Partially Democratic? Wholly Ridiculous.
It may seem presumptuous, even harsh or dismissive, to say that partially democratizing schools is impossible. How can any effort to give students a greater voice in their education be a bad thing? The problem is, though, democracy is not modular-it’s either/or, on or off, all or nothing. “Partially democratic” makes about as much sense as “partially pregnant” or “partially dead.”
Sure, introducing a measure of democracy into traditional schools sounds nice; but the likelihood that it could be authentic and successful is remote. However lofty its rhetoric, no institution can permit reform to stray outside its historical and social mission. Anything more constitutes not reform but reconstruction, and institutional self-preservation will inevitably undermine it.
The prevailing system of schooling was devised during the Industrial Revolution to develop a functional, relatively tractable populace. John Taylor Gatto lays out ample evidence for this in his Underground History of American Education. Gatto’s analysis is that most schools, far from being broken, are in fact doing what they were designed to do. John Holt adds in Freedom and Beyond that “universal compulsory schools are not and never were meant to be humane institutions” [author’s emphasis].
Yet cynicism alone can’t explain why partially democratizing schools is a misguided and doomed notion. Plenty of dedicated adults sincerely desire to empower students. However, even a cursory analysis of the situation makes it clear that good intentions and hard work simply aren’t enough.
As Holt points out, schools have acquired several competing purposes over the years. While it is true that schools’ educative function is to help students grow, that goal is overwhelmed by less humane mandates. For example, the custodial function of schools seeks not growth, but rather to keep kids out of the home, off the street, and away from the workplace. The sorting function involves assessing and channeling students according to their aptitude for certain tasks. Indoctrinating children with the values of compliant citizens, workers and consumers, as well as promoting progressive social reform, rounds out the educational agenda.
Like it or not, no school could possibly reconcile all these disparate functions. For one thing, Holt bluntly asserts that “schools can’t simultaneously be in the jail business and the learning business.” Moreover, treating students as commodities to be weighed and ranked hardly promotes growth. What’s more, it doesn’t work. Despite traditional schooling’s faith in assessment, the fact is human nature will always elude measurement. No paper-and-pencil test could ever quantify character, or such traits as persistence, initiative, resilience and flexibility.
Above all, partial democracy must fail because it is an empty concept; it is inauthentic. The qualifier “partial” implies that what passes for democracy will be limited to pre-approved realms, subject to the whim of the educators who granted it. Well, freedom that can be readily revoked is no freedom, and democracy in a box is not democracy. It is disingenuous, at best, to feed students scraps of democracy with one hand while holding back true power with the other.
Besides, flexibility in accomplishing someone else’s agenda hardly compares to being a self-determined individual in a genuinely democratic community. Students are perceptive and will see right through shallow promises and superficial trappings. Even if some fall for pseudo-democracy, at some point their hopes will be dashed. Either the program will end, or it will run up against the narrow, playpen limits that block substantive change. And then, says Holt, the resulting disillusionment will be worse than if the experiment had never been tried.
Democracy is not a patch, nor is it icing or a paint job: one cannot take pieces of it and cover up an institution’s basic flaws. Democracy is, instead, a culture. One need only look to the former Eastern Bloc to see how difficult and protracted the process of democratization truly is. Here in the West, conventional schools remain our most inveterately undemocratic institutions. It defies common sense to imagine that one can merely drop a few seeds onto such inhospitable ground and watch democracy take root and blossom.
Granted, there are degrees of health, in systems as well as human beings. Yet people are either alive or dead, and schools are either democratic…or not.