culture fix

The most common criteria for a liberal democracy are as follows:

• Right to life and security of person
• Freedom from slavery
• Freedom of movement
• Equality before the law and due process under the rule of law
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of information
• Freedom of the press and access to alternative information sources
• Freedom of association and assembly
• Freedom of education
• Freedom of religion
• An independent judiciary

Certainly, most people in the United States would agree that all these criteria are met, or at least promised by the government. After all, by the sixth grade, nearly everyone learns the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and that freedom is as American as apple pie. What is not talked much about is that we generally give only lip service to these freedoms, that most of us live quite different lives, and that our society certainly is far from these ideals.

People are afraid to give their children liberties that they themselves do not experience in life. When a person has spent, in some cases, a majority of their lives in institutionalized education, where the regimen is anything but freedom, and followed this up with the aptly named wage slavery, it is difficult to even imagine an alternative. Of course, they would want the same for their children -- what else is there?

Schools like Sudbury Valley take the basic tenets of liberal democracy and apply them to their culture. Rather than trying to instill a basic set of ideal societal beliefs on their students (by rote memorization in fifty-minute classroom chunks), they create an environment where the people are implementing these ideals. This concept is far ahead of the times -- most adults in our society work in environments barely progressed beyond medieval serfdom. In the transition from an industrial society to a service economy, many American factories have been outsourced to the global south and China, or staffed by undocumented workers. These factories have been happily replaced with cubicles, which (forced by further outsourcing) many workers are replicating in the home office. The factory clock, the first casualty of the French revolution, has been usurped by the wristwatch, and cell phones keep us in touch with our employers even during our vacations.

If we can't make the choice to emancipate ourselves, what do we have planned for our children? Should we lock them up in our prison schools, and perpetuate the emptiness we feel in our adult lives? Or should we work with them to create a new society? Where people have been raised as equals, and expect no less from each other?

When faced with the choice of freedom, which entails facing and rejecting the dark void in our society, it's no wonder that so many turn back to their government, hoping that our school systems can simply be fixed with a few more tax dollars, better educated teachers, or more standardized testing.

On the other hand, maybe more people would make a different choice if they were even aware the choice was theirs to make. In that case, it's no wonder that a government still bound to its medieval roots would keep its citizens deaf, dumb, and blind. And how better to do that then keep them chained to a desk for twelve or more years and make them repeat, until the words hold no meaning, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

- Aaron Winborn