The thinking is, without that requirement, too many of our disadvantaged families would choose not to send their kids to school and encourage those kids instead to perhaps get much less robust training to take low-wage menial jobs instead. Or even if these parents sent their kids to school, the kids given the chance would exercise their right not to go to class and would not engage in the “hard” study that they needed to be successful adults.

Though Leo supports more learner-driven alternative curricula within the context of compulsory school attendance, most progressives take a big step further in terms of compulsory education and advocate that there is a singular “best practice” academic curriculum that all our youth need to be trained in if those youth are going to be successful adults in contemporary society. The fear of these progressives is that if given a choice, a sizable number of these disadvantaged kids and their families would not choose this rigorous academic training in favor of other pursuits that are easier, more fun, or more strictly vocationally focused.

There is certainly good reason behind their concern. Back in the days when schools had both academic and non-academic (vocational) tracks, too many school counselors and teachers were guilty of tracking the disadvantaged kids (mostly of color) into the non-academic track and the advantaged kids (mostly white) into the academic one.

In a hugely bureaucratic education system managed at the state level far removed from the actual participants in the schooling process, the simplest most easily implemented solution to this racist/classist “tracking” was to exercise more top-down control of the learning process. Eliminate the vocational training path and require that all kids go through the rigorous academic training (including all that abstract math that so many kids in school seem to be struggling with these days). If counselors and teachers could not be trusted to present the educational options fairly to all kids and their families, and the disadvantaged families perhaps could not make a fully informed choice, the state needed to compel a universal choice for everyone’s “own good”.

Please correct me if I’m wrong here, but I believe this is the basic progressive argument for compulsory schooling and standardized academic curriculum. Without mandatory attendance and mandatory academic curriculum, it would be mainly the kids from privileged families that would be pursuing the curriculum that led to high-paying professional jobs. That is the hard reality of the real world and any other course would sacrifice too many of our youth to a perpetual underclass.

So given all that context, I have come to a place based on my own life’s experience (as a former youth and current parent) where I think we need to start reconsidering both standardized curriculum and compulsory school attendance. I am cognizant of the problems with this approach in terms of enforcing fairness, but I think all this compulsion is seriously weakening our democratic society, founded on the principles (in theory at least) of both liberty and justice for all.

So I continue to make my case as best I can on the AERO forum for what I call “many paths of learning” as a better path forward for our educational system than the current OSFA (one size fits all) compulsory approach.

In response to one of my recent posts grinding my “many paths” ax, and mentioning that my own kids unschooled rather than going to high school, Leo responded to me with this question…

Do you really believe the overwhelming number of children in this country are in a family where parents can afford to stay home and, like Gatto wants, teach their children to read and to write? Yes, there are unschooling means of education. But children have become so dependent on others, whether in the form of electronic technology or on “authority” they find it difficult to self-regulate, no less self-direct. Setting these children free to their own devices by waving the magic wand of compulsory repeal without a massive infrastructure of other opportunities such as drop-in centers the likes of which were in the late ’60′s is setting them up for even greater harm than the toxic school environments already existing.

By Gatto, Leo is referring to John Taylor Gatto, former award-winning public school teacher who soured on compulsory education and now criticizes schooling and supports homeschooling and unschooling. Though I would admit that Gatto can be extreme in his thinking and is a major league provocateur, his provocative ideas and more left-libertarian approach to thinking about education from the learner’s (rather than just the state’s) point of view have been transformational in my own thinking. Based on reading his ideas and using them as a lens to look back at my own experience, I clearly see that much if not most of my own most profound learning happened outside of my extensive formal schooling. (See my piece “My Schooling vs My Job Skills Provenance” for details.)

In my reply to Leo I acknowledged that he had a point. Other than schools and some home environments, most of the venues in our society are not youth friendly and the kind of places where youth can congregate and engage in interaction, activity and exploration are few and far between. To suddenly wave a magic wand and make all schools and all standardized curricula non-compulsory could easily destabilize our current education infrastructure (that is our schools) beyond and kind of creative dissonance into total disintegration. In an institution built for 180 years on the bedrock of compulsion, true liberty and choice is profoundly frightening and probably beyond that institution’s ability to process.

But not being willing to surrender my vision of what I see as the evolutionary step forward away from compulsion and towards self-direction, what I proposed was doing things incrementally rather than all at once. Pragmatically, we could at least start to dial down (rather than up) compulsory schooling and standardized curricula. I cited what I feel to be pragmatic reasons for doing so…

1. With the professional skill level and experience needed to be a truly effective teacher, and all the extensive physical infrastructure we’ve come to expect from a full-service academic educational venue, it has become very expensive to create and maintain these sorts of schools and have them be effective learning centers. Adding in that schooling is compulsory which gives the adult staff the added burden of managing a significant percentage of their students that don’t want to (or otherwise shouldn’t) be there, I think that pushes many of our schools over the brink into ineffectiveness.

I keep thinking of my own kids’ cousin who pursued the standard high school curriculum at home and found that he could master all his academic subjects in less than half the time he would have at school, successfully graduate, enroll in and graduate from college. That has got to speak to an institution that is not optimized to learning and I feel the fact that so many kids are there against their will is a big part of that.

From my reading of American history, the same sort of problem happened with penitentiaries, which were originally conceived as utopian venues, for criminals initially, but that every person would eventually want to live in, because these venues represented the best practice of social engineering. It was later due to the expense of this utopian endeavor and the inevitable tightening of public budgets that these institutions had to be scaled back to their current mostly human warehousing function.

2. Forcing people (youth in this case) to live their lives a certain way 180 days a year for up to 13 years with no recourse to due process or representation is in my thinking a form of tyranny. We would never dare subject adults to this same kind of compulsory attendance (unless they were convicted of crimes). You might say people are forced to work to make a living, but at least if you quit your job the truant officers don’t come after you. People used to be perhaps more accommodating to external control from above, but I think as the human consciousness develops over the generations the passivity to accept external control is diminishing.

3. In this contemporary world which advertises and purports to (if not necessarily delivering) “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a very “old school” regimented, standardized, externally controlled education is increasingly more at odds with that and a source of increasingly debilitating stress for both student and teacher.

So if you accept my argument against compulsion (and I expect many of you will not) how do we begin to get from where we are now to this new paradigm? Maybe we start out by making attendance on the site of the school mandatory, but what you do at school during your day (as long as you stay on site) your choice. Maybe we just offer this kind of choice at some schools so parents and kids have options of learning environments – those with mandated classes and those not. Maybe we also enlarge the small but growing number of virtual schools that are focused on facilitating “remote learning” or more academic homeschooling of one sort or another (like done by my kids’ cousin).

So like John Taylor Gatto at his best, I am trying to be provocative here and hopefully create some creative cognitive dissonance to push some folks off their perhaps ossified thinking that “kids should be in school” and need to know geometry and advanced algebra… end of argument.