Thank you all for coming tonight...  It warms my heart.

I have nothing new to say, as others have written and spoken eloquently on the subject of democratic education for many years, most recently here at IDEC. What I do have to offer is my own synthesis of some of what I’ve read and experienced.

First, a bit of background. 

I have been regarded as a certified teacher because I took a one year emergency teacher training course when I was 18, and I was in the classroom at 19.  I’m glad the program was only one year long, because I had to unlearn most of it in the following years.  My real teachers were children and their families. 

I am immensely grateful to all the people who have allowed me into their lives, and have shared with me their thoughts, their hopes and their fears.

Before I had children I had many theories about how to raise children.  As my own children came into the world my theories left.  Now, as a grandmother, I have not one theory left.  Instead, I enjoy a very freeing degree of humility, and am open to a wide variety of child-rearing styles as long as they are practised with compassion and mindfulness.

I still have things I am grumpy about, of course.  I don’t like the idea of asking children to be nice.  I don’t think you can be nice and real at the same time. If a child finds herself greeting a ghastly old relative who likes to pinch her cheeks and talk about her as though she isn’t present, then I consider it a reasonable request that she be civil, and if she feels up to it, gracious.  But she should not be asked to be nice.

Because I think requiring children to be nice creates barriers in relationships, I also am not a strong proponent of good manners.  I have been sorely tried by various children in my care making me ‘look bad’ by being rambunctious in public.  I have come to understand that if I am going to take young people out in public, I’d better get over the idea that they are going to make me look good.  I’m not condoning behaviour that impinges on the rights of others, but it is not the job of a child to be a charming accessory.

Another pet peeve is condescension.  We often patronize young people by thinking they are cute.  They may be cute, but that is not the point.  Unless they are deliberately hamming it up, they are not trying to be cute, and like to be taken seriously.  We talk about self-esteem, but it does not come from others telling you how clever you are, it comes from others listening to you in a way that indicates that your ideas are of interest.

My last bugbear is fairness.   When people say, ‘but that’s not fair!’ they usually mean, ‘I didn’t get exactly the same as everyone else!’  Wanting things to be meticulously even often gets in the way of finding creative solutions.  It takes people away from the idea of pooling resources to come to a new, out-of-the-box solution.  Fairness is a slippery idea at the best of times, and when you put all of your mind to finding minute reasons to tip the scale in your favour, then you lose the ability to see the whole picture. 

The whole picture is that if anyone in a group is dissatisfied with a solution, then it won’t have that synergy that  whole-hearted support always produces. 

If you stand back a bit, and entertain any ideas that might work, you sometimes come up with solutions that seem grossly unfair, yet everyone involved completely supports!  The method we use in SANE is to put all ideas out on the table with no one negating any of them.  Then we pick up the ideas that seem most useful and craft them into a draft solution.  Then the whole group tinkers with the solution until a magic moment occurs when everyone has the sense that this is IT.  We know that it isn’t going to be perfect, but we can change it later if it doesn’t work.  Often, the process solves the problem and the solution is never put into practise.

I do make a distinction between fairness and justice.  Injustice occurs when any of the people involved feel that their concern has not been mindfully addressed.

One time I had an illuminating experience with a young woman who stayed with us for several years.  She had a habit of making tea, taking her cup off with her and expecting to come back for a refill.  Often she forgot to return, and so the pot was left unwashed.  I got tired of washing the pot before having tea, and then washing it again afterwards. She was filled with guilt and I was filled with righteous indignation.  All of our solutions simply did not work. 

Finally, I abandoned righteous indignation.  I make this sound easy, but believe me, it wasn’t.  The situation was so clearly in my favour:  everyone knows that you should clean up after yourself.   Once I let go of this idea, however, we came up with a wonderful solution!  We would both wash the pot before we made tea, and not wash it afterwards.  It had an added bonus of warming the pot. We were both delighted with the solution, and it worked like a charm.

So now you have an idea of the way that I view the world.

In my early years as a teacher, I would have been shocked by all of these ideas.  I taught in a traditional school and loved it.  It was not until I had an enlightening experience with one of my classes that I began to have doubts. 

I was teaching Grade six.  I put some Social Studies notes on one board, and then on the other I jokingly put information that contradicted it.  I said there would be a quiz the next day.  The students dutifully wrote down the information and regurgitated it on the exam.  After I collected the papers, I asked them if they noticed that one set of information contradicted the other.  There was a stunned silence.  Then one brave girl raised her hand and said, “I didn’t know you wanted me to think!”  That was a turning point in my career.

