Students, Change Agents of Public Education - aug6-17

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Students

Agents of
School Change
Advocates for
A Quality Of Life Mission And Curriculum
“Students and young graduates make up the only group big
enough, idealistic enough and strong enough to make real
change.”
By James C. Leiter, Jr.
info@edudemocratica.com

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The author of this work, with this deed has dedicated the work to
the public domain by waiving all of his rights to the work
worldwide under copyright law, including all related and
neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy,
modify, distribute the work, even for commercial purposes, all
without asking permission. However, when used, the author would
appreciate having the work cited.
ISBN-13:
978-1976187322
ISBN-10:
197618732X

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DEDICATION
To Amada Quiyono Nagano, my wife, constant companion and
mentor. Also to the memory of Alma Rae Price, Ph.D, life-long
friend, teacher and advocate of the ideas in this book.
“We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children
will also have wealth. We do not pray to have more money but to
have more kinsmen.”1
1 THINGS FALL APART, Chinnua Achebe,Penguin Books, 2017, Page 165

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CONTENTS
Chapter Page
PREFACE 1
1 Mission of Pubic Education 3
2 Quality Of Life Standards 9
3 Problems of Autocratic Schools 15
4 Characteristics of Democratic Schools 27
5 Learning Goals and Measurement 41
6 A Democratic Curriculum 49
7 Sex Education 66
8 Social Capital – Cooperation, Character 71
9 Day Care / Community Centers In Schools 95
10 Changing Public Education 105
11 Bibliography 115

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PREFACE
It is my hope that students who read this book will learn how
teaching in schools can induce them to uncritically accept systems
of thought,2 and that this indoctrination limits their autonomy and
ability to control the quality of their lives. I also hope they will
learn that ‘true learning’ is that which throughout their lives causes
them to change their behaviors in ways that improves the quality of
their own and others’ lives. Once students understand this, I hope
they will become passionate agents for changing what goes on in
public schools.
Students and young graduates are the only group big enough,
idealistic enough and with enough power to induce school
authorities to make the needed changes, and also the group that
will most benefit from the changes. (Teachers could help and also
benefit, but by opposing the status quo, they could lose their jobs.
Students have nothing to lose but their chains.)
James C. Leiter, Jr.
Morelia, Mexico, 2017
2 indoctrinate, uncritically accept systems of thought, THE AMERICAN
HERITAGE DICTIONARY, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN, 1965, Page 671

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CHAPTER 1 – THE MISSION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION
Public Schools - Criteria For Their Missions
For a school mission to be useful to those who do the work of
schools; administrators, students, parents, taxpayers and
legislators, all school activities must be regularly evaluated for
how they accomplish or do not accomplish the school’s mission.
Such evaluations provide the reasons for building on activities that
support the mission and for eliminating those that do not. A
mission statement that is simple, clear and universally supported
by all the constituents permits efficient administration by
minimizing controversy and conflict that inhibits making needed
changes.
Mission clarity and administrative efficiency are achieved when
mission criteria exist that are actually used to measure how well or
badly the mission has been attained, and when administrators
faithfully make the changes to the activities indicated by the
evaluations.
Student Understanding of the Purpose of School
For students to be fully engaged in school it must be clear to
them that they are there to learn how to achieve a quality life for
themselves and others, and how their personal standards and means
for achieving a quality life will evolve as they pass from youth to
old age. Without the autonomy, the will and opportunities to
achieve and maintain lives of quality, they will never know
themselves and likely always be obsequious followers of others
and liabilities as citizens of democracies.
The Scarsdale, N.Y. school mission statement is typical of most
schools’ immeasurable mission statements. (Numbers inserted by
the author.)
It states: “The Scarsdale Public Schools seek to sponsor (1)
each student’s full development, enabling our youth to (2) be
effective and independent contributors in a democratic society and

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an interdependent world. (3) To this end, we endeavor to help them
to think and express themselves clearly, critically and creatively.
(4) To understand themselves and others within the broad fabric of
human experience and the natural universe, (5) to appreciate their
rights and responsibilities as citizens, and to become people of
integrity, maturity and generous spirit. A measure of our success is
the degree to which they (6) fulfill their potential for the common
good, non sibi--not for themselves alone. (7) Valuing our
individuality, (8)we unite to keep the flame of learning.” 3
Evaluating how well this mission is accomplished requires
measuring how well each of its goals are fulfilled. As indicated
below, none of them can be measured by the tests Scarsdale High
uses to evaluate their students. By considering them one by one, it
should be clear that these goals can only be measured by
evaluating how well students live their lives and contribute to their
communities in school and as adults.
These Mission Goals Are Immeasurable
1. “Each student’s full development” – tests do no show that a
student has developed his or her talents to the fullest.
2. “be effective and independent contributors in a democratic
society and an interdependent world.” - tests do no show that a
student that a student has contributed to democratic society or an
interdependent world.
3. “to help them to think and express themselves clearly,
critically and creatively.” – standard tests seldom show that a
student expresses himself or herself clearly, critically or creatively.
4. “To understand themselves and others within the broad
fabric of human experience and the natural universe,” - tests do no
show how well students understand themselves or others and their
rights and responsibilities as citizens..
3https://www.scarsdaleschools.k12.ny.us/cms/lib/NY01001205/Centricity/domai
n/5/policies/0100/0000%20Mission%20Statement-Educational%20Beliefs.pdf

