“It is liberty alone that fits men for liberty.”
—William GladstoneFootnote 1
Introduction
For a liberal order to persist and grow, people must be engaged in forms of education that prepare them to govern themselves, to preserve liberal institutions, and to solve public goods problems without recourse to authoritarian control.Footnote 2 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; insofar as education is a conscious end within our control, we should organize that education to enable learners to practice the personal and civic virtues underpinning self-government and liberal society. Which model of life most conduces to this end: life in a factory or life in a self-governing community?
Adam Smith takes up the problem in an oft-quoted passage from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.Footnote 3
Smith’s words are meant to point to dangers of monotonous factory work for intellectual and moral virtues and the need to develop institutions to counteract these undesirable consequences of commercial society. The quotation is often thought to imply the desirability of government subsidies for schooling and even the enforcement of compulsory schooling. But as one reads these words and compares it to the consequences of mass schooling today, one wonders whether the so-called cure has provided a remedy. One even wonders whether the very outcome Smith feared is not, in fact, being systematically generated today by the supposed solution.
The success of commercial society in generating material wealth means children no longer need to work to survive. Childhood has become an extended period of being sheltered from the pressures of adult life that would otherwise interfere with their unique potential, but in the process they have been systematically separated from experience and responsibility. The wealth that has generated the existence of this sheltered childhood has provided adults the means to supervise and control children more or less continuously. Rather than being in environments of community interaction, self-directed play, and apprenticeship in citizenship and self-supporting work that would prepare them to self-govern, the young are kept more and more in environments in which they are treated as passive beneficiaries of a factory production process aimed at increasing their “human capital.”Footnote 4
The good involves a spiral of self-initiated actions that develop intellectual and moral virtues that are drawn upon to develop yet further virtue. To learn, individuals must practice responding to their environment and develop powers to choose freely among alternatives. To the degree one is controlled by others, one is retarded from being a moral agent and from taking actions that develop internal responsibility. The more others solve problems for us, the less capable we are of living without guardians. We must, therefore, be aware of the danger of too much external control of agents’ lives, whether it be by parents, teachers, governments, or even forms of technology that rob individuals of the practice of personal responsibility.
Such was Alexis de Tocqueville’s concern for modern democratic society. Tocqueville thinks learners engage in practices that either generate or retard their capacities to self-govern. He fears that without a countervailing science and art of association, individualism would generate a vicious spiral in which people cede responsibility for dealing with public goods, lose civic virtues required to deal with common problems, and become dependent on authority likened to a “schoolmaster.”Footnote 5 This guardian would be “an immense tutelary power,” resembling “paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.”Footnote 6
Yet Tocqueville saw a remedy in the American society of his day: the tendency of Americans to act, to associate freely to solve problems, and to participate in local township forms of self-government. He argues these practices are like “schools” (here, positively connotated) for developing liberal mores and self-governing capacities conducive to prosperity and the maintenance of free society:
The institutions of a township are to freedom what primary schools are to science; they put it within reach of the people; they make them taste its peaceful employ and habituate them to making use of it. Without the institutions of a township a nation can give itself a free government, but it does not have the spirit of freedom. Fleeting passions, the interests of a moment, the chance of circumstances can give it the external forms of independence; but despotism suppressed in the interior of the social body reappears sooner or later on the surface.Footnote 7
Young people today live ever more of their lives under the kind of despotism Tocqueville characterizes as life under a perpetual schoolmaster.Footnote 8 While these people ultimately graduate into legal majority, Tocqueville’s view suggests that the trend toward ever more schooling and helicopter guardianship will tend to generate not self-governing individuals and communities, but “a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”Footnote 9 Insofar as living under despotism becomes the dominant practice “in the interior of the social body,” we should expect it, sooner or later, to appear on the political surface. Tocqueville argues, therefore, that people need to practice living in freedom, to practice supporting and governing themselves, individually and collectively, in order to be fit for freedom and to live a life of human flourishing.
Life must be so constituted as to invite everyone into the practice of the arts and virtues of freedom and responsibility. Practically this means, first, children need to have less factory-like schooling, more self-direction, and more unsupervised, free play in the company of others. Second, because the practices of local self-government and association have atrophied in society at large, especially for young people, why not introduce the experience of self-government in a township for teenagers as a component of education in the art and science of self-government?
We are thus confronted with two models for education: the factory and the self-governing community. This essay first examines the nature, origins, and consequences of the factory model 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 R. “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.
Factory model schooling: Training versus development of intellectual, moral, and civic virtues
The comparison between mass schooling today and the stupefying conditions of a factory is no stretch. Industrial efficiency was an explicit model for many in the era in which mass schooling was established. People often talk about school as a factory that produces learned people. Graduates are referred to as “products” of the institution. Although the language may be innocent enough, given a capacious understanding of production and co-production, the idea the graduate is a product suggests a tendency to think of the student as an input: either as passive material to be formed from without or as unintelligent “labor” performing functions more or less by rote.
