Year: 2018

Report from IDEC 2018

Namaste EUDEC friends from Europe and beyond! Here is the promised Report from IDEC 2018: how it all unwrapped in my very fragmentary and subjective outlook 😉 The 25th International Conference for Democratic Education (IDEC) just took place three weeks ago in Bengalore, on the central south Deccan Plateau in India. (15th to 21st November […]

Democratic School Partnership Project Launched in Greece

We are very excited because our school-partnership project was approved by the Greek ministry of Education. This comes in a period where we are actually starting to raise awareness on the topic of democratic education and we enthusiastically realise that more and more people are interested to join. In this promising “Sympraxis” democratic school partnership […]

New TED Talks on Democratic Education

Christel Hartkamp-Bakker and Peter Hartkamp from Sudburyschool Harderwijk in the Netherlands have both been featured at recent TEDX events. Last week, Christel’s talk was recorded at the TEDX 2018 event for TEDX Harderwijk. The subject of her talk was “Can we trust children to educate themselves?” The livestream (unedited) can be viewed here (talk starts at […]

We hold the key to the future – and should not be afraid to say so!!

(A revised version of Derry Hannam’s keynote talk at the EUDEC conference held at Korfes, Crete, August 2018) There are two pillars to Democratic Education. Pillar number one consists of self-directed and self-managed learning and education which is free from coercion, competition, compulsory testing and fear of failure where, above all, young people learn to […]

New Democratic School in Croatia!

Dear All, 3 September 2018 marked the first day of work for Nova Škola primary school, the first free-democratic school in Croatia. We are very happy and proud of finally making our dreams come true. Our biggest obstacle was finding an adequate facility. We entered into negotiations with the City of Samobor representatives to be […]

EUDEC Poland Crowdfunding for Coordinator

Dear EUDEC friends and members, On 24th-27th May 2018 another conference of Polish democratic education community took place. About 250 hundred people joined the conference near Poznan to exchange experience, support each other, and charge their batteries. In the polish community, we came to a conclusion, that we want to have a crowdfunding to pay […]

Latest Report from Sudbury School Ammersee

Dear friends of Sudbury, (Deutsche Version unten) A good week ago we received the negative decision of the court, and now we are waiting for the details. We prepared for the hearing intensively and for many months, and during it we described the many-faceted ways that learning happens at a Sudbury school, that many pupils […]

New Democratic-Education project in France has spaces available as Boarding School

Dear friends, Last year, in March 2017, we founded an eco-village called Village de Pourgues, in Le Fossat, France. Our foundations and structures are inspired from Sudbury Valley School. We are now 30 people living together, including 9 children from ages 1 to 10. Where so many have failed since the 70s, we succeeded in […]

School students need time to think – A modest proposal

It seems to me that the crucial commodity that children and young people need in order to find and deepen their interests and identity is TIME. Time to think, time to wonder, time to create, time to hang out with their friends, time to find out who they are, time to relax and just be idle […]

Freedom to Learn Conference in Prague – November 2018

A new and exciting organisation is holding its second Freedom to Learn conference in Prague in November. Its first conference in 2015 was attended by more than 300 people. The organisation is SvobodaUčení.cz. It is a Czech network linking a number of new ventures in the Republic.