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(5) “to become people of integrity, maturity and generous
spirit.” – tests do not measure a student’s integrity, maturity or
generous spirit.
6. “fulfill their potential for the common good” – tests do not
show how a student has fulfilled his or her potential to serve the
common good.
7. “Valuing our individuality,” – tests show nothing about a
student’s value of individuality.
8. “unite to keep the flame of learning” - tests show nothing
about how students maintain the flame of learning.
Since the New York State Regent’s Examinations do not
measure of how well students accomplish the school mission, it
must be asked what purpose their mission serves. As we see it, it
only serves to provide a smoke screen that allows the powerful
people in the system to run the schools according to their own self-
serving, un-written, unknown standards, and inevitably creates
misunderstanding and conflict among the constituents and makes it
impossible to define or deliver a ‘quality education’. The mission
is pure smoke.
That the vast majority of the world’s population supports the
fiction that grades measure school missions, validates Eric
Hoffer’s thesis that to be a true believer in a mass movement, (such
as today’s public education), people must be psychologically
damaged and self-effacing in order to absolutely, fanatically accept
a system unsupported by reason. 4
Because the noble sounding mission statements of almost all
public schools are immeasurable and therefore useless, we
advocate a mission that can be universally embraced because it is
reasonable and measurable. It is a ‘quality of life mission’
espoused by two nationally known and respected experts.
4 schools’http://www.hofferproject.org/Hoffer.jpg

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The One And Only Effective Mission
Michael Strong provides a mission statement that everyone can
agree with and work hard and cooperatively to accomplish:
“The mission of education is to make life better, for individuals
and for the world. If education does not serve this mission it
should not be happening.”5
Management science has proved Michael Strong’s proposition,
that the only way to fully engage students and teachers in student
learning is for the administration to be dedicated to the welfare of
all students, teachers, administrators, employees, parents and
citizens. “Managers’ fundamental task is providing the enabling
conditions for people to lead the most enriching lives they can.”6
My opinion is that the actual, tacit mission of almost all public
schools is to indoctrinate. The interminable lecturing and testing
bores and tunes students out and kills learning that would make
them autonomous, effective, satisfied democratic citizens.
Without A Mission There Is No System
Dr. Edwards W. Deming, the author quoted below, is perhaps
best known for his work in Japan after World War II. He was a
key figure in establishing humanistic and statistical quality controls
in Japanese industry and contributed greatly to Japan’s present-day
industrial success.
“A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to
themselves . . . components become selfish, competitive,
independent . . . and thus destroy the system . . . We cannot
5 http://thepurposeofeducation.wordpress.com Oct 17, 2014, Michael Strong is
a well known educatorand authorof The Habit of Thought,From Socratic
Seminars to Socratic Practice.
6 Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday1990, Page 130, Quoting Bill
O’Brien, President Hanover Insurance

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afford the destructive effect of competition . . . A system must
create something of value, [that is] the aim of the system. It is
thus management’s task to determine those aims, to manage the
whole organization toward accomplishment of those aims [that]
must always relate to a better life for everyone.
The aim precedes the organizational system and those that
work in it. . . there must be throughout the organization a sense
of agreement on the aim.” 7
7 THE NEW ECONOMICS, Dr. W.. Edwards Deming, MIT Press, 1994, Pages
50-52.)

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CHAPTER 2 - QUALITY OF LIFE STANDARDS
Life Quality Standards Of The United Nations
In an annual report on Human Development, the UNITED
NATIONS established standards for evaluating and reporting the
quality of life in 186 countries.
They were developed by the Pakistani, Mahbub ul Haq. In
brief, they are:
 Good nutrition and health
 Access to a good education
 Economic security
 Physical security
 Satisfactory use of leisure time
 Participation in political, cultural and social institutions
These are standards that all public schools can adopt. They are
all measurable and clearly relate to the quality of lives.
Hierarchy Of Needs And Life Quality
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provides other life quality
standards suitable for schools. It stipulates that lower needs in the
hierarchy must be satisfied before those higher up. The higher up
one moves in the hierarchy, the better is the quality of one’s life.
In brief, they are:
1. Physiological needs: Food, shelter, sex
2. Security needs: Safety
3. Social needs: Company and interaction with others