I went from 5 years in the traditional schools to 3 years teaching pre-school.  What an enormous difference!  I had to unlearn everything I learned in teacher training.  It wasn’t about pouring information into empty vessels, and it wasn’t about igniting interest.  It was about providing a rich environment and supporting children to make use of it however they saw fit.  The proof was in the light in their eyes.

When my daughter was in Grade 2 and getting stomach aches every school night, I knew I had to do something for her.  She had gone from being an energetic, creative child to being a well-behaved subdued student.  She did well in academics and had friends, but was losing her initiative, resourcefulness and joy.

So...

A group of parents and myself started the school in our house on Windsor Road with 15 students. We named it Windsor House.  We had been involved in parent-participation preschool, so it was natural that we wanted to continue to access that wonderful synergy.  The school grew and evolved for 37 years and now has about 125 students.  

Things have changed a great deal over the years.  We live in an information richness that is many orders of magnitude larger than it was when I began teaching.  In 1958, in each school there was a globe and wall maps in each room, and text books.  That was it.  Teachers used to obtain information from the textbooks, package it into 40 minute lessons, and teach it to the students.  In my early days of teaching I was often only a page ahead of my class.

Nowadays, students have access to more information than anyone could possibly assimilate.  What they need to learn is how to choose from that massive amount what will be useful for them at any given point in time.

What remains is needing someone to support learners by being in relationship with them, and by providing resources they cannot obtain themselves.  They need access to a variety of people so they can choose who to trust.

They also need people who have skills and are able to share them.  They should be able to choose these mentors too.

I will concede, as well, that there is a place for a certification process so that others can easily verify who has mastered a set piece of information or a skill.  We want to have confidence that our surgeons and airline pilots, to name but two, are qualified.  I’d actually like to be sure that they are mentally stable as well, but that doesn’t seem to be as easy to certify.

The responsibility for gaining certification should belong to learner, however, not to some bureaucrat.  Every time a learner wants certification, as with a driver’s licence, they can apply for it.  If they don’t pass, then they can go back and do some more work and apply again. Failure is unnecessary. 

My father, who is in the audience tonight,  started his teaching career in a one room school house, and finished it teaching teachers at UBC. He once said,

In Education there should be no failures,
Only degrees of success.

Failure punishes the least fortunate and rewards those who don’t need reward.

Other than certification, all else should be entirely the learner’s business so that they can learn in fits and starts, or in a smooth progression, or in some quite inexplicable way.

Gabor Maté makes it clear that the early years are very important to brain development.  The brain has a genetic predisposition, but develops in response to the environment.

Furthermore, the creation of a world view starts very early, and influences the rest of your life.

Daniel Greenberg , in his book Worlds in Creation, talks about the MODOR which is an ongoing dance between what you make of the world - your model of reality -  and your method of dealing with the world.  It is about responding to fresh information through the lens of your world model, and changing your world model in the light of new information. 

If children decide, very early on, that adults cannot be trusted, then it takes a huge amount of evidence to the contrary to allow them to shift that perspective.  All of the incoming evidence is viewed through that dark lens, and so positive input tends to be discounted and negative input confirms the already-held belief. 

Conversely, if young children deduce that the world is a friendly place, and basic needs are easily met, then they will receive input in a very different manner.

It is impossible though, and perhaps not even desirable, to provide a perfect environment.  Small hurts are part of living, and necessary for the development of resilience, but they must be  manageable.   It is the traumatic hurts, the ones that cannot be processed and dealt with during a good night’s sleep, that are to be avoided. 

It is no surprise, then, that people have great potholes in their road of life.  Some people have a huge ditch running alongside the road, providing a constant threatening presence.  It doesn’t take a lot of research to deduce that someone travelling along a road with very few potholes and no yawning chasms on either side can be much more adventuresome, generous and capable.  They have a much better chance of realizing their potential.

Just to get the ‘nature vs nurture’ argument out of the way, I believe that both nature and nurture are very important, and have varying influences during the course of one’s life.  Given, however, that the genetic component is already set, what can we do to ameliorate its negative aspects and support its positive aspects through the environment we provide ?

How do we supply, as parents and mentors, an environment that will provide a solid grounding for young people so that they can stride into a yet unknown future full of vitality and hope?

