FROM A PYRAMID PARADIGM TO A NETWORK PARADIGM by Yaacov Hecht

Excerpt from Yaacov Hecht’s chapter in EDUshifts Now! book.

In 1987, I have founded and run the Democratic School in Hadera, Israel, an experimental public school for four hundred schoolchildren age 4 to 18 years old. In a democratic school, each school child builds his own personal study program and determines what to learn, how, when, where and with whom. The school is run democratically and all the teachers, schoolchildren, and parents are welcome to be partners in the school’s management.

With time, I have been involved in the foundation of similar schools both in Israel and worldwide and developed professional training, which is designed specifically for teachers in democratic schools. Increasingly I have started to lead processes in the spirit of the Democratic Education in hundreds of traditional schools and from there, launched the development of the Education Cities model, where the goal is to transform the entire city into one big school. In Education Cities, the organization I am running today, we develop municipal collaborations between public institutions and private organizations that are active in the city, for the goal of expanding the unique development routes that are available for each schoolchild. As of today, we are active in more than 10 cities and towns, working with about 10% of Israeli schoolchildren, and the rate of our development is growing with increasing speed.

Many times, I have been asked, why have I chosen to call the school in Hadera “Democratic”? Is it not that every school in a democratic society is a democratic school? I have named the school in Hadera “Democratic” because I realized that the old school model that had prepared schoolchildren to live in the non-democratic society of more than a century ago, could not keep on existing and preparing schoolchildren for life in the democratic society in which we live today. Schools in the past, that had prepared its students for life as workers in an industrial factory, which mainly required discipline and obedience, cannot prepare them for life in contemporary organizations that call for creativity and for taking initiative.

I have realized that democratic education is the missing piece in the bigger puzzle called a democratic state.

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