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4. Affiliation needs: To be part of a group
5. Self value needs: To be able to cope
6. Self-actualization needs: To develop one’s innate capacities
to the fullest.8
Multiple Intelligences And The Quality Of Life
To achieve self-actualization, the highest need in Maslow’s
hierarchy, one must develop one’s intelligences to the fullest
degree possible. Harvard Professor, Howard Gardener, has
researched the intelligences all people have to a lesser of greater
degree. They are Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial,
Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal and Intrapersonal.
. . . “It is of the utmost importance that we recognize and
nurture all of the varied human intelligences . . . If we
recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of
dealing appropriately with the many problems we face in the
world . . . we can help increase the likelihood of our survival
on this planet,”9
“Flow” And Quality Of Life
According to Mihalyi Ciskszentmihalyi, the quality of life of a
person is detected in his or her positive or negative experiences.
The positive ones are happy, interesting and gratifying, the
negative ones to the contrary. The most gratifying experiences
8 The Third Force, The Psychology of Abraham Maslow, by Frank G. Goble, ©
1970, 2004, The Jefferson Center for Character Education – Amazon Kindle,
Location 586-87
9 Multiple Intelligences, Howard Gardner, New Horizons, 2006, page 24.

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produce a sensation of ‘flow’, the feeling of being so absorbed in
an activity that consciousness of time and one’s surroundings seem
to disappear; the quality of one’s life feels elevated, and a desire
develops to repeat similar experiences in the future.10
For students to enjoy ‘flow’ experiences, they must be given
choices, time and encouragement in school to pursue their most
passionate interests.
Mihalyi Ciskszentmihalyi, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers
were leaders in developing a positive psychology, one that instead
of studying and treating pathologies, focused on the discovering
those aspects of thought and behavior that contributed to high
quality lives. Their work is the very foundation of democratic
education, whose mission is to graduate students capable of
achieving high quality lives.
Autonomy, Mental Health And Well-Being
“Everyone is to some extent autonomous, (intrinsically
motivated) and seeks contexts that support their autonomy and
to influence others to treat them in an autonomy supportive
fashion. Everyone is also to some extent controlled
(extrinsically motivated) and responds with either compliance
or defiance . . .
Autonomy provides people with the opportunity to promote
their own development. They are more self-actualized have
higher self-esteem, more integrated personalities, more
positive mental health and are more satisfied with their
interpersonal relationships . . .
. . . Children’s not being able to satisfy their fundamental
intrinsic needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. . is
. . . linked to poorer mental health [and a lack of a] firm
10 FLOW, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE, Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, Harper Perenial, 1990.

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foundation for well-being. 11
Altruism And The Quality Of Life
The research of Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan at the
University of Rochester has demonstrated that people who
continue to accumulate material wealth after achieving an income
that satisfies their basic needs of life: food, clothing shelter and
safety, instead of seeking self-actualization, have poorer mental
and physical health and less life satisfaction than altruistic people
who choose vocations of service. 12
This Graph from a 2004 article by Ed Diener and Martin
Seligman, in an article, “Beyond Money”13 illustrates the lack of
correlation between Gross National Product and life satisfaction. It
supports our argument that the mission of education should be to
enhance the quality of life of students and of the nation in both
material and non-material ways.
Education For What?
11 Why We Do what We Do, by Edward Deci Written with Richard Flaste,
PENGUIN BOOKS, 1996, Pages 131 and183-4. (Slightly abridged)
12 Tim Kasser, THE HIGH PRICE OF MATERIALISM, 2002, The MIT Press
13https://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~ediener/Documents/Diener-
Seligman_2004.pdf

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According to Martin Seligman, “. . What schools teach is how
to succeed in the work place.”14 For most students such learning
will be increasingly useless because technological advances are
creating unemployment faster that they are creating new jobs.
Jeremy Rifkin in his book, THE END OF WORK writes:
“The information age has arrived. In the years ahead, new,
more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring
civilization ever closer to a near-workerless world. In the
agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors, machines are
quickly replacing human labor and promise an economy of
near automated production by the mid-decades of the twenty-
first century. The wholesale substitution of machines for
workers is going to force every nation to rethink the role of
human beings in the social process. Redefining opportunities
and responsibilities for millions of people in a society absent
of mass formal employment is likely to be the single most
pressing social issue for the coming century . . . . . the Clinton
administration has pinned its hopes on retraining millions of
Americans for high-tech jobs as the only viable way of
reducing technological unemployment and improving the
economic well-being of American workers . . . [but] a growing
number of critics are asking the question, “Retraining for
what?” . . . The few good jobs that are becoming available in
the new high-tech global economy are in the knowledge
sector. It is naïve to believe that large numbers of unskilled
and skilled blue and white collar workers will be retained to be
high-level technicians, molecular biologists, business
consultants, lawyers, accountants, and the like.15
Measuring The Accomplishment Of A Quality of Life Mission
The capacity for achieving a life quality that schools engender
in their students can only be measured by comparing various facets
of quality lives of graduates with non-graduates at various stages
14 Flourish, by Martin E.P. Seligman, Atria Paperback, 2013, Page 78
15 THE END OF WORK, Jeremy Rifkin, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Pages xv and 36.