Schools as they exist today emerged from a combination of a vision based on the analogy of an industrial factory, a behaviorist view of learning, and the constraints of mass bureaucracy. Raymond Callahan and Bruce Tyack outline how the drive for factory-like efficiency influenced the development of the system of mass schooling around the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 10 Elwood Cubberly writes in his 1916 Public School Administration:
[S]chools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of the twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down.Footnote 11
An important influence on the thinking of these early school reformers was Frederick Taylor’s work in scientific management, the goal of which was to “raise the productivity of the industrial workplace through the systematization and centralization of knowledge.”Footnote 12 In order to make labor more efficient, Taylor engaged in “time and motion studies” to identify the most efficient movements of workers as measured by external inputs and outputs. Such studies were then used to train workers to behave like machines. Rules and formulae set down by a central planning office would thus “replace the judgment of the individual workman.”Footnote 13
In the scientifically managed firm, Taylor taught that “[a]ll possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department.” Managers would prepare detailed instruction cards, plan the use of and set the machinery, and coordinate generally who did what, when, and in what order. The jobs of the workers, meanwhile, would reduce to rote routine. The role of workers in Taylor’s system was “to do what they are told to do promptly and without asking questions or making suggestions.”Footnote 14
Likewise in schooling, social engineers “sought … to centralize the nerve-centers of information and influence and to standardize the education process.”Footnote 15 The role of learners and teachers as intelligent and responsible agents was subordinated to centralized planning by experts in conscious opposition to the patterns of a village community:
[T]hey were … trying to replace the village forms in which laymen participated in decentralized decision-making with the new bureaucratic model of a closed “nonpolitical” system in which directives flowed from the top down … each step of the education process was carefully prescribed by professional educators.Footnote 16
Rather than governing themselves, acting and experiencing the consequences of self-directed activity, learners were to be acted upon. Both student and teacher were to be treated as a means under the control of the thinking of those above them.
One might question the intelligence of applying such a procedure to a learning environment in which the development of thought, character, and democratic citizenship are among the ostensible objectives. In response to such an obvious doubt, Frank Spaulding, head of the Department of Education at Yale and leader of applying scientific management to reform schools declared in a speech: “Let us waste no time over the obvious but fruitless objection that the ultimate and real products of a school system—those products that are registered in the minds and hearts of the children that go out from the schools—are immeasurable, and hence incomparable.”Footnote 17 To achieve the results of schooling in factory-like efficiency, one must engage with what is measurable, especially if education is to be directed by distant experts through a vast bureaucratic structure.
What are the characteristics of the factory model? Students are divided into age-segregated “grades,” irrespective of differing abilities of individuals or of the potential for children of different ages to engage in peer teaching and learning. Students are moved around in a conveyor-belt fashion and then made to sit still while the teacher engages in whole-group instruction, usually trying to put information into the learners through their eyes and ears. Learning is measured by input “hours” (such as the Carnegie credit-hour system). Students are assessed by objective tests and are assigned alphanumeric grades as both the measure of their performance and as a means of extrinsic reward and punishment. And the subject matter, timing, and sequencing of subjects is governed by a relatively rigid curriculum set in advance, with little choice or flexibility to follow the needs and interests of the learner. Such schooling tends to strip learners of agency, meaningful context and application of what they are learning, and of the responsibility to practice becoming aware of and correcting their own errors without oversight.Footnote 18 Despite appeals to the language of science for legitimacy, the application of these practices to schooling was not the result of studies of children or how they learn.Footnote 19
The factory model of education and the model of learning in which individuals pursue their own interests within a community of learning correspond to behaviorist and constructivist views of learning, respectively. The behaviorist view, associated with B. F. Skinner, Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and Edward Thorndike, characterizes learning as resulting from environmental conditioning in which behaviors can be elicited based on simple associations reinforced by positive and negative consequences.Footnote 20 This view of learning suggests information and understanding can be delivered by making associations simple and repetitive and by administering extrinsic rewards and punishments in response to outwardly observed behaviors. Learning becomes an amalgamation of various simple elements that can, in principle, be observed and managed by an external planner.
An alternative to behaviorism is constructivism. Constructivism, associated with such figures as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Maria Montessori, sees the internal activity of the learner as a complex process of self-construction in which current experience is integrated into prior understandings rather than as a simple receiving of external stimuli.Footnote 21 Learners come to each situation with a distinct background and ways of understanding. In this view, it is the learner who above all must be active. Learning results from processes of purposeful behavior and meaning-making that take place within the learner, processes that cannot be directly observed or externally controlled. In this view, self-directed activity driven by internal interests is essential to learning. Teaching seeks to connect the interests of the student to a meaningful environment that provides opportunities for purposeful, self-directed activity and complex feedback.Footnote 22
Let us return to Smith’s words above describing life in a monotonous factory and then compare them with what much schooling looks like today: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.”Footnote 23 For so many, compulsory schooling consists primarily in engaging in the “simple operations” of behaviorist schooling: sitting still; listening or pretending to listen; memorizing, regurgitating, and forgetting discrete information; never fully understanding and then moving on. The student may be exposed to different subjects, but “the effects” are pretty much “always the same, or very nearly the same,” all results reduce more or less to a focus on homogeneous numbers he sees again and again called grades. How often do directions come from without: where to be, what to do, how to do it? When he makes a mistake, how often is he merely informed of the correct answer and ushered on to the next activity? And how often are experiments and problems merely a sequence of prearranged motions designed to achieve an expected outcome in which he is told what he should have learned? In short, how often do guardians remove all genuine difficulties from his path so that “he has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur”?
Taken to the extreme, the factory model reduces the student to a means to someone else’s thought and planning to be controlled by simple, extrinsic incentives, creating the kind of thoughtlessness and irresponsibility Smith feared. One engaged in such an environment, Smith argues,
naturally loses…the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging. … The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier [or one might add of an entrepreneur or pioneer]… . His dexterity at his own particular trade [in this case “schooling”] seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.Footnote 24
Thankfully, young people engage in activities other than factory-like schooling. Not all schooling is factory-like and young people have a life outside of school. But what happens as more and more of school tends toward the factory model thanks to pressures to “meet standards” and more and more life is swallowed up by such schooling?
