Radical democratic schooling on the ground: pedagogical ideals and realities in a Sudbury school

Abstract

Sudbury schools, which originated in the USA in the 1960s, are radical alternatives to traditional public schooling that promote egalitarian relationships between children and adults. Given that the Sudbury model has been largely overlooked in educational anthropology, this paper presents findings from a 1.5-year critical ethnographic study of a Sudbury school in California. In analysing participant interactions within the school's ‘democratic’ decision-making group, the paper presents evidence of an informal power structure that privileged older age, male gender and greater experience over youth, female gender and novicehood in determining whose voices wielded power. In doing so, the article provides an illustrative example of how theoretically democratic settings are edited to meet realities on the ground.

Keywords:

• democratic schools
• Sudbury education
• school governance
• power
• participation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lubna Chaudhry and several anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Michelle Yates for calling my attention to the applicability of Freeman's ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ concept to understanding how power operates in ostensibly egalitarian groups.

Notes

1. Italicised words represent the speaker's use of emphatic stress, while ellipses indicate pauses.

2. Sudbury schools other than CVSS are not anonymised due to their websites’ public availability.