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of their lives, such as at ages 20, 30, 40 and so on.
Many statistics are available to do so: wages, addictions,
home ownership, civic involvement, rates of arrest, incarceration,
hospital admissions, disease statistics, obesity, rates of divorce,
suicide, participation in sports and cultural activities, etc.
A likely and highly beneficial effect of using these evaluations
is that teachers will ‘teach to them’ in a way similar their present
discredited tendency to teach to academic tests. When this happens
the entire complexion of public education and society will change
for the better. Practically all citizens will understand what it means
to have a high quality life and strive to achieve one.
Tests can still be used for diagnostic purposes to help students
understand what learning tasks are still ahead of them in order to
reach their goals.

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CHAPTER 3 – PROBLEMS OF AUTOCRATIC SCHOOLS
Behaviorist Psychology Dominates Public Education
In education operated on the basis of behaviorist theory: “the
"teacher" is the dominant person in the classroom and takes
complete control. Evaluation of learning comes from the teacher
who decides what is right or wrong. The learner does not have any
opportunity for evaluation or reflection within the learning process,
they are simply told what is right or wrong”16 This is an autocratic
way of controlling students that may originate from the bible,
proverbs 13:24, from whence came the phrase, “spare the rod,
spoil the child”.17 This is still the psychology that dominates
public education.
Behaviorist teachers attempt to engender learning and
compliance by externally motivating students with rewards and
punishments; a process known as ‘operant conditioning’, a term
and process developed in the 40s and 50s by Harvard professor, B.
F. Skinner. “. . in behavioristic analyses, thoughts are merely by-
products of bodily events that in no-way affect how people
behave.”18
Effects Of Autocratic Treatment
• Denies students freedom and opportunities to exercise their
initiatives.
• Uses punishment and unnecessary competition that makes
students fearful.
16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/behaviorism
17 https://www.gotquestions.org/spare-rod-spoil-child.html
18 THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF THOUGHT AN ACTION, A SOCIAL
COGNITIVE THEORY, by Albert Bandura, prentice hall, 1986, page 17

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• Fear and lack of initiative makes students passive and
sometimes rebellious.
• Use of extrinsic motivators suffocates students’ innate
intrinsic motivations to improve the quality of their lives.
• Kills independent thought and creativity.
• Kills interest in school and learning.
• Kills interest in cooperation and fosters bullying.19
• Builds negative rather than positive social capital.
Public Schools Confuse Teaching With Learning
According to the doctrine of Behaviorism students learn
because of ‘conditioning’ that their teachers impose on them. It
logically follows that teachers and not students are responsible for
learning. That notion in today’s world sounds ridiculous, but the
idea persists that for students to learn they must be taught.
Over fifty years ago, Ivan Illich criticized this confusion of
learning and teaching.
“many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively
know what the schools do for them. They school them to
confuse process with substance. Once these become blurred, a
new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better
are the results, or escalation leads to success. The pupil is
thereby schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade
advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and
fluency with the ability to say something new. His
imagination is ”schooled” to accept service in place of value,”
19 The Trauma of Peer Victimization by Allan Beane PH.D, in Children of
Trauma Edited by Thomas W. Miller Ph.D, International Universities Press Inc.,
1998, Pages 205 - 218

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“ school prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life
by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned,
people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no
longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to
the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by
institutional definition.”
“ this pedagogical torture . . . . relies on random terror to break
the integrity of an entire population and make it plastic
material for the teachings invented by technocrats. The totally
destructive and constantly progressive nature of obligatory
instruction will fulfill its ultimate logic unless we begin to
liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our
belief that man can do what god cannot, namely, manipulate
others for their own salvation.”20
Ineffectiveness Of Lecture Teaching
In 1990, after seven years as a highly acclaimed Harvard
lecturer, Eric Mazur, discovered that his Physics students had
learned practically nothing, so he decided to give them the
problems and text to discuss and asked them to find the answers on
their own. What he learned amazed him:
• Students learned faster and retained their learning longer.
• Students were more interested in pursuing science careers
than students in lecture classes.
• Formerly passive, note taking students, became active
participants in teaching other students.
• He learned that practically no one becomes competent
listening to lectures.
Eric Mazur says learning now interests him far more than
20 Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd,
London, 1971, Page 1.