The young are spending more years in school, more days per year in school, with longer school days and less time in recess. At the same time, ever more of home life is being taken up by homework that makes home more like school. Parents, fearful of danger and worried that success at school and in “getting into a good college” are necessary for a successful life, control ever more of their children’s free time, helping them do their homework and engaging them in supervised sports and activities.Footnote 25 The pressure to conform to this trend is even starting to be felt in the Netherlands, which has been touted as one of the places most resistant to it.Footnote 26 Children are increasingly subject to activities in which adults set all the purposes, make all the rules, establish all the processes, adjudicate all disputes, and judge all relevant outcomes. Ironically, parents, conscious of the pressures on young people from so much school and supervised activity, are expecting less responsibility around the house.Footnote 27 At the end of this period of being shielded from all personal, domestic, and civic responsibilities it is hoped young people will become responsible individuals and citizens at the stroke of midnight of their eighteenth or twenty-first birthdays.
It is instructive to examine the consequences of the movement to extend and scale factory-like schooling to ever younger children, where the effects are most pronounced. Accountability pressures for academic readiness from governmental policies along with parental desires for children to have an academic edge are leading to kindergarten and pre-kindergarten (pre-K) environments looking more like factories for academic readiness, crowding out other forms of learning and play.Footnote 28 More time is dedicated to teacher-directed instruction and assessment, and less time on art, music, science, and, most importantly, child-selected activities.Footnote 29
Where longitudinal studies of pre-K interventions exist, they show that initial positive treatment effects on academic outcomes are consistently followed by precipitous and substantial fade-out of these effects over time. They also show that participation in factory-like pre-K programs can generate significant perverse effects on long-term academic and social outcomes.Footnote 30
A small number of intensive and interactive (as opposed to factory-like) interventions for highly disadvantaged children have shown positive effects in adulthood, but popular awareness of these exceptions—such as the High/Scope Perry Preschool project—often fails to recognize the dramatic differences between the approaches and outcomes of these interventions from academic-type preschool programs.Footnote 31 A longitudinal randomized control study comparing the effects of factory-like, direct-instruction preschool models, in which teachers followed a predefined script for instruction and rewarded correct answers, with the High/Scope and play-based preschool models, in which children were guided to plan their own activities or to play in a broadly supportive environment, found that rather than benefitting from positive outcomes in adulthood, participants in direct-instruction preschool programs had higher rates of emotional impairment or disturbance during school (47 percent versus 6 percent), higher rates of arrest for criminal activity (39 percent versus 10 percent for felonies, and 38 percent versus 0 percent for property crime), and lower rates of volunteerism compared to those who participated in the models that allowed for more self-directed activity and greater peer interaction.Footnote 32
Similarly, in the 1970s, the German government sponsored a comparison of graduates from fifty play-based kindergartens against fifty academic direct-instruction-based kindergartens in order to assess whether to switch from traditional mixed-aged, play-based kindergartens to age-segregated, academic ones. The study found that graduates of the direct-instruction pre-schools performed as well as or significantly worse than play-based programs on academics and were less well-adjusted socially and emotionally.Footnote 33 Compared to the children in the direct-instruction-based experimental preschools, children from the play-oriented kindergartens also showed a higher degree of “learning ability,” “curiosity,” “joy of discovery,” “questioning,” “independence,” “assertiveness,” “critical ability,” “self-confidence,” “willingness to take risks,” “impulsiveness,” “entrepreneurial spirit,” and “spontaneity.” Following the study, the German government decided to reverse course and stick with play-based kindergartens.Footnote 34
These results are supported by the most significant longitudinal randomized control study to date that examines the effects of a typical-to-high-quality, state-wide, pre-K school readiness program. The study finds, again contrary to the intentions of the intervention, that by third grade those randomly assigned to participate in the school readiness pre-K program ended up having worse outcomes in language, math, and science as well as more disciplinary infractions, worse attendance, and a greater use of special education services than those in the control group, and that these differences became more pronounced by sixth grade.Footnote 35
What explains these effects? One element is that factory-type environments focus on developing constrained skills, such as knowing the letters of the alphabet that can be learned easily later on, at the cost of failing to develop unconstrained skills, such as vocabulary, listening skills, and background understanding, that could otherwise be cultivated through varied interactions in a context-rich environment.Footnote 36 Two related points pertaining to self-regulation and cooperating with others are particularly relevant. First, one of the most significant predictors of later academic and life success is a learner’s executive function, that is, cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior and higher cognitive functions, “including planning and decision-making, maintenance and manipulation of information in memory, [and] inhibition of unwanted thoughts, feelings, and actions.” Evidence shows that practice of planning and self-directed activity promotes the development of these virtues of self-control.Footnote 37 Second, evidence shows that varied interaction with peers promotes interpersonal understanding and the ability to negotiate and engage in conflict resolution.Footnote 38 Factory-like schooling tends to crowd out practice of such self-directed activity and unstructured peer-to-peer interactions, undermining development of internalized executive function and skill in understanding and dealing with others, virtues critical for individual and democratic self-government.
