The
Three Hundred and Sixty-five Day School Holiday
David Gribble
Ricardo
Semler is the author of Maverick! and The Seven-Day Weekend and
the founder of Semco, Latin America's fastest-growing company, where the
employees decide when they will work, what they will do and how much they will
get paid. The Semco Foundation is now considering how to apply the same
principles in education, and has recently started a school called Lumiar, in Sao
Paolo, Brazil.
The school opened in February
2003 with 24 students aged between two and ten – Lumiar uses the word students
rather than children or pupils – and has almost doubled in size in its second
year. It intends keep growing until it reaches 110 students up to the age of
eighteen. Three quarters of the students are offered grants covering between 25%
and 100% of the fees.
The school is open from early
morning to late afternoon and students attend for as long as they want.
Regardless of age they are entirely responsible for their own education; there
is no coercion or constraint. This at first seems astonishing, particularly in
view of the fact that that some of the students are as young as two. However, on
reflection it becomes clear that even conventional educators often allow
children to learn independently and to choose what they will do when they are
two years old. It is only when they get older that adults start deciding for
them.
At
Lumiar students, from two upwards, have the time and opportunity to discover
their interests, talents, and personal approach to learning. They are completely
responsible for determining the course of each day and what studies they will
pursue, if any. They are free to decide whether they study independently, with a
mentor, or with a small group. They live in an active, energetic community,
filled with books, committees, computers and passionate people, and those
passionate people say this creates a need for exactly the kind of knowledge and
skills that are most in demand in the post-industrial information society of the
twenty-first century.
Semco gives powerful reasons for
developing a new kind of school: the present system is anachronistic, they say,
and tinkering with it will never be enough; the web has made text-books out of
date; the role of the teacher is obsolete; school management is too dominant;
the lack of democracy disempowers future citizens; the amount of knowledge
retained is negligible; parents deliver children to the system and are then
barred from it; children suffer unnecessary discipline and rules they don't
understand; students learn to memorise, not to develop learning skills; drugs,
violence and a blasé attitude are
results of a top-down system and a lack of love; vacations, rules, buildings and
classrooms are obsolete; uniformity is a fundamental value in schools, in a
world that now values differences.
Because our current society is
changing so rapidly from the industrial age to the information age, it is hard
to determine what specific knowledge anyone will need in the future. Lumiar
focuses instead on goals of self-awareness and personal responsibility. The
number of areas of knowledge being pursued in a productive manner in the world
at large is so vast that it is impossible to try to expose anyone to all of
them. It is a matter of prejudice, says Lumiar, to pick out a tiny set of
subjects and label them as more important than others.
In spite of the common view that
people in general are ignorant of democratic principles, children are not
usually allowed to experience any of these principles in their everyday lives.
In conventional schools students have no rights, they do not participate in
meaningful decision-making and they have no freedom of self-determination. Such
schools are in fact models of autocracy, in direct conflict with democratic
principles. In a democratic school like Lumiar, people of all ages become deeply
committed to democratic values because they are experiencing them in their
everyday lives.
Complaining about the unethical
behaviour of the youth of today is a universal pastime. However, ethical
behaviour, says Lumiar, depends on the ability to choose a path and accept full
responsibility for that choice and its consequences. Ethics begins from the
proposition that a human beings are responsible for their own actions. In
traditional schools students are denied responsibility for their own actions:
they are obliged to follow imposed curricula, obey
rules that they do not accept and submit to discipline when they fail to
conform. The result is that they learn to lie, to deceive and to be dishonest.
At Lumiar, by contrast, the
students learn responsibility by choosing their own curriculum and playing
important roles in the running of the school.
The worst result of conventional
schooling, according to the Semco Foundation,
is that it frequently makes the students hate learning, and even hate the very
knowledge that the school tries to transmit. At Lumiar the learning process is a
great pleasure; children learn by playing, following their own curiosity.
The huge poverty and economic
inequality in Brazil have resulted in an increase in violent crime and,
consequently, deepened the enormous gap between rich and poor. The elite have
been locking themselves in closed condominiums, protected by security gates and
gunmen. Their children go to expensive private schools where they are protected
from any contact with poverty and the country's general social problems. Poor
children, when they do not have to work, go to utterly inadequate government
schools. Democratic schools that unite children and adolescents from different
social backgrounds will be a major step towards a solution to this problem.
Lumiar therefore has a social
mission as well as an educational one. The Semco Foundation hopes to spread its
ideas throughout all the schools in Brazil. If it succeeds it will surely have
enormous influence throughout the world.