Download the original attachment
Part 1: Introduction
Many have heard me say that I don’t believe in democracy, but that’s only a small piece of what I really mean when I say it. Democracy is an institution, and as such it’s artificially contrived: its intent is to create the illusion that a group of people can speak with a single voice. I don’t believe in that illusion and I don’t believe in artificially contrived institutions, because they’re all playing the same game: creating a faceless entity that individuals can hide behind.
I have also said that I don’t believe teaching works. I believe that things can be learned; I don’t believe they can be taught. If there is a connection between an idea that is being “taught”, and the resultant “learning”, it’s indirect, and relies much more on the motivation of the learner than the skill of the teacher.
I don’t believe that human nature is something that needs to be overcome. I don’t think that feelings need to be denied by the self, or invalidated by others. Feelings are feelings, humans are humans, and Good and Evil, in their capitalized form, are in essence just concepts promoted by institutions to further their own goals (see my first paragraph).
Speaking of institutional creations, one that I find particularly objectionable is hierarchical management. The word “hierarchy” is from the Greek: “sacred rule”. The concept developed in that godfather of all institutions: organized religion. It’s toxic enough there, but its implementation has become almost universal, down to individual households. We must all view ourselves as “subordinate” and “answerable” to some other person, and if we’re lucky, we have others that are subordinate to us. It’s a big problem, because when a person needs to move among several hierarchies, often with overlapping membership, roles can become confusing, and trouble often ensues.
Personally, I find it difficult to have to remember what my role is supposed to be in a given situation. I have been experimenting with just being the same person all the time, and that’s the example I’m providing to Chris and Miranda. My goal isn’t to make their lives any easier or any more difficult by doing this; it simply is most comfortable for me, and conserves my personal energy for things that I feel are more important, and that I have a greater chance of being successful at.
I don’t believe in punishment, which is sometimes known by the euphemism “consequences”. Call it what you will, it is merely an institutional imposition to exert control. I don’t believe it has any positive value, and I consider its use a form of aggression.
What I do believe in, very strongly, is self-directed education. And I love that aspect of what happens at The Circle School. Chris and Miranda have both benefited immeasurably from being there. It has broadened their education in so many ways that would not have been possible given a home-schooled environment.
To put things into perspective, before I get going on all this, I could never in a million years list all the things that I love about TCS. I don’t think I could even list all the levels of things that I love about it. The things that bother me about it are very few, so I can easily describe them. So far, they have not come close to out-weighing the positive things, but as our time left here grows shorter, the impacts of those things weigh more heavily on me than in the past.
Before we came to The Circle School, my understanding was that there would be no attempt to “teach” Chris and Miranda anything, unless they asked to be taught, and I was absolutely okay with that (see my second paragraph). But it emerged that there were indeed things that TCS was attempting to “teach”: democracy and civic responsibility. That didn’t thrill me, but I figured that it couldn’t hurt for them to get a chance to function as peers in an organized society. But I neither believe that an absolute standard of morality can be taught, nor that it would ever need to be taught (see my first three paragraphs). And I have come to strongly object to the hierarchy that seems to be flourishing in this society of “peers”.
Part 2: What Is
So here we are, almost six years down the road. And what kinds of things am I talking about?
Chores
Well, let’s start with something that seems fairly benign: chores. At TCS, each School Meeting member must sign up for and perform a chore, unless they pay the “opt-out” fee, pay someone else privately to do a chore for them, or become a chore-checker, responsible for signing off on the completion of chores in a particular “zone”. In order to facilitate the execution of all that, certain chores must be done at certain times of day. Certain chores are reserved for younger and smaller people. Certain chores require special training, which means you need to schedule time with an appropriate person to train and certify you, or you can’t choose that chore. “Doing” a chore means choosing an age-appropriate chore for which one has received the proper training, and that has not been already chosen by someone else, performing the chore during a designated time period, finding an appropriate chore-checker, and getting that person to inspect the work and sign off on it. Do I have this right? How did we get here?
Well, how did we get here? There’s a certain amount of basic housekeeping that it’s prudent to do on a regular basis, and it seems sensible to have everyone, staff and students alike, participate in the effort. It’s nice to allow even the tiniest members to help, so you designate a couple of things that they can easily accomplish, and the older folks don’t choose those chores unless there’s no one else to do them. It seems pretty reasonable.
So now we fast-forward a couple of years to where the population has more than doubled in size. The place needs cleaning just as much, probably more, but the number of individual jobs hasn’t changed a whole lot. There are no longer enough chores to “go around”. So a system was developed that seemed to be a winner on many levels: everyone would still need to perform a task every day, and now we could actually ensure that things got done properly by training people as chore-checkers. And a hierarchy was born.
As rule-followers go, I am by no means a zealot. Given a choice between obeying versus ignoring a rule that’s in place, I will generally follow the rule, as long as it doesn’t pose any particular hardship upon me to do so. But if it does impose hardship, and I can’t see a benefit to following it, I will probably simply ignore it, especially if I think I won’t get caught. In fact, I will probably put much more time and energy into finding a way around the rule, and consider it time well spent, because being creative doesn’t chafe nearly as much as the frustration of signing up for a chore, doing it, and then having to find someone to come and pass judgment on the job I did.