I have collected many quotes from famous people that all have the same basic message: People are the most productive and competent members of society when they are most fully themselves,
at ease with who they are, and living in integrity with who they are. 

Know Thyself. 
Accept Who You Are. 
To Thine Own Self Be True

This is especially important nowadays because the corporate culture is so dysfunctional, humans are in danger of becoming extinct.  To stop this trajectory we must change ourselves and our own behaviour, which many of us are doing as quickly as we can, and we must provide a different environment for the next generation so that they are not as impaired as we are.

As adults, we have a responsibility to try to break the chain.  The first thing to do, of course, is to keep working on being the most of who we are, and the second is to keep working on being at ease with who we are, and then comes living in integrity with who we are.  This is a lifelong job.

I have found that the more that adults are at ease with their own boundaries, the more comfortable it is for kids to accept those boundaries.  Being at ease with boundaries means that you don’t wait until you are resentful and angry before you make known a boundary.  Instead, you recognize at once that whatever is happening is not going to work for you, and you cheerfully put a boundary forward, with the comfortable belief that your boundary will probably be honoured.  If it isn’t, then there is some collaboration to be done.

In collaboration, one puts out a need and everyone brainstorms to see what will enable that need to be met in coordination with the needs of others.  Collaboration is different from compromise, in that with compromise there is the expectation that all parties are going to give something up.  With collaboration, however, there is the expectation that with two or more brilliant minds working on the problem, the solution will be better than one thought up by a single person.

Once, in a meeting, I said to the group, “With five good brains working on this we should be able to come up with a good solution.”

From the chair beside her mother came the voice of our four year old youngest member.  “Six,”
she called out firmly.  It took me a moment to realize that of course we had six good brains working on the problem.

Collaboration requires that we listen carefully.  The more I really listen to people, the better I understand the whole picture, and the less I am likely to want to overpower them.  The less I try to overpower them, the more co-operative they become.

Occasionally, of course, I bump into someone who insists on trying to overpower me.  In those cases, if I have the upper hand, I use my power with compassion, and if I don’t have the upper hand, I back off and work on a strategy that will assist me if the situation arises again .

Although I prefer to use collaboration, I have no quarrel with people making decisions for other people.  It must be done occasionally.  What I object to is people being so certain that they are making the right decisions.  As a culture, we have taken on the idea that some people’s decisions are more right than others.

We do not wait to see if the decision should be adjusted or revised.  We buy into the notion that if we are above someone else on the hierarchical ladder, then our decisions are better.

This utter conviction makes for rigidity.  It doesn’t allow for flexibility and reworking.  This utter conviction means that some things continue long after they are obviously terribly wrong.

When I talk about dysfunctional societies and emotionally fragile people, I would like to differentiate between mental illness, which is completely beyond my expertise, and emotional distress which we all experience to varying degrees. 

Emotional distress occurs because there has been damage to the sense of self.  It comes from negative events in the  environment.  Our job is to support mental health and refrain from inflicting emotional injury.

If we, as adults, continuously work on our own reactive places, then we get better and better at being constructive mentors.  Given, however, that we are all at different points along the road to sainthood, we need something more practical to guide us.

We need to do our own personal work all the time, whatever way we can.  By that I mean taking a humble view of one’s own behaviour and a generous view of the behaviour of others.  I mean realizing that if you were completely in someone else’s boots, genetically and environmentally, you would probably be making the exact same decisions that they are making.  You aren’t so much superior as lucky.  This attitude allows you to be respectful of the thoughts and opinions of others. 

You don’t have to agree with others, but if you consider that you might learn something important from almost any person in the room, you will be more respectful.

This brings me to my main point.  As mentors, our job is to provide an environment that is as respectful, in the full sense of the word, and as nourishing to emotional, intellectual and physical health as we possibly can make it.

Children deserve to be listened to with respect.

Much has been written about listening.

In spite of all of the information out there, I notice that adults still do not listen very well.  In fact it is not only adults, it is anyone who is one or more rungs higher on a ladder than the person they are talking to.  Eleven year olds do it to four year olds.  Bosses do it to employees, computer whizzes do it to us bumbling incompetents. 

Most of the time it is merely irritating, but with young children it may change the way they view themselves.  Young people have been trained to think there are right answers, and that the adults know what they are.  They think their ideas might be silly or unimportant, so after a few bad experiences, they only speak their minds to their peers.

