Why Wait?
By Anthony Burik, Staff Member
From the Spring 2003 Newsletter

I recently read with interest the story of a young American woman killed in the Gaza Strip as she tried to stop a bulldozer from destroying Palestinian homes in an Israeli security operation. The young woman, Rachel Corrie, was a student at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, a university known for its students and their fiery activism. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle dated March 19, 2003, the Evergreen State College "...unabashedly encourages students not to wait until they graduate to get aggressively involved in local, national and even international causes."

If Evergreen is ahead of the curve on student activism, the assumption is that most people involved in political life wait to shape the political debate until they graduate from college. The thinking goes that those people over the age of twenty-two or so, armed with college degrees, are the ones most fully informed to participate in political goings-on. However, many people, even some with college degrees, are content to simply vote and pay taxes and never be a part of the politics that infuse American society in many ways.

Having been a staff member at DVS for the last few years, I have come to understand that in order to create a more vigorous democracy, the members of the community (in this case, our school), no matter their ages, have to have a stake in the continual governing of the community. It is related to a concept that we hold dear in the United States, with its origins in "no taxation without representation" and the American Revolution. For some reason, however, in our nation’s schools, the very place where students should learn about and practice rule of, by, and for the people as a part of their American upbringing, the students are actively denied this golden opportunity. Adults who work in schools are for the most part unwilling to put the students more in charge of both their own lives at school and the life of the school itself.

There are stirrings of democracy, but for the most part, they are wholly unsatisfactory. In some traditional schools, teachers and their students sometimes come up with a list of rules at the beginning of the school year, only to stick with those rules for nine months straight with no additions or amendments. I tried this as a public school teacher, thinking that those rules put all of us in the classroom on the road to something more equitable. However, as the teacher and authority figure, I often became the judge and jury in the class, the final arbiter of how the rules were to be interpreted. We were stuck in a rigidity of our own making, feeling resentment rather than relief.

The situation at DVS is completely different. Here, any student from age five to nineteen can come to the weekly School Meeting in September, January, or May and propose a new rule, amend a current rule in the DVS Lawbook, or try to do away with a rule all together. They can do the same with DVS school policies. In addition, any student can ask the School Meeting for money for anything, from art supplies to sports equipment to food for cooking projects. In addition, through our judicial process, students decide when other students have broken the rules of the school and what appropriate consequences would be for rule infractions. Furthermore, students can run committees and take on clerkships that oversee different administrative aspects of running DVS.

Many adults who discover these facets of DVS are initially incredulous, and sometimes even hostile, to the notion that students are equipped to contribute to the management and development of their school. The thinking goes, how can young kids possibly have anything intelligent to say about such weighty matters as rule violations or what the school should spend money on, given their lack of knowledge of the world and their lack of experience?

From our point of view, all these experiences give DVS students the chance to participate in the construction of a lively democracy. The beauty is that anyone in our school community, from the youngest to the adults, has all of this available to them, in the process learning how to advocate for her- or himself, how to proceed through certain activities in an orderly fashion, and how to become a leader.

Not surprisingly, once many students take on these responsibilities, they remain involved in the school for quite some time, I believe, because they see for themselves that their participation has a direct impact on the shaping of the school culture and democracy. They don’t do it because it will look good on their college applications; they do it because they can and want to work, study, and play in an environment of their own making, in which they feel safe and free to do the things they are interested in doing.

According to the aforementioned San Francisco Chronicle article, "Evergreen teachers say they simply encourage students to apply what they’re learning. ‘We don’t believe citizenship begins when you graduate,’ said Anne Fischel, an Evergreen teacher and friend of Corrie’s."

At Diablo Valley School and other Sudbury schools around the world, we don’t believe citizenship begins with graduation either, and that is why everyone from age five and up - every citizen of our community - is enfranchised and empowered to be as activist as s/he wants to be.

Diablo Valley School admits students of any race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin to all rights and privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students and staff at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan program, and athletic and other school administered programs.

Our school has enrolled students from: Antioch, Berkeley, Clayton, Concord, Danville, El Cerrito, Lafayette, Livermore, Martinez, Oakland, Oakley, Pittsburg, Pleasant Hill, San Francisco, San Leandro, Vallejo, Walnut Creek and other communities in the Bay Area.