Educating as if Democracy Mattered
Lessons from the free school movement of the 1960s
While many of the social movements that erupted in the 1960s saw their ideas taken up, at least to some extent, by the wider society and established institutions, the radical critique of schooling that emerged in that same countercultural uprising ended up withering on the vine. It has had virtually no impact on mainstream education and is largely forgotten today. Breakthrough works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique are still cited and revered today, but writings on education that were also widely influential at the time — such as Summerhill by A.S. Neill and How Children Fail by John Holt — have fallen into that proverbial dustbin of history. It is instructive to inquire why this is so.
The radical educators were concerned with how to sustain a democratic society and prepare young people for lives as active, engaged citizens. Inspired by the notion of participatory democracy as proclaimed in the 1962 Port Huron Statement (the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society), these educators sought to go beyond the technocratic liberalism of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and most of the institutions of the time, including even the most progressive public schools. In their view, genuine democracy was not a mass system to be…
