Truly Injecting Democracy into the Classroom

Injecting democracy into a classroom is not an easy task. Despite the democratic society the United States of America prides itself on being, education is surprisingly much closer to being an autocracy due to its teacher centric classroom structure (never mind the large bureaucracy that looms over them). At the end of the day, the teacher is in control, dictating what the students do day in and day out with the hopes they will walk away more intelligent and wiser than they were when they first stepped into the room. From my experience, few teachers stray away from this structure following an old adage of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

That was until recently. In a course entitled “Teaching, Democracy and Schools,” my professor decided to turn the class on its head and give the students free reign on an assignment. The idea behind the assignment was for the students to design an ideal school, permitting it satisfies certain requirements. These requirements were far from crippling, truly allowing the students to design the school with few limitations. But the twist was not the assignment; it was the process in which the students could take to complete it. Options included: working alone, working in small groups, or (most radically) working as an entire class. Needless to say, it was not surprising (at least to me) what my class chose.

Now I get why these guys struggle to get things done.

Working as a class was clearly an exercise in democracy as now you have 24 voices that need to be heard and included into a single idea/project. Needless to say, things did not go very smoothly in the beginning. Organizing ideas, staying on task and overbearing desire to compromise slowed the process to a screeching halt. All too often people wanted to synthesize all the ideas and then attempt to mold them, however, it never went as planned. Additionally, splitting up work was nearly impossible because a lack of constant (or efficient) communication. When structure was finally installed, it was almost too late (praise the fates we had an extended deadline). Fortunate favored us as the concluding moments of the project went better than expected. Overall, if I have to say anything about how we did as a whole, I would say we were “impressive.” The process was unlike anything we ever did and we performed quite admirably all things considered, finding a means to complete the assignment while staying true to the vision we had…at least for the most part.

What is more interesting is how one considers the implications of implementing this class structure to an assignment in other classrooms. I say “other classrooms” merely because this was used in a classroom full of graduate students (many of which are like-minded) that seek to become teachers in some respect. What about a high school class of potentially diverse teenagers with a wide range of aspirations of lack thereof? Or a middle school classroom of volatile children with raging hormones? Or a bunch of overly energetic elementary students who may or may not love school at that point? This structure for an assignment would be very interesting to include in a curriculum because of the potential it has on the students. It could get the more apathetic ones involved. It could promote new ways to look at problems. Best of all, it gets democracy into the classroom, making all the students understand how our government and by extension society truly operates. The hidden curriculum here cannot be understated. It’s that important. It is just of matter of doing it and making it work. There’s the tricky part that I have to figure out.