Chore infractions strike me as just so ludicrous. Isn’t it in everyone’s best interest to keep the place clean? If people aren’t helping, it probably just isn’t important to them. It may become important to them over time – it may not, who knows? The people to whom it’s important will see that it’s done, and if they don’t, then maybe it’s not so important after all. If it’s not going to be done willingly, it’s hard to feel like it’s worth it.
I guess there are some people out there who feel that doing chores is “good for the soul” in some way, but a “chore” by definition is something that you don’t want to do. I usually need a really good reason for that. And when it’s getting in the way of other pursuits (for example, when my little programming group meets, those who are chore-checkers are usually interrupted and have to go check a chore or two during our session), I think it’s defeating the basic purpose for being at The Circle School.
School Meeting
School Meeting meets weekly, plus various “special” meetings when quick action is necessary. But quick action is not the normal pace of School Meeting. Things get a reading one week, a second reading the following week, discussion, and then perhaps a vote. There’s Roberts Rules, and all sorts of procedural things that take up a lot of time.
Every law in The Circle School’s voluminous law book was enacted by the School Meeting. Every law whose language has become outdated, or whose usefulness has ended, requires someone to care enough about getting rid of it to go through that cumbersome process.
So you end up with a huge number of rules, time-consuming certification processes, and a whole lot of red tape. Some people thrive on this stuff, but others will decide that most things are just not worth the hassle. This imposes a “survival of the fittest” mentality, where those who care enough to be persistent get what they want, but so do those who are persistent simply because they enjoy the process. And those who are of an impatient nature just take their needs elsewhere.
There is also great potential for those who are too busy pursuing their own endeavors to care a whole lot about school government to find that they have been completely disenfranchised by the “majority” – that is, the majority of the people who attended School Meeting, not necessarily a majority of School Meeting members.
Yes, that’s a lot like the “real world”. But not exactly like it, because in this country I am allowed to show up at the polls on a designated day and vote on whatever issues are on the ballot, regardless of whether or not I was present for discussion of any of them. Votes at School Meeting happen when they happen, except in special circumstances, so if you’re not in there for the discussion, chances are you’ll miss the vote too. So you end up having to put time into the process, regardless of your level of interest, just to protect yourself.
JC
So now we come to the Judicial Committee (JC), the most robust manifestation of hierarchy at TCS.
Why do we need it? Why does it have to take up so much time? During my programming group sessions, people have been pulled out multiple times because their presence was required by the JC. I have heard that people get drafted to be “runners” for the JC, so that the JC doesn’t have to take up even more time by stopping to have people rounded up.
In a 6-hour school day, JC being 1.5 hours makes it 25% of the day, and it’s tying up a fair number of people, in a room that I’m sure has to be coveted for other purposes.
I’m not going to go on and on about this. I’ve talked about how I dislike hierarchies and institutions. Everyone is answerable to the JC, and the JC is answerable to the School Meeting, and the School Meeting on a given day might be any mix of people. It is the highest authority at the school, and it is able to speak with a single voice, for which no individual person is held accountable.
I’ve talked about my distaste for punishment, and I find it disturbing to hear about people being brought up on charges of “breaking their consequence”, when the “consequence” in question was a punishment, some of which sound pretty draconian to me. This doesn’t serve any purpose, it doesn’t improve anyone’s behavior; all it does is create a system that gives a minority of people a disproportionate amount of power.
Maybe I’m totally misperceiving this, but I’ve been misperceiving it for six years now. One of the most common complaints about the public school system since “mainstreaming” has been practiced is the amount of time that seems to be spent on behavior issues. The same thing is happening here, it’s just being called by a different name.
Part 3: Some Proposals
I realize that any proposals should come from within the school, so I’m approaching them with some hesitation. But the way things are, my only vote at the school is an economic one, and I’d rather throw some ideas out there than just leave.
* Throw away the law book and start over – every year! Any rule that doesn’t find its way back into the book probably isn’t needed.
* Establish and elect an ombudsman. This person wouldn’t have or even need to have any real power, but could investigate complaints against the school government, and report findings to the School Meeting.
* Eliminate punishments altogether. There’s no such thing as “getting away with” anything; any action by a student against any other student is an action against the school. Likewise, any sentences imposed by the school government against any student are detrimental to the school, for the same reason.
* Move the JC out of 1A – it’s an unconscionable waste of prime real estate. If you have to have JC, maybe you could have it in the basement.
* Eliminate chore-checking. Re-organize the chore sign-up process so that people only have to sign up two or three times a week, or whatever’s needed to get the bare minimum cleaning done, and then if stuff doesn’t get done, it just doesn’t get done.
* Separate the actual voting from the procedural School Meeting session. Issues that come to a vote can be logged on a board and numbered. At a designated time, the Election Clerk can sit there next to the board, and everyone can come up and cast a ballot that reflects their vote on each issue. The Election Clerk can assist those who can’t read, and can keep track of who has voted.
* If a sizeable number of people vote for a proposal that ends up being defeated, establish a mechanism for addressing the concerns of the minority voters.