Democracy educators in the US have much to learn from the international Escuela Nueva or "New School" movement born in Columbia in the 1970s. This includes the simple -- but hugely disputed --lesson that it is possible to make large scale democratic change from inside the system, working outward to build coalitions.

My conviction grows from research I've done as part of my ongoing Bridging Differences discussion with Deborah Meier on Education Week. In her last blog, "Schools Are Democracy Sites, Not Chain Stores," Meier calls for discussion about what should be a publicly funded school "with democracy in mind."

"A society like ours with vast inequalities of power has trouble even imagining what a full democracy might entail," she writes. "I'm hoping for a conversation that might lead to greater agreement about what kind of democratic processes entitle a school to public funding. Name me a few you'd insist on, Harry (and friends). What's your short list of what shouldn't be allowed or what must be practiced in schools that rest on public resources--in the name of democracy?"

I responded today, December 22, with lessons I see from the Escuela Nueva movement. Meier's question raises related questions. "What is democracy?" Also, "How does the idea of democracy reawaken as an inspiring idea, far more than a trip to the ballot box?" Finally, "How can we achieve democratic change in education on a large scale?"

These are global questions since democracy is threatened around the world and education in many societies, including in the US, is mostly a hypercompetitive race for individual success.

Many are fatalistic, thinking real change just can't happen. I also see a problem in the anti-institutionalism and outside critic stance widespread among academics and intellectuals. Proponents of radical democracy in education from the late Paulo Freire to Henry Giroux and many others today think education is determined by capitalism and we won't get democracy in schools without society-wide revolutionary changes.

That's why the emerging movement for democracy schools called Escuela Nueva, or New School, is so important. It counters fatalism and also the anti-institutional mindset.

We need more details about this but the basic story is that the New School movement was launched in the 1970s by Vicky Colbert working with Beryl Levinger and Oscar Mogollon. Colbert studied at Javeriana University in Bogota and got a fellowship for graduate studies at Stanford. "I was exposed to wonderful theories," Colbert told Sara Hamdan for a New York Times article in 2013, "Children Thrive in Rural Columbia's Flexible Schools." (I'm sure John Dewey was on the list). "When I came back I wanted to work with the poorest of the poor schools, the isolated schools."

She became coordinator of rural schools for the Columbian Department of Education in the 1970s and with Levinger and Mogollon developed the New School model, finding support in rural communities. With growing evidence of its success, it became the main approach for rural education in the country and spread to a number of urban schools.

The New School model is based on democratic decision-making, active learning, and productive community work. Teachers, parents, and students have strong voice. David Kirp reported in another New York Times piece, "Make School a Democracy," last spring on his visit to a school in a low income neighborhood in the town of Armenia, Columbia. The student council was running a radio station, planning what to do with underutilized school spaces, and organizing a day set aside to promote peace.

Hamdan quotes Myriam Mazzo, a teacher in a single room school in Armenia, who says "the student is not afraid to speak or share ideas. He is participative, democratic, knows how to share and work in teams. Most important he can work at his own pace."

Students map their communities and bring their lessons to community members. Teachers use many local resources. Parents are active in the everyday activities of the schools. Their involvement, researchers find, impacts their parenting and their level of community involvement. There are core elements to the New School, such as the idea that teachers are more "guides" than instructors, but the approach adapts to the particulars of local communities and societies.

UNESCO reports the adoption of the approach in 20,000 schools in Columbia. According to the World Bank, students in the New Schools in Columbia outperform better-off students in traditional schools. A UNESCO study found that Columbia, where most rural schools use the model, does the best job of any Latin democracy in educating rural children. The Columbia Department of Education, the Clinton Global Initiative, UNESCO, and many other groups support the approach.

The movement has spread to 40 countries including Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Mexico, Uganda, Zambia, and Vietnam. Though New Schools have many resemblances to Scandinavian folk schools, to Jane Addams Hull House, to Dewey's "Schools as Social Centers," and to Central Park East schools in New York and Mission Hill Schools in Boston, the New School approach is largely unknown here. An exception is Kirp, a professor at UC-Berkeley.

