Given the evidence pointing to the psychological and developmental benefits of educational approaches that allow for student autonomy, consent, and self-direction, schooling approaches identified as self-directed education (SDE) are poised to contribute meaningfully to contemporary discourse relative to school reform. Yet parents and teachers know little about how schooling approaches that center student autonomy are able to foster learning, student wellness, and career and college readiness. Thus, the authors conducted a document analysis of SDE practitioner-expert publications that contained rich, contextual narratives of student experiences, asking, “How do SDE practitioner-experts describe student learning, well-being, and future readiness?” Findings indicated that students had the flexibility to pursue a wide range of unique pathways for both academic and nonacademic learning, that the settings provided positive support for physical and mental wellness, and that students were adequately prepared for postsecondary success.

Cooperatives are enterprises owned by the people who use their services, such as the workers or consumers. In East Boston, cooperatives work to ensure adequate housing and health care, work with dignity, and resistance to discrimination and wealth inequities. Democratic education is central to their operation, for residents in the community, the general public, and people in government and nongovernmental organizations. Through the interview in this article, Luz Zambrano provides a firsthand account of how these cooperatives arose, how they operate, and the challenges they face.

Rousseau's teaching that education is a process of natural growth has influenced most theorizing upon education since his time.It has influenced the practical details of school work to a less degree.Occasionally, however, experimenters have based their plans upon his principles.Among these experiments is one conducted by Mrs. Johnson at Fairhope, Alabama.To this spot during the past few years students and experts have made pilgrimages, and the influence of Mrs. Johnson's model has led to the starting of similar schools in different parts of the United States.Mrs. Johnson carries on a summer course for training teachers by giving a working object lesson in her ideas at Greenwich, Connecticut, where a school for children has been conducted as a model (fig.1).Her main underlying principle is Rousseau's central idea; namely: The child is best prepared for life as an adult by experiencing in childhood what has meaning to him as a child; and, further, the child has a right to enjoy his childhood.Because he is a growing animal who must develop so as to live successfully in the grown-up world, nothing should be done to interfere with growth, and everything should be done to further the full and free development of his body and his mind.These two developments go on together; they are inseparable processes and must both be constantly borne in mind as of equal importance.Mrs. Johnson criticizes the conventional school of to-day.She says it is arranged to make things easy for the teacher who wishes quick and tangible results; that it disregards the full development of the pupils.

“Reconstructing Democratic Education” was an international conference held virtually on June 22, 2024. This article uses the words of the speakers and the participants to present some of the stories and reflections that stimulated us that day. Speakers touched on a wide variety of challenges that democracy in general and schools in particular are facing. We heard about an effort to reconstruct the teaching profession in Cambodia, a collaboration between third-graders and a college class for preservice teachers, a yearlong sequence of courses for teachers that evolves from the students’ life experiences, and a film arts program for educationally challenged students in British Columbia. Two periods of participant questions and comments produced lively conversations about the opportunities and dangers that mark our efforts to reconstruct democratic schools for the twenty-first century.

Daniel J. Boorstin was a distinguished historian at the University of Chicago from 1944 to 1969; later he served as librarian of Congress. A prolific author throughout his 89 years, Boorstin saved several unpublished manuscripts. His cogent observations on college lectures are resurrected here. For Boorstin, the widespread definition of great professors as prodigiously learned had a high price: an overemphasis on lectures designed to impart facts. As a “high priest” of knowledge, the eminent scholar too often stood at the “altar” remote from his flock.

The author—in the role of one teacher observing another—documented a spring 2021 remote introductory art history course during the COVID-19 pandemic when graduate student teaching assistants called a campus-wide strike. Forced to improvise, the professor replaced formal analysis papers and exams with an ungraded journal. Drawing from the content of these journals, notes from the Zoom classes, and email correspondence with the professor, the author explicates how students took this journal assignment as an invitation to respond personally to the course content, and as an opportunity to grapple with their own identities. These journals allowed students to use art to explore similarities and differences freely across culture, space, and time. With the traditional requirement for an academic argument temporarily on pause, the author raises questions that characterize our present day: how to encourage a world that accepts different identities without hostility.

In a time of for-profit schooling, continuing segregation, racism, book banning, unconscionable inequality, and antiquated approaches to pedagogy, the prescription for democratic schooling seems daunting. Yet the path is clear: We need to change society to enable democracy in schools; we need democratic schooling to bring the public out of its eclipse; and we need an engaged citizenry to address seemingly insurmountable challenges. Considerations such as this led the Schools journal to inaugurate this Symposium on Democratic Education in the Twenty-First Century. We recognize the magnitude of the task and make no claims to offer a complete or final solution. Nevertheless, the experiences reported in this and subsequent issues shine a light that aids along their path.