User:Fasten/school/ideas/school democracy
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[edit] Abstract
A frequent problem of school democracy appears to be that pupils lack motivation to take an interest in the democratic processes available at their schools. The school community does not present the pupils with any significant challenges to take control and to make changes to the prearranged circumstances because the environment is designed to allow what parents and pupils commonly expect from a school: To allow a pupil to learn and to receive sufficient grades in order to qualify as desired. This is, however, an egoistical goal that does not require democratic participation or community building, goals that could be seen as important for a learning community and important to raise politically mature citizens. Schools that recognize a need for democratic participation still appear to suffer from a lack of convincing motivations for pupils to exercise democratic control. A possible solution could be to make prearranged circumstances and processes sufficiently undesirable and irritating that pupils would see it as self-evident to want to redesign or replace some of the prearranged circumstances and processes.
[edit] Participation for everybody
"It is vital that pupils are provided with structured opportunities to explore actively aspects, issues and events through school and community involvement, case studies and critical discussions that are challenging and relevant to their lives." [1]
A conceivable scheme to allow participation by every pupil are grade parliaments and requirements for working committees per subject. With four pupils in a committee and about twenty subjects that would offer eighty pupils in a grade to hold a responsible position in the school community. Subject committees could be authorized by their grade parliaments to handle matters concerning qualification of tutors, grading of mentors and coaching lessons for teachers in their respective subjects according to the self-imposed rules of the grade parliament.
Teachers could intervene to make the work of a committee more interesting by introducing mistakes were the pupils had failed to make any mistakes of their own. The grade parliament could provide insufficient or inconsistent instructions to some of the subject committees, so the committees would have to reject their work until the process had been straightened out. The committees themselves could occasionally fail to follow procedure or overstep their respective competencies in order to encourage somebody else to stop them. To make this more interesting the procedures and competencies of committees could vary between subject areas and from year to year.
[edit] Class council
An important property of a class council is job rotation.[2] A class council can have up to four offices: chairperson, secretary, time monitor and rule monitor. The offices should be assigned to different pupils each time so that every pupil has an opportunity to learn to hold an office.
[edit] Conspiracy
In a grade or school community with low participation a possible strategy could be a conspiracy, like the headteacher who decides to allow teachers to make unexplained choices in the absence of any procedure defined by pupils [dead end situations ...] or the corruption of the elected representatives to support a different goal than what they had been elected for.[undesirable situations ...] The latter may also be useful in a community with a minority of stragglers, as long as the minority could still be expected to take action and try to get their own representatives elected. A conspiracy may be in order whenever a sufficient number of pupils can be expected to benefit from trying to influence school politics to solve a problem other pupils would have solved for them long before.
Conspiracy situations could, for example, arise if pupils became eligible to vote for a grade parliament during a variable entry phase for tutorship in grades nine, ten and at the beginning of grade eleven. Pupils could become eligible to vote for a grade parliament with the beginning of a semester only so a variable entry phase of four semesters would allow five groups of pupils to make up their minds as new voters somewhat independently. Anybody willing to analyze earlier attempts and to interview people about their motivations and experiences would probably understand why the end result often wasn't anywhere close to the initial motivation for becoming politically active but young pupils are not always that good researchers and listeners and even with a sufficient explanation some people might decide to try to make a difference.
[edit] Development of the democratic structures driven by needs of the pupils
Pupils could be allowed to develop their democratic structures and procedures at their own pace. For the younger grades a class council may be sufficient while older pupils might discover a need for grade parliaments, a bipartite school parliament for the Mittelstufe and Oberstufe and, finally, one or several district parliaments with neighboring schools and parliaments with twin schools.[democracy] Some of these developments could be necessary to overcome prearranged circumstances and processes designed to irritate.
In a school system where pupils were allowed to leave their classes to organize independent study the class council would lose importance at some point but might allow stragglers to follow the observed examples of their peers.
[edit] Representative democracy or direct democracy
When a grade parliament formed or when a new grade joined a junior high school parliament the democratic rules could be rearranged to suit the majority. Issues could be the psychological effects of an elective office on, possibly, impressionable teenagers, the expenditure of time for representatives, limitations for the representatives (e.g. limited authority of offices, job rotation, authorizing committees) and whether to form a representative democracy or a direct democracy. Discussing competing concepts and their effects could be an interesting addition for political education.
A representative democracy could, for example, elect committees for most purposes: A supervisory board could function as a rule monitor and could have the authority to disband the assembly and cause a new election. A committee of the general secretary could supply a (rotating) general secretary. An assembly president (or speaker) could be appointed by the members of the assembly for each session. A rules committee could decide what procedure was required to debate a proposition. Policy committees could be responsible for developments and proposals concerning specific topics and could be appointed by the general secretary as required. This is only an approximation of a council (no pun intended), there may be room for improvement.
[edit] See also
