Students are human. Therefore, they crave liberty.
All people desire liberty. Sometimes, liberty gets a bad rap--particularly in the context of school. Some people misinterpret a focus on student liberty to mean I'm okay with a chaotic free-for-all.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Simply put, liberty is "freedom from undue interference." It doesn't mean absolute power to act as one pleases. In fact, learning to properly manage our own liberty requires us to grasp that we are not at liberty to act in a way that infringes upon the liberty of others.
What does this mean in a classroom?
It means my job is to teach you geometry (or English or economics), so I'm going to. Of course, you are free to ignore the lessons--as long as you don't interfere with someone else's ability to receive them. And it means that you can make whatever decisions you want within that classroom, as long as you're not infringing on the liberty of other people--whether they're students, teachers, or visitors.
Liberty means students are free to experience logical outcomes.
Yes, you are free to ignore the lessons--but of course, if you do, it's completely rational to expect that you won't know what to do when you're asked to demonstrate comprehension of whatever we're studying. And to demand that I or your classmates re-teach the lessons you ignored--well, that would be an infringement upon our liberty, wouldn't it?
This understanding of the classroom means that humans--both students and teachers--are free to make whatever rational decisions they like within the framework of the classroom, as long as they're not stepping on someone else's liberty.
Symptoms of liberty in the classroom:
Students begin to treat each other as human beings.
Students begin to see their teachers as equals, rather than adversaries.
Students learn to negotiate, to bargain, to enter into mutually beneficial agreements.
Students learn the art of cost / benefit analysis, since they bear the consequences of each decision.
Students see themselves and their liberty as inextricably linked to the individual worth and liberty of everyone else around them; in short, they begin to think in terms of community. Not a community imposed from the top down, but a community as it should be--an accumulation of distinct and distinctly valuable free individuals.
Why this matters so much:
Our culture is increasingly incapable of maintaining a civil society. We seem to be losing the common framework that held it all together. There are many reasons for this, but I believe this is because we have spent half a century thinking about school wrong.
It is irrational to micromanage students from kindergarten through the 12th grade, and then expect them to be capable of seamless entry into a democratic society as if by magic. If we want a nation full of adults that can handle liberty, we've got to begin letting them practice it at while the stakes aren't so high.
We can't correct the mistakes students make if we don't let them make any. We can't teach people to live freely well if we don't hand them ever-increasing amounts of freedom. I don't know how to fix the entire world, so I'm starting with my classroom.
