By Colin McGregor
Are you a student fed up with your classes? Imagine that you are in a school where you are never penalized for being late or absent; where you help to prepare meals and participate in the administrative decisions of your school; where you can contribute to your program and the activities you participate in – from music to creating a video game, if you prefer!
Welcome to a self-managed school. They have them in France, but not here. France has had success with their rare self-managed schools. The best known is the Lycée autogéré de Paris (LAP) – founded in 1982 to offer an alternative to the traditional education system. Free, it accommodates 240 students.
As Flore, a teacher of economics and social sciences, explains: “There are no penalties at all for being late or absent. Precisely it is one of our basic principles, free attendance. So the student can attend the lessons he or she wants. It is a desire to allow the student to take responsibility, to no longer undergo their schooling but on the contrary to be master and at the initiative of the lessons they choose.”
She continues: “As the students are not obliged to come to class, there is this question of how to make the course attractive, fun and at the same time to convey the keywords, definitions, concepts. So I set up a lot of very fun activities… With my final year, for example, we play a lot of games. Yesterday, for example, we were in an escape game room.”
According to student Margot: « It’s just a special place…the students will do everything together, there’s no real administration, there’s no cleaning staff, there’s no people who make us food, it’s the students and teachers together who do everything.”
Meals are prepared by students and teachers. According to Théodore, a student, “You come here when we cook and you say, how can I help?”
It costs 3 euros (just over $4.00 in Canadian dollars) per meal, and according to one student: “At least we know where the food comes from.”
Continues Margot: “I want to go to class, I want to get involved in high school, I want to come, I get along with my teachers. Decisions are made in small groups, by grassroots groups, we meet once a week to make decisions because in fact, making them in a large group would be much too complicated… The administration is managed almost exclusively by students, but there is also a person who works here permanently because when everyone is in class, we cannot necessarily manage the phone calls, the registrations.”
Zoé, also a student at the LAP, explains: “The voice of a student and the voice of a teacher, it is equal. In fact, a person’s voice matters.”
Pascal, a teacher, observes that: “When we let the students take care of such important things as the school budget, administrative tasks that have important consequences, there is an awareness of what is there is at stake.”
Thursday afternoon there are no classes. They have what they call projects. For example, the theater project puts on a play. They also go hiking, they go to eco-farms, among many other projects. There is even a video project, where students create a video game!
Mrs. Longerinas, a teacher, summarizes the situation: “The school’s vocation is to help each student build a personal life project or at least a personal project at least professional.”
Margot explains: “From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Thursdays, we have committee hours, and since we are a self-managed school, that is when we manage the whole school. There are some who will do the administration, others who will manage the budget, there is the maintenance commission which deals with repairs. There is the CAPE (commission for aid and prevention in the student). A few days ago the nurse and a teacher went to a training on sexism, sexual assault, all that. So they brought back flyers, we are sorting them out to see what would be interesting for us. As we are students, we know how we would like it to be managed, so I think we are perhaps in the best position to manage prevention for other students.”
Julie is a former student and a visual artist: “I felt useful on the one hand, and I had the impression of learning things on the other hand. From the start they told me, it’s an exchange: we’re going to teach you things, and you too will teach us things. I graduated. We are all different, and society offers us a single model of education accessible to all… Me, I needed someone to say we are going to do things differently, and it will be fine. It’s not the end of the world. The flaw in our current education is that we do not offer other alternatives on a larger scale. There is not just one solution, but there is only one format.”
Not Here Yet
Sadly, there are no self-managed schools here in Quebec, or anywhere else in Canada. There are several reasons for this. Professor Lisa Starr of the Faculty of Education at McGill University, the province’s largest faculty of education, says: “We have an opportunity post-COVID to change class times and think about new how we think about schools.” However, she cites two reasons why we do not have self-managed schools in Quebec: bureaucracy and parents.
“Most parents experienced school in a very controlled way,” says Dr. Starr. “Everyone thinks they know what schools are based on their own experiences. But they experienced it from a very narrow point of view. People think school hasn’t changed in 50 years because they see students sitting in rows.
« Sometimes as parents they tend to base their opinion on what they hear around the football field… They don’t know enough about alternative school systems because the traditional school system dominates the discourse.”
Moreover, alternative schools have an image problem. They are seen as places where struggling children or remedial students are sent, and Dr. Starr says many parents recoil at the “stigma” of sending their children to such schools.
Also, “education is under provincial control in Quebec,” according to Dr. Starr. “Bureaucracies in each province like to think they know how to set up schools, even though they are very similar across the country.” Also, bureaucracy hates losing control of anything: autonomous schools are about giving up control, and bureaucracies don’t like that. “Alternative schools tend to be private or independent schools – they need to be made independent of provincial bureaucracy.”
In the 1960s, independent schools proliferated across North America, but most closed as the more conservative 1980s approached. Indeed, several different educational models emerged in the 1960s.
“We have examples of alternative schools. It’s not just a matter of public/private, French/English. And schools have had to adapt a lot during the COVID crisis.” But, says Dr. Starr, “The key is that if we haven’t learned anything from COVID, we need to present it as an opportunity. COVID has created an opportunity to change schedules. The technique of scheduling two classes at once for a shorter period has surfaced. Adaptability. This should be a period of reflection. If people stop to think about it, self-managed schools can be an option.”
It’s also about “how schools are run. How teachers are trained,” says Dr. Starr. McGill has “the largest number of teachers in training, but we don’t have the expertise to train people to work in a self-directed environment. There is nothing wrong with teaching future teachers about lesson planning and the things we teach them. But teaching adaptability is much more complex.”
French version available on the Reflet de Société website November 28th, 2022
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