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teaching, and he encourages a shift from "teaching" to "helping
students learn.”21
Indoctrination Vs. Learning
Indoctrinated students are treated like empty vessels to be
filled with the knowledge specified in the curriculum. They are
not considered capable of making important independent decisions.
Rather than learning how to learn they are indoctrinated with
officially approved dogma and outdated knowledge. To control
what students learn they must be tested often and motivated
extrinsically with grades, gold stars and threats of demotion or
punishment. Teachers are required to make lecture presentations
in a prescribed manner.
Students subjected to this autocratic treatment are poorly
motivated, often rebellious or misbehaved, and what little they
learn, they soon forget be cause it is irrelevant to their lives. The
system also causes teacher and administrator discontent because
they lack the autonomy to take initiatives to do what they know in
their hearts what is right for their students. They either burnout or
continue without enthusiasm to go through the charade required of
them.22
Finland’s effective remedy is for the central administration to
only provide general guidelines to schools and leave all the
decisions as to how they are to be interpreted and applied to the
administrators and teachers.23
Autocratic schools are generally part of large districts in which
the curriculum and system of administration are the same for all
21 http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture
22 BURNOUT, The Cost of Caring, by Christina Maslach, MALOR BOOKS,
2003
23 FINNISH LESSSONS, By Pasi Sahlberg, TEACHERS COLLEGE PRESS,
2015, Page 122.

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schools. Since the texts and curriculum are determined every few
years by an expert committee, they are always two or three years
out of date.
Questionable Value Of PISA Examinations24
Nations throughout the world tend to judge the quality of their
education system by how well their students’ score on the
international PISA examinations compared to how students in
other countries score. Nations whose students score poorly tend to
adopt the educational practices of countries whose students score
well.
Believing as I do, that the purpose of public education is to
help students learn how to achieve quality lives, I see little value in
the PISA tests. They only show that certain countries prepare their
students well to take them. In doing so they may diminish the
quality of lives of the many of their students. This seems
particularly true in Asian countries in which students compete
intensely for high scores that qualify them for matriculation in
prestigious schools. The personal costs of such intense
competition can be devastating. In Korea, for example, student
suicide rates soar the month before national examinations.25
The reason students are so eager for acceptance to prestigious
schools is that their graduates tend to earn more money. The reason
they want to earn more money, for themselves and their nations, is
that they erroneously equate being personally rich and living in a
high GNP country with having high quality lives.
As pointed out earlier in our reference to the research of Tim
Kasser and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, wealth
24
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/ The Program of the OECD
organization for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial
international survey which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by
testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students.
25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea#Education

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does not necessarily produce happiness or a quality of life, in fact,
sometimes just the contrary. Altruistic pursuits are more likely to
yield a life of quality.
Trend Toward Plutocracies
It may have been defensible for schools to be almost wholly
concentrated on students learning to earn a living when the world’s
main problem was to produce enough food to avoid famine. But
now science has solved that problem. Our present problem is that
our democracies have become plutocracies that legislate an unjust
distribution of wealth that renders impossible the realization of
quality lives for all citizens.
An extreme example of a plutocracy with a high average
income and a mediocre life quality is Qatar. Their average
individual income at $129,946 is the world’s highest but their UN
human development ranking is only the thirty-third. A contrary
example is Australia, a very democratic country that ranks second
in human development (after Norway) but has an average annul
income of only $42,833. The clear lesson is that ‘money isn’t
everything!’.26
The first step in reversing the unjust distribution of wealth in
plutocracies is to acknowledge and publicize the dangers to people
and to the environment of our excessive belief in materialism.
Once these dangers are better understood, voters will replace
plutocratic politicians with democratic ones who will legislate for a
more just distribution of wealth. The best place to initiate this
change is in the public schools responsible for educating our future
citizens.
Our public schools can contribute to solving this problem by
making their curricula and management more democratic. They
need Socratic classes in which students develop opinions on how
to solve this grave problem and the will to solve it.
26 http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI

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Dangers Of Stress
". . Working hard at something we love – these do not cause
stress. But studying a subject we are not interested in and
worrying about the grade, or doing things at work that we find
meaningless but that the boss requires and we must do if we
don’t want to lose our job, or just being overwhelmed by more
than we can cope with to the point where we feel fragmented or
exhausted – these cause stress,”27
“ . stress can make us sick, . . many . damaging diseases . can
be caused or made worse by stress.” “ . data show: the fewer
social relationships [social capital] a person has, the shorter his
or her life expectancy, and the worse the impact of various
infectious diseases.” 28
Given that stress can lead to depression, less resistance to
disease and a shorter life, it is the responsibility of teachers to
eliminate as much stress as possible for their students. They can
do so by putting them in small groups whose members cooperate
in helping each other; by replacing punishment for interruptive
behavior with efforts to discover and eliminate its causes; by
reducing competition (particularly for grades), and most of all by
teacher/coaches providing supportive counseling that demonstrates
their unconditional love and respect for each student.
The Danger Of Using Extrinsic Motivators
Students are intrinsically motivated to learn things that improve
the quality of their lives. When they understand the personal
benefits of learning, they accept their teacher’s instruction and are
motivated to learn on their own on the Internet, by experimentation
or by asking for information and help from their teachers, family
27 The Good Society, by Bellah, Madsen,Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton, Vintage
Books, 1992, Page 255.
28 WHY ZEBRAS DON’T GET ULCERS, Robert M. Sapolsky, St. Martin’s
Griffen, 2004, Pages 3 and 164.

