Partnership Education

When envisioning healthy alternatives to dominator systems it is helpful to have examples. I find the work of John Corrigan at Group 8 particularly impressive.

Corrigan set out to identify the key conditions in schools that enable students to learn easily and well. He discovered that an essential component is that students feel respected and cared for by their teachers. The teachers do not attempt to coerce the kids into learning. Instead they create conditions such that the students are in a mental state that enables them to learn easily.

Here is a link to Redefining Education, a fascinating PowerPoint that presents the Group 8 approach. Corrigan points out that when the brain is in threat mode, with the more primitive brain centres activated, the higher brain centres are literally deprived of energy. So in this state learning beyond rote memory becomes virtually impossible.

Corrigan contrasts the 'red state', where the lower brain centres are activated for dealing with threat, with the ' blue state'. In the centred calm of the blue state objective enquiry, pattern recognition and productive creativity become possible. Moreover, students who are taught in this kind of environment tend to come out as bright, optimistic, collaborative and creative adults.

Corrigan's Group 8 ( www.gr8education.com ) now works with the leadership of schools in Australia and England to change the climate so that classrooms move out of threat mode and operate with positive relationships between students and teachers. This transition departs from a long tradition of schools as coercive institutions. For students it has two great advantages: they performed better academically, and their love of learning is left intact.

Corrigan’s approach is a brilliant synthesis of neurology, systems thinking, historical insight, organisational change, vision for the future and caring. Reviewing Redefining Education again, I find it truly inspiring. I see Corrigan’s work as a significant contribution to our evolution to being a healthy society based on partnership values.

Corrigan's insight that students perform best when they have good relationships with their teachers - when they feel respected and cared for rather than coerced and threatened - is echoed in an Australian business study called Simply The Best.

The Business Council of Australia commissioned two researchers to work out the difference between ‘good’ workplace units ‘excellent’ ones. The researchers discovered that the managers of excellent workplace units were relaxed and respectful with their staff. On site, it was at first difficult to determine who were the managers were, because they showed no obvious signs of status. They seemed approachable, and they allowed a great deal of individual initiative by their staff. Naturally employees perform enthusiastically when the workplace feels congenial.

This Australian experience mirrors the work of Brazilian industrialist Ricardo Semler. In Maverick Semler recounts how he transformed his company from a high level of autocratic control (which produced only mediocre results) to a culture with high levels of worker autonomy.

Semlar was coached through the transformation by his HR manager, an academic who was expert in the philosophy of democratic education that A. S. Neil used at Summerhill. Neil believed that if you wanted children to be healthy, they should not be coerced. They should be given the freedom to regulate themselves. So he started a residential school on the east coast of England with essentially only two rules. The first was that although classes were held, students were not required to attend them. The second was that students were required to attend Saturday night community meetings. These meetings were an opportunity for performances and games.

They were also the place where the inevitable community differences were worked out. Suppose that people were irritated because Johnny was always throwing mud balls. The meeting might decide, “Well, Johnny is throwing mud balls at us because he is angry and doesn't feel special. So we will give him a chocolate cake!"

The students who came to Summerhill at first were of course disturbed kids that most other private schools wouldn't tolerate. When they learned that they did not have to go to class, many of them didn't - for years on end. But this does not mean that Summerhill was an academic disaster for them. As it turned out, at some point the kids would get fired up about learning and rapidly make up lost ground. Perhaps they did this because something shifted and they found learning fascinating, or perhaps they realised that soon they would graduate and they needed to know something. Whatever the reason, they were internally motivated.

I visited Summerhill, and I recall a conversation with an eleven-year-old boy. What impressed me was his direct presence. He had no fear of me as an adult. Later I met three graduates of Summerhill in Washington, DC. I was impressed by their quiet sense of calm; they were at ease with themselves. “Ah,” Neil might have said, "that was the point."

To learn more about schools based on democratic self-regulation, A. S. Neil's Summerhill and Homer Lane’s earlier Talks to Parents and Teachers are excellent.

Aldous Huxley knew a great deal about human potential. In his last novel, Island, Huxley describes an imaginary South Sea island society and education system that had been shaped by a Buddhist monarch teamed with a Scottish doctor. They combined forces to integrate the Buddhist quest for enlightenment and positive community values with the best of Western medicine and science.

Even today Island is an insightful vision of how cultivating the full use of the self - including psychological insight, creativity and spiritual development - can be integrated with science for human welfare.

Sylvia Ashton Warner's charming Teacher describes how she taught young Maori children to read by tapping into what they were interested in at the time. She would ask each child what word they wanted, and print the word out for them on a card. A few days later she would take the card back. If the child's card was worn, she knew the child was interested in that word. If the card was smooth and clean, she knew the child had not looked at it. This meant that she had not found the right word for the child. So she would dig deeper on the next round.

You can see the difference in approach between demanding that the child learn certain words and tapping into the child's innate interest.

The basic pattern of most schooling today was established by astute thinkers in the 1700s. Similar systems were devised in Prussia and in Spain. Their goal was to produce a better-educated populace while maintaining social control. So they taught 'subjects' as isolated disciplines disconnected from life except within technical specialties. This made it difficult for people to connect the dots in ways that might threaten the rule of the monarch. Ivan Illich (De-schooling Society, 1971), Thom Hartmann (Screwed - The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, 2006), and economist Herman Daly (For the Common Good, 1989) all go into this.

John Corrigan observes:

One of the key features of the Prussian approach was to keep active that part of the brain that makes us resistant to change (through keeping children under stress) i.e. force children into accepting a certain view of the world and how to behave in that world then make them resistant to change - by the way, this also makes us more susceptible to depression, anxiety etc. After a long time of doing this we have come to accept the mind states that are produced as being "normal" i.e. "educated" people are often bright but lack, for example, creativity or emotional intelligence etc. and sometimes suffer anxiety, etc. (personal correspondence)

Globally there is now an International Democratic Education Network (IDEN), and an active home schooling movement.

The first rule of medicine is to do no harm. This applies to education.