Tocquevillian pedagogy: Practicing responsibility in a free and self-governing community
The practices we engage in create the habits, virtues, or vices we draw upon to meet the challenges of life. Arenas of learning must, therefore, involve us in forms of practice appropriate to life and responsibility. To be fit for freedom people need more than what Tocqueville calls literary politics.Footnote 39 They need (1) to practice being self-directed by dealing with real problems, making rules for themselves independently and with peers, talking, negotiating, and resolving conflicts; (2) to experience using and improving their own judgment, noticing and correcting their own mistakes; and (3) to internalize norms appropriate to self-government that lead them to contribute to the provision of public goods beyond motives of narrow self-interest. But how are they to develop these understandings and virtues? This section discusses Peter Gray’s work on free play as well as Montessori’s and Tocqueville’s models for how learning environments can help learners develop their intellectual and practical responsibility. The succeeding section will examine William “Daddy” George’s experiment in which young people engaged in township-level self-government in Junior Republics as an education in civic responsibility in the Tocquevillian mode.
Peter Gray on free play as a means of developing dispositions of self-control and self-government
Tocqueville believes that free play is an important part of the development of democratic, self-governing mores in America:
The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to struggle against the evils and obstacles of life; he has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to its power only when he cannot do without it. This begins to be perceived from school onward, where children submit even in their games to rules they have established and punish among themselves offenses defined by themselves.Footnote 40
It is from practice like this, Tocqueville thinks, that Americans learned the habits and skills of association and self-government that enabled them to unite to solve public goods problems. Reflecting on Tocqueville, Vincent Ostrom argues that these abilities constitute the very meaning of democracy as a way of life.Footnote 41
Peter Gray’s work on free play supports Tocqueville’s observations. Gray defines free play as freely chosen activity directed by the participants to the activity and undertaken for its own sake.Footnote 42 Gray argues free play is the means by which young people “(1) develop intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learn to regulate their emotions; (4) learn how to get along with others as equals, and (5) experience joy.”Footnote 43
Because they naturally want to elicit the voluntary cooperation of other players, children develop responsibilities and skills of individual and collective self-government as a means to keep play going. The responses of other children provide a natural control of error on their rules, conduct, and sentiments.Footnote 44 From this feedback, they learn the golden rule; to generate and modify rules for mutual benefit and a sense of fair play; to moderate anger and to settle conflicts by argument, negotiation, and compromise; and patterns of trust and justice in their conduct with opposing teams through repeat dealings, fluid membership of who is on what team, and a need to elicit others to keep play going.Footnote 45
A significant benefit of free play is that far from the eyes of those who might wish to interfere, it avoids the danger that the benevolent despot does too much to help. Gray explains the close correlation between the rise of young people being deprived of self-directed free play and the well-documented fall in young people’s sense of personal control as well as the rise of anxiety, depression, and narcissism.Footnote 46 Jean Twenge and colleagues show a substantial increase from 1960 to 2002 in an external locus of control among college students, that is, a greater sense that one’s life is controlled by external factors such as luck or powerful others rather than by their own efforts, despite gaining greater objective control of their environment over that time.Footnote 47 Gray argues that people with an external locus of control “are less likely to take responsibility for their own health, their own futures, and their community.”Footnote 48 On the contrary, as Gray holds, free play develops an unequivocal sense of agency and responsibility:
Free play is nature’s means of teaching children that they are not helpless. In play, away from adults, children really do have control and can practice asserting it. In free play, children learn to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, create and abide by rules, and get along with others as equals rather than as obedient or rebellious subordinates.Footnote 49
These outcomes are an example of Smith’s claim that contact with those outside our immediate family constitutes a “great school of self-command.”Footnote 50 Free play is thus an important arena in which young people practice governing themselves as well as the skills and dispositions needed to regulate themselves and associate with others.
Montessori on learners correcting their own mistakes
Many conceive education as an activity in which an authority corrects nonexperts. After all, it is the teacher who knows and the student who does not. Montessori disagrees:
Most teachers think it is their main business to be always criticizing, and they do this just as much in the field of learning as they do in moral matters. The child’s training has, they think, to be guided by two reins: prizes and punishments. But if a child has to be rewarded or punished, it means he lacks the capacity to guide himself. Footnote 51
Being told one has made a mistake reveals that we have erred in the eyes of another, but that does not necessarily provide us with the means of identifying what it is within ourselves that needs to be corrected nor the disposition, skill, or power needed to make the correction. Such external government is akin to despotism that may bring about apparently good results in the short term, but that can retard the development of learners’ response-ability. It discourages learners from looking to their own resources to become aware of and resolve errors, habituating them to look to others for direction and judgment, thus generating dependency.
Freedom from external constraint for individuals without experience and sufficient responsibility often bring their inner disorder to the surface: “Let us always remember that inner discipline is something to come, and not something already present.”Footnote 52 Montessori observes that children who have not had an environment to practice self-direction, concentrated work, and self-regulation in a community of peers tend to become habituated to seeking a licentious freedom in opposition to the seemingly arbitrary restraints imposed on them by adults.Footnote 53 On the other hand, when an individual freely attempts to achieve chosen goals in an environment of freedom and responsibility, he begins to develop self-control in the attempt to achieve his aims, which generates cognitive and moral spillover effects he draws upon to achieve future aims. Montessori also observes that children who become immersed in genuine concentration start becoming more self-controlled, more aware of their environment and their effects on it, and kinder and more conscientious toward others. What the learner most needs to progress, therefore, is to be active in an environment that helps to develop his capacity to control and regulate himself.Footnote 54
How are mistakes to be corrected, if not by a teacher? Montessori thinks learning is advanced by what she calls a “control of error,” defined as “any kind of indicator which tells us whether we are going toward our goal, or away from it,” which thus enables us to recognize and control our own errors.Footnote 55 The control of error is not a force that controls or corrects error from without, irrespective of whether we can control our own errors. It is, rather, something that reveals to us our own error and invites us to control and reform ourselves. A key role of the Montessori guide is to prepare a physical and cultural environment of attractive and enriching activities that tend to provide clearer feedback than would tend to occur in accidental experience.
