A leader in progressive education since 1921, LREI teaches children to be independent thinkers who work together to solve complex problems. Students graduate from our diverse community as active participants in our democratic society, with the creativity, integrity, and courage to bring meaningful change to the world.
During the writing of LREI’s new mission statement, we spent a long time discussing the inclusion of some phrase containing the word “democracy” or “democratic.” Some participants expressed concerns about the confusion between “democratic” and “Democratic.” Very reasonable given the school community’s long history of representing those who have more liberal political views. As much as we discuss being a community that is accepting to all, it can be hard to have more conservative political views at LREI. Not good. This is currently a topic of discussion on a number of levels and one on which we need to maintain our focus.
The school also has a long history of preparing students for participation in a democratic society. This is fundamental to the way we see ourselves as an institution. For many of the students I think that “democracy” means taking votes. Of course, but more than voting there is a level of conversation, an involvement in decision making and a focus on understanding issues and acting on these issues according to one’s beliefs, or according to the group’s goals, that seems to me to be essential for preparing our students to participate in “our democratic society.”
In the late 1930’s, Elisabeth Irwin and three of the school’s teachers wrote a pamphlet about teaching for democracy, entitled, aptly, Democracy.
In her foreword to this rather stirring document, Elisabeth Irwin wrote:
At a time like this when everyone is thinking in terms of world problems, it is sometimes hard to keep our minds on the small problems of the day-to-day life of our children. Yet the way that the foundations of democracy are built is by daily habits of recognizing the rights of those who differ from ourselves.
Our school does not believe in propaganda with children. It does, however, believe in helping them to meet problems concerning themselves consciously and realistically. For a teacher whose eyes are open to the many human situations arising in group life, there is ample opportunity to discover and discuss the underlying problems of democracy in children’s own terms. Just as our little children often say at home, “We don’t learn anything, we just have fun,” we would like our older children to feel, “We don’t learn about democracy, we just learn to get along together.”
That the unconscious patterns of early living remain longer than any form of direct teaching is the basis of our school philosophy.
The school has an ongoing responsibility for creating opportunities, for all children and in all classrooms, that develop the skills of living in a democratic society such that Miss Irwin’s words would as accurately describe what is happening at LREI today as they describe what was happening at the Little Red School House 90 years ago. I look forward to sharing examples of these moments with you in the weeks to come.