Education for Flourishing: Factory Schools or Communities of Free and Self-governing Individuals?

Abstract

This essay argues that young people must practice freedom, responsibility, and democratic self-government in order to be fit for freedom, responsibility, and democratic self-government. The essay first examines the nature, origins, and consequences of the dominant factory model of schooling in light of the constructivist view of learning. It then discusses Peter Gray’s, Maria Montessori’s, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s views on how the practice of freedom in a self-governing community generates intellectual and moral virtues. Finally, it describes the experience of the once famous, but now forgotten, Junior Republics started by William “Daddy” George, in which teenagers lived in a self-governing village as a model for consciously cultivating moral and civic education in the Tocquevillian mold. It concludes that we should enable children to engage in more free play with peers and that we should organize education to enable learners to practice the personal and civic virtues underpinning self-government in environments more like self-governing communities than factories for developing “human capital.”