Scaffolding by the adult may be necessary, especially at first. But the goal of the Montessori guide is to provide an environment that leads the learner to seek to achieve chosen goals that require him to discipline and regulate himself whether the guide is present or not. Intrinsic motivation and habituation to correct one’s own errors are keys to long-term growth in learning. The measure of success for the guide, unlike an occupying force overseeing unwilling subjects, is to end up “standing almost completely aside.”Footnote 56 As Montessori explains:
It is not that the Montessori teacher is inactive and the teacher of the ordinary school active, but all the activities our teacher has to perform are a preparation, a guidance, and the subsequent “inactivity” of the teacher is a sign of success. Complete outer inactivity of the teacher represents a task successfully accomplished, we might say it is an ideal aim, and blessed are the teachers who have brought their class to the stage where they can say: “Whether I am present or not, the class functions.”Footnote 57
It should be noted that schools calling themselves Montessori or Montessori-inspired exhibit a variety of outcomes. The name Montessori is not trademarked and outcomes vary markedly with program quality as measured by fidelity to or deviation from the classic Montessori materials and approach.Footnote 58 Compared to the longitudinal studies discussed above, however, longitudinal studies of Montessori programs show that students selected by lottery to enter high-fidelity Montessori schools perform better on reading, math, social cognition, executive function, a greater orientation to try to master difficult tasks, more positive attitudes toward school, and more positive interaction on the playground.Footnote 59
Tocqueville on learning in democracy
Tocqueville’s views of what kinds of activity make society at large a productive learning environment for freedom and democracy parallel Montessori’s views of the ideal constitution of a community of explorers in a classroom. Like Gray and Montessori, Tocqueville observes that trial and error when one has the ability to notice and correct mistakes tend to outperform results brought about by an enlightened central administrative figure. He agrees that central control by experts is often more skillful in achieving any particular result in the short run than dispersed action, but under freedom “in the long term the general result of all the individual undertakings far exceeds what the government could do.”Footnote 60 Tocqueville further holds:
One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government (when a people is so fortunate as to be able to get on without it, a rare thing) is the development of individual power which never fails to result. Each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the aid of an outside power which, however vigilant one suppose it, is never able to respond to all social needs.Footnote 61
As with freedom, so with local democracy. When thinking about the downsides of democracy, Tocqueville responds that “it is often true” that time and “a sense of the evil will enlighten the people and show them their needs … . [I]f democracy has more chance of being mistaken than a king or a body of nobles, it also has more chance of coming back to the truth.”Footnote 62
Tocqueville recognizes, however, that there is often disorder and even sometimes danger when freedom and democracy are gained for the first time by those without experience or the means of discovering how to correct their errors: “[D]emocracy can only obtain truth from experience, and many peoples cannot await the results of their errors without perishing.”Footnote 63 When people “cannot discern the cause of their miseries; they succumb under evils of which they are ignorant.” In cases where freely chosen action leads to serious danger to survival or long-term improvement Tocqueville “is tempted to believe that … despotism would be a benefit.”Footnote 64
The danger of such benevolent despotism, however, is that it tends to create a vicious cycle of irresponsibility and dependency.Footnote 65 The reverse is true of freedom. The disorder and failure of trials under freedom are seen immediately, but the benefits are seen only over time:
There is nothing more prolific in marvels than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom. It is not the same with despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the mender of all ills suffered; it is the support of good law, the sustainer of the oppressed, and the founder of order. Peoples fall asleep in the bosom of the temporary prosperity to which it gives birth; and when they awaken, they are miserable. Freedom, in contrast, is ordinarily born in the midst of storms … and only when it is old can one know its benefits.Footnote 66
Thus, for Tocqueville, a schoolmaster who keeps people in a perpetual state of childhood is the model of bad government, while good government seeks to make itself redundant: “The greatest care of a good government should be to habituate people, little by little, to doing without it.”Footnote 67
The more experience individuals and communities have living in freedom, the more capable they are at self-regulation and self-government. Tocqueville writes that “all” freedoms are “more formidable” the newer they are. Presumably, this is because people develop initiative and judgment, and they use their freedom to internalize norms and create institutions to counteract the bad effects of freedom over time: “The states where citizens have enjoyed their rights longest are those where they know best how to make use of them.”Footnote 68 Edmund Burke notes in 1775, for instance, that when Britain withdrew the apparatus of government from Massachusetts to punish them for being insubordinate, “anarchy [was] found tolerable.”Footnote 69 The people had learned how to live well without guardians from long experience during Great Britain’s benevolent neglect.
The great benefit of local democracy, as Tocqueville sees it, is the capacity democracy has to enable people to make trials, experience the consequences, and correct their mistakes: “The great privilege of the Americans is … not only to be more enlightened than others, but to have the ability to make repairable mistakes.”Footnote 70 What is most needed, therefore, is an environment that allows for maximal experience in trials that lead to reparable rather than fatal errors. It is through active involvement in self-government along with making and correcting errors that make townships, for Tocqueville, schools of freedom and democracy.