Furthermore, we do not know how to listen to young people.  We listen in a hurry.  If a young person cannot articulate their thinking quickly enough, we either put words in their mouths or indicate we know what they mean.  Many times we have no idea. 

To really listen, one needs to be sincere.  One needs to actually believe that this person has ideas or information that will have value, and should be considered in a decision-making process. 

I gleaned a life-changing piece of information from my son when he was about 9.  One night, in that magic time when they want to talk to you because it fends off the evil hour when they must let go of today and go to sleep, he said, ‘No one can be a perfect mother, so why don’t you just relax?”  It freed me up immensely.

This means, of course, that we must truly care what they think, not listen as a charitable gesture.  It is difficult to avoid being patronizing if you believe you are better than someone else. 

I saw a sign when I was at the AERO conference that quoted Carol Gilligan: “The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was unheard.”

I was very affected by ideas in the book The Chalice and the Blade, by Rianne Eisler.  In it she talks about the dominator model of society and the co-operator model.  She points out that most of our societies are based on the dominator model.  This model assumes that the dominators are superior.

John Holt says that freedom of speech is useless unless we have freedom of thought.  We cannot have freedom of thought if we accept the dominator model which says our superiors know best.

The problem is not the teachers.  Every teacher I know cares about the young people in their classes.  They work hard and are constantly looking for better ways to do things.

The problem is not the parents.  Every parent I know cares deeply about their children, and does their best to help them succeed.

The problem is the culture.  Unfortunately, we are part of the culture.  We are like the ancient Egyptians whose teeth ground down to stumps before they were 40 because there was sand in their bread from the flour-milling process.  Everyone had worn-down teeth, so it was accepted as inevitable.

Many of us accept that young people can’t really make good decisions about their lives, that they don’t have the ‘maturity’, that they haven’t seen enough of the world.  We deny them the opportunity to demonstrate the opposite, and then we use their lack of ability as proof.  Luckily more and more democratic opportunities are surfacing and it is clear that young people are extremely capable. 

We are still, however, having trouble ‘proving’ that young people make constructive choices about their own learning.  Our culture is willing to sacrifice emotional well-being for high test scores, because they are measurable, and emotional well-being isn’t.   Imagine for a moment if we could measure emotional well-being from day to day.  We would be appalled at the damage that is being done in the name of academic rigour.

Suppose you were tested with your age-mates and given a list of things you couldn’t do as well as your friends.  “Helen Hughes, age 69, not yet meeting expectations in map skills and cooking...”

Ideally, we want young people to have both academic prowess and emotional health, but if I have to lose one to get the other, I will always choose to support emotional health.  A slow start in academics does not mean there won’t be vigorous life-long learning.  Many of our most brilliant thinkers did not do well in school.  A rocky start in emotional health, however, makes everything that follows more difficult.

I am going to mention some of the ways in which we sacrifice emotional health without even realizing we are doing it. 

The first is one that I have done myself, over and over again.  That is to be overly zealous.  Every time I read a book about child-rearing I would leap in and adopt what I thought was the new method.  One of the early ones was that there is no need to keep saying ‘no’ to children.  You could simply explain a situation to them and they would make a constructive choice.  My eldest son, who was 5 at the time, put me to the test. 

He was standing beside our large picture window throwing his gumboot up in the air and catching it.  I said, in as calm a voice as I could muster, “That window is very expensive to replace, and your boot could break it.”  He paused, and then threw the boot carefully in the air one more time catching it neatly in one hand.  I was stunned.  It felt as though he was deliberately defying me.

But he wasn’t that kind of person, so as I tried to figure out what that transaction had been all about, he went off and put his boots away.  Last week, I asked him if he remembered that event, and if so, what was he trying to tell me when he threw his boot that one last time. 

He said he didn’t remember it (it was nearly 40 years ago!) but he thought he probably wasn’t trying to tell me anything.  He guessed that he heard what I said, weighed it in his mind, and decided that it was safe enough, so he threw the boot just one more time, to check.

I had leapt into using a technique, which was to give children an order in a rather oblique way, so they would be less likely to object.  It hadn’t entered my head that he might not ‘obey’ the devious command.

It is equally harmful to be underzealous.  Parents should not abrogate their responsibilities.  They should not let their children become abusive.  All the children that I have known who rage at their parents are quite anxious young people.  If their parents can’t keep things safe, who can?  Boundaries are something humans must set for their own protection, and it is necessary to be able to hold them with ease.  We need to model that.  The time to maintain boundaries is the first time there is a hint of someone stepping over one.  Stop the world, take it seriously, don’t carry on life as usual until it is clear that everything stops when boundaries are overrun.