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members, or other students. 29
Unfortunately, it is a long standing tradition in today’s public
schools to use extrinsic rewards; grades, gold stars, praise, etc., as
motivators. Their use tends to make most school learning rote,
dull, stressful and personally meaningless to the students.
Though repeated investigations, Dr. Edward Deci and his
colleagues at the University of Rochester have proved that when
teachers depend on extrinsic motivators, they soon replace
students’ intrinsic motivations to learn what really interests them.
They conclude that pleasing the teacher and getting good grades
becomes all that matters.30
The Importance Of Eliminating Stress
Professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, Robert
Sapolsky, has investigated how stressful physiological conditions
of persistent obsessiveness, anxiety or unnecessary hostility can
shorten the lives and reduce the resistance to disease, long after the
conditions that caused the stresses have ceased.31 It is therefore
important that teachers and school administrators do what they can
to eliminate stresses to both students and teachers.
When stress causes students to give up on learning it is called
‘learned helplessness’.32 When teachers give up it is called
‘burnout’. In both cases the cause is a feeling loss of autonomy, a
feeling of being trapped by other people’s demands, of loss of
29 Stipek, Deborah, MOTIVATION TO LEARN, From Theory to Practice,
Allyn and Bacon, 1988
30 Why We Do What We Do, Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, PENGUIN
BOOKS, 1996
31 WHY ZEBRAS DON’T GET ULCERS; The Acclaimed Guide to Stress,
Stress Related Diseases, and Coping, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994, Pages 7 – 8.
32 Ibid., Pages 300-301.

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control, “the sense that they are at the mercy of the situation and
that there is nothing they can do about it.”33
The remedy in both cases is to foster autonomy. Students’
autonomy is developed when teachers negotiate with them as
persons of equal value; whose desires and opinions must be
respected. Teachers develop autonomy when they are allowed to
use their professional knowledge without interference in deciding
how best to help their students learn.
Controlling Stresses Originating Outside Of School
Life-quality stresses beyond school control, such as hunger, fear
for one`s safety, lack of sleep or social support can be partially
made up for by a teacher, a or counselor or social worker serving
as a surrogate parent. If this is not possible, school will be a waste
of time for the student and a trial for teachers because deprived
children are so distracted by their problems that they cannot
concentrate on learning. They only learn that schools and their
homes are places of suffering and that hiding, fighting back or total
resignation is their only defenses.
When parents fail, the responsibility for the care of their
children one way or another falls on the government or the school.
Learning And Poverty
When students suffer from the lack of adequate food, clothing,
shelter and safety they cannot think about anything but satisfying
these needs and school learning for them is nearly impossible.
Eliminating poverty is therefore a prerequisite for establishing
good schools.
Plutocratic governments fail to recognize this fact, or choose
to ignore it, and year after year their schools fail to graduate
33 Christina Maslach, BURNOUT, The Cost of Caring, Malor Books, 2003,
Pages 238-9.

24
students well prepared to take on adult responsibilities. Instead of
solving the most basic problems of education, which are poverty
and ‘wrong-headed’ missions, they try ever harder to improve
schools by better teacher training, new administrative methods
such as charter schools and increasing funding. Government
leaders pretend that these things work by pointing to a few limited
successes, but the reality is that generally poor results continue
year after year.
The quality of life of families suffering poverty would be
more improved if their governments would directly give them the
money spent on their schooling. These distributions would average
about two to three thousand dollars a year in Mexico and about
twelve thousand dollars in the United States.34
For poor children to learn in school their sufferings of poverty;
bad nutrition, inadequate clothing, etc., must be relieved before
they attend school, otherwise their failing school experiences will
only compound their suffering with shame and frustration.
Standard Tests Undermine Learning
It is Public Education’s responsibility to educate students of all
abilities and cultural differences. Students with learning handicaps
or poor home preparation cannot be expected to learn as fast or as
well as the brightest and best prepared students.
Most schools expect all students to learn the same things at the
same time and use standard tests to measure their learning. These
tests discourage and alienate majority of the students and slow
down the learning of the best ones. “. . grades are also thought to
motivate students. They are, however, powerful demotivators
regardless of the reasons given for their use. 35
34 OECD, http://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-
Indicator%20B1%20%28eng%29.pdf
35 Punished by Rewards, ALFIE KOHN, HOUGHTON MIFLIN COMPANY,
1993, Page 201.