From my perspective, the New School model shows that good organizing can produce large scale democratic change from the inside of systems, not simply from the outside. Colbert and her team built coalitions with government as a partner from the outset. The success of this approach challenges a great deal of conventional wisdom, both on the left and in community organizing.

The website for the organizing heart of the movement, Fundacion Escuela Nueva, has a wealth of resources and information. A web search turns up many more.

We need to begin learning. And debating the implications.

One side pits winners and losers against each other in a race for the American Dream, while the other wonders what might be possible if we work together to form communities, build schools and create a culture of mutual respect.

Harry Boyte was only 19 when he joined Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference - a youthful white North Carolinian working as a field secretary and lieutenant to Dr. King alongside equally young black volunteers who formed the front line of the civil rights movement.'

The experience taught Boyte that "everyday politics" can change history, and he has spent his adult life teaching and proclaiming that the talents of ordinary people - "from the nursing school to the nursing home" - are essential to democracy. He founded the movement Public Achievement which now empowers young people in more than 20 countries and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota (now the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, where he serves as senior scholar in Public Work Philosophy.)

Among his many books my favorites are Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life, which one critic said "restores the dignity of real politics" (yes, I will add - even in the Age of Trump), and The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference. He's in South Africa right now, and I reached out to him for a response to the polarization and vituperation now roiling American politics.
- Bill Moyers
BY HARRY BOYTE | DECEMBER 16, 2015
The Fight For America's Soul

Since the beginning, two narratives have warred for the soul of America. One is the "We're Number One" America, in which the American Dream is a competition with few winners and others who bask in their reflected glory. This is the America of land grabs, robber barons and get-rich-quick schemes.

The alternative is the story of democracy in which America is a place of cooperative endeavor where people form associations, build schools, congregations, libraries and towns and fight for "liberty and justice for all."'

The novelist Marilynne Robinson was getting at this alternative in her conversation with President Obama last September in Iowa, reprinted in the New York Review of Books."Democracy," she said, "was something people collectively made." Making democracy created a culture of mutual respect.

I learned this understanding of democracy as a young man working for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the civil rights movement. In Hope and History, King's friend and sometime speechwriter Vincent Harding described the movement as "a powerful outcropping of the continuing struggle for the expansion of democracy in the United States." It showed "the deep yearning for a democratic experience that is far more than periodic voting."

Today there are new outcroppings of the democracy story but they do not yet merge into a narrative of democracy as a way of life. "We're Number One" America dominates, coming especially from Republican candidates. It has antecedents.

In 1941, Henry Luce, the publisher of Life and Time magazines, wrote an influential essay called "The American Century." He was scornful of democracy ("Whose Dong Dang, whose Democracy?" he sneered). He saw the American Dream as meaning opportunities for "increasing satisfaction of individuals." And he accused Americans of vacillation in the face of the looming war with the Nazis. "The cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Republican candidates today channel Luce. Marco Rubio's campaign theme is, in fact, "A New American Century." Donald Trump pledges to "Make America Great Again" and presents himself as winner-in-chief.

But bashing Republicans isn't going to revitalize the alternative.

Franklin Roosevelt's vice president, Henry Wallace, responded to Henry Luce in a speech, "The Century of the Common Man," in New York, May 8, 1942. Wallace had been a Republican businessman until he became Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture and then vice president. His family had deep roots in the populist farmers' movement in rural Iowa.

Wallace saw the war against fascism as being about democracy, not American dominance. He envisioned an egalitarian democratic post-war world in which colonial empires would be abolished, labor unions would be widespread, poverty would end, and the US would treat others with respect. "We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis," he said. "There can be no privileged peoples."