Today, government is so distant and the effect that any one citizen has on policy as a voter is so insignificant that modern citizens tend to be rationally ignorant and rationally irrational about politics.Footnote 71 The result is that modern democracy shields people from the kind of learning Tocqueville thought experience in local democracy tends to generate. In contrast, Tocqueville observes, “life in a township makes itself felt in a way at each instant; it manifests itself each day by the accomplishment of a duty or by the exercise of a right,” and township forms of government “scatter power in order to interest more people in public things.”Footnote 72
Because Tocqueville sees participation in a township as helpful for advancing the mores of freedom and because the practices of local self-government and association have atrophied in society at large, why not involve young people in consciously constructed townships as part of their education in the art and science of self-government?Footnote 73 Such experience could enable young people to practice the skills and habits of democratic self-government at the local level as a means of education and draw on the understanding and habits they develop when they graduate to being adult citizens.
Junior republics: Self-government as a means of moral education
Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont think that young people living in “a small society, upon the model of society at large” in which children are “treated as if they were men and like members of a free society” would be “powerful as a means of moral education.”Footnote 74 Apparently unaware of Tocqueville’s comments, William R. “Daddy” George put such a vision to the test on a grand scale by forming a junior republic in which young people governed themselves.
In a contemporary commentary of the Junior Republic, collaborator Thomas Osborne describes the project:
At first I thought the Junior Republic was a very picturesque and interesting philanthropic experiment … . Then I discovered that [it] was in its essential features a perfectly natural evolution from a benevolent tyranny, which, seeking to do its highest duty to the human beings under its charge, had unexpectedly blossomed into a self-governing community. … [W]hat Mr. George had really discovered was … nothing less than Democracy itself.Footnote 75
After engaging young people in New York City, many of whom had been involved in street gangs, George was inspired to share his love of the outdoors with them. Through his connections in upstate New York, he convinced a small community in aptly named Freeville to host a group of youths for a country excursion in the summer of 1890. This small endeavor would be the start of a movement that would influence not only civic education, juvenile reform, and penology, but also generate dialogue on the nature of citizenship as well as the role and capacity of young people to engage in the democratic process.
The project captured local imagination with the size of the “Freeville Fresh Air Camp” growing year after year. Visitors and supporters sent aid, making the participants well-resourced and showered with gifts and goods so that they were all sent home with bundles of clothes and food. George ran sessions for hundreds of youths during the summers but had the disturbing realization that “the work was doing harm rather than good.” The philanthropic nature of the engagements led participants and their families to start to feel a sense of entitlement to the generosity of the country hosts and sponsors. He found that fathers of the children would lose or pretend to lose jobs to get more charity.Footnote 76 Turning to the children, he asked:
“Can you tell me any reason in the round world why these people should give you clothing and other things to take home with you? Here you are getting all the food and fun you want, and in addition fresh air and health thrown in. What right have you to expect anything more?” Then it was that a little black-eyed Italian girl … [l]ooking me straight in the eye … exclaimed … “Mister George, what do yer tink we’re here fer enyway?”Footnote 77
George believed the program needed a dramatic alteration. He instituted a new rule: “Nothing without Labor” (which became the motto of the Junior Republic). Rather than giving the participants free clothes, he required them to work to buy them. After some resistance, but realizing that George meant what he said, a participant finally went to work to earn the clothes. The other participants quickly followed his lead. George was able to establish the ethic of self-supporting work within the community among youth who had formerly been dependent on parents and charity.Footnote 78
Participants owning what they had earned led to a situation in which they began to reevaluate the justice of property. Whereas before property rights were an oppressive rule imposed from above, participants now started to request laws to protect what was theirs from petty thefts. Some participants had also been stealing apples from neighboring farms, imposing costs on George, who had to make good to the farmers. Despite attempts to call on the delinquents’ consciences and then even punish continued transgressions with a switch, George found his efforts did not reduce thefts. Some participants took pride in their rebellion, while others were amused to see them receive a whipping. Rebellion even tended to be a source of social standing among the youths. At wit’s end, George decided to give participants complete responsibility for adjudicating and enforcing community laws. To his delight and to the dismay of youths who failed to win the jury’s approval by clowning about the process on its first trial, participants started taking their role as a jury seriously, judging guilt and assigning proportional punishment. What had started out as alien, adult imposition that elicited youthful rebellion, was replaced by peers making rules for themselves and holding the responsibility for rule-making, adjudication, and enforcement. Crime quickly fell for the remainder of the summer. George reports participants leaving for New York City more pleased than ever, with a sense of self-respect and pride, declaring a more fervent desire to return than had ever happened before.Footnote 79
The governance framework of Freeville emerged as George adapted the program to meet the needs of the young participants. As he developed more opportunities for real responsibility, he eventually had the idea of replicating the principles of the American republic in Freeville, which would become George’s Junior Republic. Initially, a handful of adults held the highest positions in the village government, but as youth demonstrated their abilities, including through civil service exams required to qualify for coveted administrative positions, George quickly allowed every position in the republic to be held by the junior citizens, even replacing him as president of the Republic within a couple of years. The program quickly turned from a summer program to an all-year-round residential program with a handful of pioneers.
George used the laws of New York as the governing constitution of the Junior Republic, but the citizens could add to or adapt laws through constitutional procedures. Citizens made real legislative and constitutional changes. Girls and sympathetic boys fought for women’s suffrage in the Junior Republic, for instance, passing the amendment with a two-thirds vote of the male citizens to become part of the constitution, well before women in the greater United States republic gained the right to vote. However, women’s suffrage went on to have varying fortunes at the Junior Republic.Footnote 80
What George ended up creating was truly radical. What had started as rules to help young people experience more self-respect arising from self-support evolved into a republic largely modeled on American principles. However, it was a village “like any other,” but “of the youth, for youth, and by the youth” who lived there.Footnote 81 The agency the youth experienced in Freeville was not a mere simulation, but real experience in self-governance. Almost every aspect was led by the youth citizens. It would be a misconception to imagine the Junior Republic as anything like a school governed by adults overseeing the citizens. It was not. Indeed, citizens were given genuine freedom that led to real problems, and they were given the responsibility to address them. George felt the need to be explicit that his ambition was not to create a perfect society, as Jennifer Light explains:
From smoking to swearing to setting fires, crime and bad behavior were routine parts of republic life. So too were legislative choices he considered ill-advised. Yet in an immersive environment where kids could see the consequences of their choices play out, George was unfazed by these missteps. Indeed, the possibility of making mistakes and subsequently recovering from them was central to the republic’s learning objectives, so long as the children were given free rein to make them and sort things out for themselves.Footnote 82
The scale of the Junior Republic and frequent elections meant that the Tocquevillian dynamics of learning in a township could take place. Participants could make trials in their personal conduct and in changing village institutions, experience the consequences, and then change policy in response. The size of the Republic (about 200 citizens living on 250 acres) enabled each citizen to have significant influence and clearer feedback about their trials, and “[t]he simplicity of Republic life enabled each child to comprehend the dynamics of his society.”Footnote 83
Several stories reveal the power that the experience self-governing in the Junior Republic had for moral education. They illustrate learning from reparable mistakes, developing greater responsibility and internal locus of control, and internalizing norms of property and honest government. One early bill came from dissatisfaction with seeing able-bodied participants being fed on the public dime. A junior legislator rose to suggest a bill to stop Junior Republic taxes from being used to support able-bodied participants. The law had immediate effect: “The next meal the chronic paupers presented themselves as usual at the dining tent, but the little uniformed police man said, ‘Move on.’ The last two weeks there were no paupers.”Footnote 84
Participants also developed a greater sense of responsibility and internal locus of control by having to manage their work, pay, and expenditures. George reports coming across a boy deep in thought, who, after spending all his earnings at the beginning of each week, would blame others for his hard luck. He was now realizing that it was really he who had control over his income and that no one else was to blame for his recurring poor lot. He had decided, instead, to start bundling his income into seven bundles, one for each day of the week, and not to touch those bundles earmarked for a future day. If it worked, he planned to teach the method to his father in the city who suffered from the same problem he had just discovered in himself.Footnote 85
In another story, George reports that after the first civil service exam, some participants were heard lamenting their earlier lack of application in school now they felt the consequences of being cut off from coveted positions and greater pay in the Republic. “Truancy boys” learned that they were constrained to jobs involving physical labor, and many started studying for the civil service exam so they could become a policeman in the Republic.Footnote 86
Finally, George tells a story of a boy turning his conduct around from being locked up in the Republic jail: “I’ve figgered it out, and it costs more to be bad dan good.” Work and accommodation in jail was harder, paid less, and accompanied by social disapprobation compared to honest work on the outside: “I made up me mind dat I can’t afford to be bad, an’ I’m goin’ to try now to go to de top.” George reports:
He did. From that day there was a marked upward tendency in the boy, and before the camp season closed he was speaker of the House of Representatives. I reasoned after this that it was better to give a boy a few months in prison at the Junior Republic under good influences than two or three years of it at the expense of the state, and this imprisonment followed by the natural disgrace of being an ex-convict and criminal.Footnote 87
An important source of moral education in the Republic came from peers generating and enforcing laws as well as the greater internalization and sympathy youth had to the rules not only when they had property to protect, but also when they and their peers were involved in making, adjudicating, and enforcing the law. George argues that most of the youth started to respect the law. While many did so at first merely as a matter of intelligent “policy” or only to the extent that following law was beneficial to their personal interests, many came to internalize the norms of democratic freedom and started doing “right for right’s sake.”Footnote 88 These two phases of moral development parallel Tocqueville’s dual interest in two ways. First, by aligning incentives through institutions with a philosophy of self-interest rightly understood. Second, by developing republican dispositions genuinely oriented to the public good.Footnote 89 The same tendencies were also observed in less immersive urban environments that used the Junior Republic principles.Footnote 90
The great achievement of George’s Junior Republic was to create spheres of real responsibility and agency. Like the Montessori guide who establishes an environment and then steps aside, George emphasizes that “the great art of running the Republic was not to run it at all.” He further says: “In all questions arising and concerning the Republic village solely, solve the problem by asking: ‘What would they do in the nearest village of adults, if this question presented itself?’ and act in the same way.”Footnote 91
Freeville affiliate Frederic Almy writes that learning through experience and discipline in the Junior Republics is an inoculation in responsibility:
Where the germ of pauperism or of vice cannot be killed, may there not be a treatment by antitoxin, as at the George Republic, by deliberately helping the poison to run its course in a mild form in order to prevent future attacks? It may be well to let a boy be idle and lazy for a time and suffer all the consequences of hunger and cold; to let him be violent, and as a penalty be duly and severely punished by his peers; in fact, to give him a brief rehearsal of life under natural conditions which will be very profitable when life arrives in grim earnest.Footnote 92
Junior Republics were visited, studied, and widely acclaimed by figures such as John R. Commons and Theodore Roosevelt. They were also widely imitated to create many forms of boys and girls towns, villages, clubs, student governments, and forms of youth participation in local municipalities not only in America, but internationally. Several factors, however, led to the decline of the Junior Republics. First, popularity, rapid growth, and factionalization in the movement caused it to become disconnected from William George and his influence. Many of these imitations failed to maintain standards of genuine self-government. Second, the social welfare movement moved away from George’s messy and “unscientific” approach to the Junior Republics. The Junior Republics had to fight against concerns about co-education, the use of jails in the Republics, and concerns about child labor as well as legal controversies about participants and inmates contributing to institutional maintenance. Finally, changing attitudes and professionalization of social work as well as the expansion of public high schools, rising wealth, and competing opportunities in cities reduced interest for youths to participate voluntarily in Junior Republics.Footnote 93 George, once classed as one of the most important men in America, is now hardly known today.