25
Until Standard Tests are abandoned for the purpose of
individual student evaluations, the majority of students will
continue to learn very little and have few opportunities to develop
their character. They will remain passive and discouraged
Alfie Kohn, possibly America’s greatest thinker and writer on
public education says in his book,
“Education is defined as how many fragments of information
those “student-things” can retain long enough to be measured
on standardized achievement tests . . . I believe that we will
never know what real education is until we have shaken off
this this sterile, discredited model.”(p 214)
“anything that gets children to think primarily about their
performance will undermine their interest in learning . . .
Someone who is concerned to minimize failure is unlikely to
challenger herself. (p 158 -9)
“ . . A classroom that feels safe to students is one in which
they are free to admit when they don’t understand something
and are able to ask for help . . . Grades, tests, punishments and
rewards are the enemy of safety. . . The reason we want to
know how students are doing is to help them learn more
effectively in the future - the only legitimate purpose for
evaluation.”36
Test Grades Less Than 100% Unacceptable
Salman Kahn, of the Kahn Academy, made a strong case in a
TED talk that tests with grades less than 100% should be returned
to the student for further study and be retaken as many times as
needed for the student to finally score 100%. He made two very
important points:
1. That no one wants an architect who has not scored 100%
on tests of their construction knowledge to build their
36 PUNISHED BY REWARDS, Alfie Kohn, HOUGHTON MIFLIN
COMPANY, 1993, Page 203

26
house.
2. That learning only partial knowledge from a lesson will
make it hard, and maybe impossible, for a student to
understand future lessons that assume that prior lessons
have been learned.37
Giving passing grades to students that do not score 100% on
their tests indicates either that the tests are ill-designed rituals or
that schools are more interested in giving the appearance that their
students learn, than in their actual learning. They get away with it
because schools are political institutions without clear missions.
They advance students whether they have learned what they signed
up for or not.
37 Salman Kahn, TED Talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
MTRxRO5SRA

27
CHAPTER 4 – CHARACTERISTICS OF DEMOCRATIC
SCHOOLS
Democratic Schools
Democratic schools are those that recognize the universal desire
of every human, every student, to be free; to control his or her own
thinking, action and destiny. They help students discover what
they want by showing them what people throughout the world do,
or do not do, to achieve high quality lives. When students have an
idea of what a quality life can be, in school and later,
teacher/coaches can then help them set goals and make plans for
achieving one.
The Responsibilities Of Schools And Students
When students who feel secure physically and emotionally are
given opportunities and stimulated to follow their curiosities and
learn from their own efforts they will assume responsibility for
their own learning. Democratic schools give students the freedom
to make many of their own decisions. Doing so may make
students a bit noisier, but also more self disciplined and ultimately
easier for a teacher to manage.38
The responsibility of teachers is to treat their students equally
and individually; to not compare either their competencies or
accomplishments, and to earn the confidence and trust of each one.
They must maximize cooperation among students and minimize
competition. When students trust their teachers to help them
achieve high quality lives and to not shame them, they will accept
their counseling and instruction.
Self-Regard And Self-Care - The Challenge Of Public Schools
Children enter preschool or kindergarten almost totally
dependent on their families and teachers for their care and well-
38 http://www.apa.org

28
being. It is the hope and object of K-12 public education that they
graduate from high school with the character, knowledge and
abilities to begin adult lives ready to take good care of themselves,
their families and contribute to the general welfare of their
communities, country and the world.
If they have not developed the necessary qualities and skills in
their K-12 experiences they are at great risk of never doing so and
of leading lives of little satisfaction and of becoming burdens for
their communities and governments.
Equalizing Opportunities For The Disadvantaged
Rich kids do better in school than poor kids because their
broader life experiences provide them with a greater knowledge
base to build on.
In the opinion of Dr. Gerald Lesser, former Chairman of the
Board of Advisors to Sesame Street, culturally disadvantaged
students can, to a degree, catch up with their wealthier peers by
watching a large number of educational videos.
“Television has the . . inherent property . . . to transport, to take
children to events, places and experiences that they have never
seen before and are unlikely ever to have the opportunity to see
in person. Young children, especially those confined to inner
cities, necessarily move within a very narrow neighborhood.
Television can and should take them beyond these boundaries.”
“It can show them how things work, how other people use
them, what goes on in the world and how to think about it. The
events need not be dramatic or exotic. Children are still trying
to unravel and understand the ordinary, commonplace world as
it is.”39
39 Children and Television, Lessons from CTW SESAME STREET, Gerald S.
Lesser,(Vintage Books, New York, 1975) , Page, 26