Wallace's Century of the Common Man drew on the widespread sense of democracy as a way of life built through work that incorporated public meanings and qualities. Citizenship as public work is based on respect for the productive potential of everyone, regardless of income or education, race, religion or partisan belief.

For instance, the men and women participating in programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), involving more than 3 million young men in public-work projects, acted out of practical self-interests, not high ideals. They needed jobs. But their work also had democratic overtones. As people made a commonwealth of public goods, they became a commonwealth of citizens.

The CCC brought people together across differences. As Al Hammer told me in an interview for Building America, a book co-authored with Nan Kari, "The CCC got people like me out into the public. It gave me a chance to meet and work with people different than me from all over the country -- farm boys, city boys, mountain boys, all worked together."

Public work was educative in other ways. C.H. Blanchard observed that "the CCC enrollees feel a part-ownership as citizens in the forest that they have seen improve through the labor of their hands." Participants often developed a strong sense of public purpose. Scott Leavitt of the Forest Service explained that "there has come to the boys of the Corps a dawning understanding of the inspiring and satisfying fact that they are taking an integral and indispensable part in a great program vitally essential to the welfare, possibly even to the ultimate existence, of this country."

Government public-work programs were part of many efforts that activated civic energies during the Great Depression. These ranged from unionization of the auto industry to civil-rights struggles, from cultural work in journalism, film, and theater to rural electrification and projects to halt soil erosion.

These efforts extended far beyond government, but government programs could be catalytic, a pattern displayed in New Deal for the Arts, a National Archives exhibit now online. The exhibit celebrates the cultural work of thousands of writers, sculptors, musicians, photographers, painters and others.

Government cultural work provided jobs but also conveyed a message of hope and collective agency that signaled a shift in conventional wisdom. "The people," seen by intellectuals in the 1920s as the repository of crass materialism and parochialism, were rediscovered as the source of democratic creativity. "The heart and soul of our country is the common man," said Franklin Roosevelt during the 1940 campaign setting the stage for Wallace.

Cultural workers in and out of government conveyed the story of democracy as a way of life, background for Wallace's speech. Subsequently the journalist Ernie Pyle's reports from the front lines of World War II about "GI Joe" generated the wide public perception that the war was about democracy, not superiority. At the end of the war, mainstream commentators regularly called for modesty and expressed appreciation and respect for other nations' contributions.

The culture of democratic respect has eroded. And as work has come to be seen only as a means to the good life and not of value in itself, the public dimensions of work and recognition of the importance of workers have sharply declined. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi describes the changing identities of men, from African-American shipyard workers to television executives and evangelicals, as work has been devalued. They live "in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture." Public visibility of work that contributes to communities and builds the commonwealth has largely disappeared.

Below the surface of anger and division today, a myriad new stories of "making democracy" are growing again. But in this election, no candidate on his or her own is going to weave them into the democracy story. Bernie Sanders, the most vocal about "revitalizing democracy" by challenging the billionaire class, sticks to the basics. "We know what democracy is supposed to be about," said Sanders in his announcement speech. "It is one person, one vote, with every citizen having an equal say."

The poet Walt Whitman had a different view. "We have frequently printed the word Democracy," he wrote in Democratic Vistas, "Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened. It is a great word, whose history remains unwritten."
It is time to recall the greatness of the word democracy. And to reawaken the story.
Published under creative commons. First published on BillMoyers.com http://billmoyers.com/story/the-fight-for-americas-soul/

Citizen politics grows from the sense that we have to "live together afterwards," for all the differences and conflict. Politics in this elemental sense is the alternative to war and violence.

Citizen politics grows from the sense that we have to "live together afterwards," for all the differences and conflict. Politics in this elemental sense is the alternative to war and violence.

