Schools for Democracy – Deborah Meier
I’d like to share some insightful observations from one of the “real” pioneers in education reform, Deborah Meier. In this presentation she made in Chicago, from 2006, Dr. Meier talks about how most of America’s schools function as authoritarian institutions, where democracy and collaboration are neither practiced, taught, experienced or modeled.
This is a huge failing of our nation, because in order for children to truly understand democracy they need real life opportunities to observe and apply it. Dr. Meier’s insights are aligned with the ideas of progressive educators such as John Dewey and Maria Montessori, as well as the research of Barbara Rogoff, and the theories of Lev Vygotsky, about the role of apprenticeship experiences, adult modeling and scaffolding with children’s learning.
In another presentation, she said:
“The motives of the drivers behind NCLB—which fixes in law our misplaced obsessions—vary, but between them they have helped create a climate that removes democracy from our schoolhouses. Folks like us who advocate a different kind of childhood are on occasion labeled elitist, failing to confront the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged that requires that we throw overboard the frills of childhood along with the frills of local democracy.
“The” poor need, our critics argue, something different—something more akin to a boot camp with a boot camp approach to intellectual skill and authority. And to this end, they say, we must cut out our romantic love affair with local democracy.”
I would argue that Dr. Meier’s ideas are not romantic, and that designing schools for democracy is an idea whose time has come. It’s also something that is backed up with real research evidence, and has already been successfully implemented in many places.
A few months ago, in the New York Times article Make Schools a Democracy, UC Berkeley Prof. David Kirp described how the Escuela Nueva (New School) model has been flourishing in thousands of Columbian and Latin American schools for decades:
“Escuela Nueva turns the schoolhouse into a laboratory for democracy. Rather than Schools for Democracy – Deborah Meier | Creative by Nature: