Few days back, posted the following on the Discuss Sudbury Model list on Google lists, in response to what I saw as an attempt to characterize Democracy as desperately needing a degree of benevolent nudging (or ham-fisted collectivist thought control, take your pick) in order to prevent the powerful few from dominating the disinterested many. Of course, it wasn’t put that way – that’s me trying to be funny. You should see my haircut.
Anyway, thought it might be of interest to all those people out there not reading this blog:
You raise real issues that have gotten a lot of thought. Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others is applicable here as well, but:
The problems you describe have been apparent since the inception of democracy – surely, the Athenians were well aware of them, as were the founding fathers, as are the people involved with Sudbury schools. In more general terms, it’s a question of balancing the interests of the few against interests of the many (or, as your examples, the interests of another few). The counterbalances are also pretty well understood (my opinions here – there’s no magesterium for the Sudbury world, I’m sure other disagree):
1) natural, unaliable rights. There are certain things the democracy shall not do. Period. No voting on it.
2) subsidiarity. As Wikipedia puts it: an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.
An example that sprang to mind while reading your posts: US sugar producers, a tiny percentage of the population, have historically gotten laws passed which have the effect of imposing a sugar tax on everybody else, to the benefit of the US sugar producers. Absent these laws, we’d all pay a lot less for sugar (we’d import it all), and many if not all US based sugar producers would go out of business.
So, the questions become: are rights being violated? Is this decision being made at the appropriate level?
In the first case, I’d say yes, rights are being violated – effectively, one group of people is seizing the property of another group for their own benefit. In the second – since when is it a national level issue whether some local companies go out of business or not? Are we really going to agree that sugar production is some sort of national security issue?
Of course, there are counter arguments. But it’s telling that issues such as these are currently settled by weighing the wallets of the political contributors involved without any reference to principles at all.
In Sudbury schools, there are generally only three levels of Democracy – individuals, with their rights, groups with their goals and plans, and the school as a whole. The students, in the JC, school meeting and just in the rough and tumble of life, learn through doing that, in order for the school to run properly or even survive 1) everybody has rights which must be respected; 2) things work better if the ‘national’ level democracy (school meeting) leaves as much of the details as possible to the local level democracy (corporations and groups); 3) there are some ‘national’ level issues, such as adherence to the general laws of the land, that must be dealt with on a ‘national’ level.
So, I’d argue that, from a practical perspective, Sudbury students get far better training in the proper deployment of Democracy than any other students anywhere. They don’t get that weirdly abstract and rosy view of government I recall from ‘civics’ classes, a newsreel-like ‘progress marches on’ view of government fundamentally antithetical to functioning democracy. Instead, having experienced the work involved in a real democracy, they are less likely to mistake what goes on in America, at least at a national level, for any kind of real democracy.
This is a good thing, in my opinion.
Yard Sale of the Mind 