In our continuing conversation on Education Week, "Bridging Differences," Deborah Meier and I exchange views about the significance of democracy schools for the larger society. She writes on November 26 about conflicts:

"It depends on what the issue is, how deep the disagreement as well as how important it is to live together afterwards. Sometimes a split is a step forward, not backward. But it's not a good habit. At Mission Hill it means that there's almost always a way to find a meeting place when a parent has a serious concern even if it takes time to find it. . Some are "easy," like homework. We were opposed to it, at least until 4th or 5th grade and only if we thought kids would not be stuck if parents were too busy doing something else. Some parents wanted homework very much. So we shifted to sending suggested activities home to all parents and mandated reading or being read to.

"We had a few parents who were upset that a teacher told her 3rd graders that Langston Hughes was homosexual. We took her worry seriously and helped her see that aside from respecting our own values we had to acknowledge the view of many other parents, about what was right. We thought more about when to bring up a famous person's sexual preferences and when not--and why. The parents appreciated the conversations and remained a stalwart ally.

"It helps that teachers have two years to get to know parents well, and time is set aside for family and school/teacher conversation, the staff has built-in time to talk together, that the school itself is diverse and thus we don't have to do all the talking!"

I reply in Education Week, December 8.

Your stories about negotiating your way through differences with parents and families on issues like homework and sexual orientation are great - the stuff of everyday politics. And your embrace of tension, conflicts, and sometimes sharp divisions - "it depends on how important it is to live together afterwards" - is the first premise of citizen politics.

Citizen politics grows from the sense that we have to "live together afterwards," for all the differences and conflict. Politics in this elemental sense is the alternative to war and violence. In these days of deep divisions, fears, and fear-mongering, this is more important than ever.

So, your schools have been laboratories for such a politics!

I'm thinking a lot these days about how much examples of such politics are needed in the rising tide of acrimonious attack and bellicosity, especially from the Republican side. It reminds me of what I've read about the early 1940s.

Henry Luce, the publisher of Life wrote an influential essay in 1941 called "The American Century." He accused Americans of vacillation in the face of Nazi dangers and said "the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

This sounds a lot like Republican candidates today. Marco Rubio's campaign theme, "A New American Century," explicitly brings back Luce.

But we need a response that is not narrowly partisan. Simply bashing Republicans isn't the answer.

In the early 1940s, there was another alternative - the vision of "the century of the common man" which Roosevelt's Vice President, Henry Wallace, articulated as the answer to Henry Luce in a speech in New York, May 8, 1942.

Wallace had been a Republican until he became Secretary of Agriculture and then Vice President for Franklin Roosevelt. His family had deep roots in the populist farmers' movement in rural Iowa. Wallace saw the war against fascism as about democracy, not American supremacy. He envisioned an egalitarian, democratic post-war world in which colonial empires would be abolished, labor unions would be widespread, poverty would end, and the US would treat others with respect. "We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis," he wrote. "There can be no privileged peoples."

Wallace's Century of the Common Man speech drew on the widespread sense of what Marilynne Robinson was getting in her conversation with President Obama printed in the New York Review of Books: "democracy...was something people collectively made." This created a culture of democratic respect.

I was struck by how people felt they were "making democracy" through work when I interviewed veterans of the Civilian Conservation Corps from the 1930s, who told me their work building parks which were "national treasures" changed their lives. There were many other "citizen workers" in those days -- citizen teachers, citizen business owners, and citizen politicians, among others. Lisabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal describes vividly people's sense that the whole society was responding to the Great Depression.

Society has seen huge decline in the public dimensions of work and respect for people who do work (including teachers). Susan Faludi in her terrific book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, describes the changing identities of men, from African American shipyard workers to television executives and evangelicals, as work has been devalued. Men live "in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture." Older identities of "contributing to communities and building the nation" have largely disappeared. She argues that men are like Betty Friedan's "trapped housewives" of the 1960s.

I'm convinced this loss of public role has a lot to do with white men supporting candidates like Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.

We urgently need to remember histories of public work and publicize current examples that challenge dominant trends. So your schools and others inspired by them, it seems to me, are usefully described as democratic sites where people help to make democracy through their work. You were doing more than making decisions democratically -- you were making democracy.