Conclusion
Smith tells a story of a boy who uses a string to open and close valves on a machine he was hired to manipulate in order to be free to go play with his friends.Footnote 94 The irony is now that commercial society has created enough wealth to enable children to avoid monotonous forms of factory work and engage in self-directed free play, we have developed institutions that tend to subject them to a form of schooling modeled on factory-like environments.
The future of liberal society depends on young people developing responsibility by practicing self-government in environments where they can make mistakes and bear the responsibility to correct those mistakes. They need more free play with others, forms of schooling more like Montessori environments than hierarchical and monotonous factory work, and, ideally, time running and living in real village communities of, for, and by older teenagers as practice in the education Tocqueville saw arising from participation in township-level government.
How can these forms of learning be enabled and encouraged at relatively low cost? The expansion of free play can be achieved by helping educate parents about its benefits and by creating environments where free play can flourish. Gray argues that the decline of free play is partly the result of increased unfounded fears among parents. That leads to a vicious spiral of fewer children playing in neighborhoods, thus increasing the real dangers of and reducing the attractiveness of outdoor play for both parents and children.Footnote 95 Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) is a guide to help parents overcome unfounded fears and promote free play.Footnote 96 Unschooling environments such as Sudbury Valley in the United States, Summerhill in the United Kingdom, and Forest Schools in Northern Europe can help overcome some of the collective action problem of having children play outside by providing infrastructure, unobtrusive adult presence, and processes for managing danger and risk. These kinds of environments can serve the daycare functions that schooling serves today, but while allowing young people to learn and play freely with each other. Costs of government schooling today are much greater than Sudbury Valley environments. Gray shows evidence that such environments create no net disadvantage for graduates either in the professional world or in going to college.Footnote 97
Another interesting facet of Sudbury Valley and Summerhill-type communities is that the community engages in self-government of the school through a direct democracy in which every member of the community has a vote, replicating elements of genuine responsibility and experience characteristic of the Junior Republics. There is a need for further study of how these environments affect skills, habits, and dispositions conducive to democracy in adulthood. As Tocqueville suggests, however, while highly desirable and perhaps necessary to some degree, practical experience with voting alone is insufficient for developing capabilities in liberal democratic self-government. Also required is some enlightenment in the science and art of association, including understanding the market process and government institutions, awareness of liberal democratic ethics and ideals, and knowing how to recognize and navigate social dilemmas surrounding the provision of public goods and the management of common pool resources.Footnote 98 How to invite people into the study of the science and art of association in the face of the tendencies of individualism is, thus, a question of critical importance for the science and art of association itself.
Montessori schooling provides a well-worked-out curriculum and set of principles for realizing a constructivist approach to education relatively consistently. The approach, however, requires a radical reworking of school infrastructure, organization, and culture. The rise of school choice as well as greater charitable interest in Montessori and “Montessori-inspired” preschools has given new opportunities for accessible Montessori schools to proliferate. But given that the name Montessori is not trademarked, and given that outcomes under the banner of Montessori vary significantly based on the fidelity with which the approach is applied, success of this potential expansion of Montessori will depend on proper execution and the development of greater popular understanding of the need to look for markers of a good Montessori environment.Footnote 99
What are the prospects for establishing something like Junior Republics today for older teens as an education in personal responsibility and citizenship? Tocqueville claims:
The difficulty of founding the independence of townships, instead of diminishing as nations become enlightened, increases with their enlightenment. A very civilized society tolerates only with difficulty the trials of freedom in a township; it is revolted at the sight of its numerous lapses and despairs of success before having attained the final result of experience.Footnote 100
Many will be shocked at the level of noninterference George exercised at points in the Junior Republic and the real levels of responsibility, disorder, and sometimes even danger experienced in the early Republic, given the rough background of some of the early participants. But they would also be amazed by the order and achievement young people experienced in rising to overcome these challenges and by the positive culture of mutual support and accountability young people developed when given the needed institutions and the opportunity to do so.
In a world in which young people are ever more sheltered from self-supporting work, community participation, and free play, there is more of a need than ever to engage them in genuine experiences of self-government. It is crucial to engage young people in environments where they can practice the responsibilities needed to flourish and contribute to public goods, and where they can learn self-governing mores through trials that are not fatal to their futures, rather than be separated from experience and responsibility until legal adulthood.
Whether young people are provided with environments and opportunities to make trials and learn from nonfatal errors as individuals and citizens or not, they will eventually make mistakes that have consequences for themselves and others. Their capacity to direct themselves, to make and correct their own mistakes, and to coordinate with others as equals without recourse to guardians will depend on the extent to which they can practice and develop such virtues. Developing or retarding responsibility will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Acknowledgments
I would like to gratefully acknowledge Ross Emmett, Tyler DesRoches, and David Schmidtz for involving me in this project; the other contributors to this volume and the anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments; and my wife, Rachel Davison Humphries, for her invaluable support in writing this essay.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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