Of course, in order to hold a boundary, you have to know where it is.  That is where personal work comes in.  I have done a lot of work on personal issues so that I can be with young people without doing them the disservice of either being a pushover or a hot-button reactor. 

Educational overzealousness is a big one.  We have been brainwashed with the idea of the teachable moment.

On one memorable occasion, I was brought up short by my daughter who was at the time four years old.  We had a ratty old bearskin rug in front of our fireplace and it was missing the head. She musingly remarked “I wonder which end the head was at.”  I, having just learned to not answer questions directly, but rather to extend the thinking by asking further questions, said “If you stroked the fur could you figure it out?”

“Mother,” she said calmly, “ I don’t want a learning experience, I just want to know where the head went.”  That was a learning experience for me!

Also, we still judge young people by how much schooling they have been able to endure.  It is common to judge the effectiveness of a school by how many graduates go on to university.  I reject that yardstick.  I think we cannot judge how effective a school is until years later when we look at the people who spent most of their time there and see if they are leading compassionate, constructive, rewarding lives.

One of my heroes is a Windsor House alumnus who has endured tremendous hardship in his life. He has carried on in spite of ongoing terrible misfortune.  What I admire him for, however, is for continuing to be thoughtful of others and loving towards people close to him. Another of my heroes is a young woman who consciously acts with integrity even when it is quite difficult.

It is no surprise, then, to hear that I am a proponent of non-coercive education.  It seems so common sense to me, that I am actually taken aback when I hear of people who think the most important aspect of education is to produce obedient people. 

There is so much we need to understand about the fears of such people, and about how to help dissolve those fears.

What I have gained from this conference is the idea that to have Peace we need to lower the level of fear.  To lower the level of fear we need to provide emotional safety and evidence of sufficient food, clothing and shelter for all.  To do that we need to be less reactive and embrace sustainable practices.  To achieve that we need to provide our young with nurturing environments and evolved mentors. 

So, what to do?

We can start right away.  We can continue to self-reflect in order to work on our own places where we are reactive, while taking whatever steps we can to nurture people of all ages.  If you restrict yourself to working for only young people you miss the opportunity to support a parent or a crotchety neighbour so that they can be more accepting of the young.

We can stop trying to be right and try instead to be responsive and compassionate to everyone. 

If each person takes whatever action appeals to them, whether it is rephrasing a criticism to be useful instead of hurtful, or infiltrating a whole country with democratic schools, we will reach the tipping point where there are enough sane people to create Peace.

I will tell a true story of a young person who taught me that it is possible to lead from behind.

This young man came to Windsor House because he was not doing well in his neighbourhood school.  He was a bright lad, but had trouble reading and writing, so that by Grade 5 he was feeling very much a failure.  At Windsor House, he was acknowledged for his strengths and supported in his slow but steady growth in the language arts.  He began to bloom.  His enthusiasm for life was contagious and his family was greatly relieved.

When he was in his early teens he decided to join Cadets.  I was invited to watch his first parade.  It was a glorious sunny day, and the parade began forming up.   Being tall, he was in the back row of his marching group, beaming proudly, handsome in his new uniform.  The drums rolled and the marching began.

Because he was long of leg, he could not march at the drummers’ pace without walking into the person in front of him.  Instead of taking smaller steps, he slowed his paces.  He was so confident and stately, looking straight ahead, that the lad beside him slowed his pace to match.  Pretty soon, the boy beside him slowed, and so it moved on down the row, as I strode alongside grinning with delight.  Before long, a person in the next row up, hearing a steady slower beat from behind, slowed his pace and it moved along the second row.  Before the end of the parade, all but two in his cohort had changed to his pace.

What a lesson in self-confidence! 

I may be just as off-beat as that young man, but I am confident that treating everyone with genuine respect will build a culture where people can feel safe enough to find our who they are, accept themselves warts and all, and live with integrity.

My little piece is that I am going to start a Learnary, which is like a Library only has a broader range of offerings and is run by the community it serves.  It will also have a child-minding component and an Institute where people gather to learn how to work with young people in a respectful way.  I like to start small, so the first person who applies will be the start-up student of the Westmoreland House Institute of Mentor-Training (WHIM).  I invite applicants.