29
Giving Students The Help They Need And Ask For
When teacher/coaches do not give lectures, they have time each
week to observe student study groups and to track each student’s
progress with MOODLE, (or some other learning management
system). Periodic private meetings with each student are also
important for creating relationships of trust and confidence.
Feedback, Modeling and Coaching “. .[students] who have not
yet . . perform[ed] at high levels can learn to do so at any stage in
their educations once they experience teaching that is intensely
focused on developing thoughtful performance.”
What every student needs:
• Clear standards and criteria of performance on specific
tasks
• Lots of feedback about work in progress
• Opportunities to revise their work in response to this
feedback
Coaches help students learn by:
• Providing supportive personal relationships
• Providing clear goals & standards
• Providing regular, prompt, feedback
• Providing examples of high quality work that students can
use as models
‘Initial grumbling of students about high expectations turns into
satisfaction with high levels of accomplishment. Well coached
students are motivated and enabled to go far beyond their entering
levels of competence when they have the opportunities and

30
scaffolding to help them learn.’ (Paraphrased)*40
Cognitive/Humanist Psychology For Today’s Education
“Quite simply, cognition refers to thinking.”41 Cognitive
psychologists maintain that thinking is the interactive use of
memory, observation of the results of activities of others (models),
and the awareness of one’s own abilities to choose courses of
action most likely to yield a desired result. This ability to self-
regulate behavior, (except for autonomic behaviors), makes us free
and uniquely human. Freedom is defined by the number of options
available to people and their right [and ability] to exercise them.
“Cognitive learning is fostered through instruction, modeling and
performance feedback . . .”42
Humanism is a progressive life stance that, without
supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead
meaningful, ethical lives in which we are capable of adding to the
greater good of humanity.43
Humanism and Cognitive Psychology are inherent in our
‘Quality of Life Mission’. When this mission is adopted by public
schools, students will be treated humanely and democratically and
will love both learning and their schools. Schools will also elevate
students’ learning by providing them with video access to models
from around the world who are engaged in solving their life
problems and in other activities that enhance the quality of their
40 THE RIGHT TO LEARN, Linda Darling Hammond, Jossey Bass, 1997,
Page 106. (Paraphrased)
41https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/cognition
42 Information mostly taken from THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF
THOUGHT AN ACTION, A SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY, By Albert
Bandura, PRENTICE HALL, 1986, Page 18.
43 American Humanist Society

31
lives.
Students seeing how models benefit from their activities will
add what they see to their own repertoire of memories and thereby
expand their learning, their ability to think and to choose options
for engaging in new activities.
Our Definitions Of Learning, Teaching, Meaning And Myth
LEARNING is the acquisition of information and skills that
cause students to modify their behaviors in ways to improve the
quality of their lives or avoid experiences and situations that can
diminish the quality of their lives.
TEACHING is any activity that supports student learning. It
mostly requires helping students set learning goals that make what
they are going to learn crystal clear; then tracking each student’s
progress towards those goals, and helping them overcome
whatever learning problems they encounter. Teaching can, but
does not necessarily, include the personal explanation of academic
material.
MEANING is understanding of how events, information and
skills contribute to, or diminish, the quality of a person’s life or the
quality of life of others.
KNOWLEDGE is information supported by evidence.
MYTH is information unsupported by evidence
THINKING - A Positive Guide for Action
In order for students to think, they must know what thinking is,
and its importance to them in choosing life-quality-enhancing
behaviors and avoid impulsive, destructive ones.
Thinking, according to Albert Bandura is . .
“The remarkable capacity to use symbols, which touches
virtually every aspect of people’s lives, provides them with a

32
powerful means of altering and adapting to their environment.
Through symbols people process and transform transient
experiences into internal models that serve as guides for future
action. Through symbols they similarly give meaning, form,
and continuance to the experiences they have lived through . . .
By drawing on their knowledge and symbolizing powers,
people can generate innovative courses of action. Rather than
solving problems solely by enacting options and suffering the
costs of missteps, people usually test possible solutions
symbolically and discard or retain them on the basis of
estimated outcomes before plunging into actions. An advanced
cognitive capability coupled with the remarkable flexibility of
symbolization enables people to create ideas that transcend their
sensory experiences.”44
Metacognition - Comprehension
Metacognition is a term describing a person’s ability to be
aware of, and to control, his or her own thoughts. According to the
American Psychological Association, metacognitive abilities are
important in developing autonomy, competence, relatedness to
others and leadership skills.45
Comprehension is achieved when students become aware they
can combine what they know with new information and skills to
change their behaviors in ways that improve the quality of their
own lives or the lives of others.
Importance Of Negotiations To Life Quality
Just negotiations are the key to all satisfactory relationships;46
44 The Social Foundations of Thought and Action, Albert Bandura, Prentice
Hall, 1986, page 18
45 The American Psychological Association,http://www.apa.org
46 GETTING TO YES, Roger Fisher and William Ury, Penguin Books, 1983

33
life partners, friends, work associates, etc. The only alternative to
settling differences by negotiation is an autocratic settlement
imposed by the most powerful party. Such resolution degrades the
quality of the lives of both parties, particularly the under dog’s.
So far I am aware, there are no primary or secondary schools
that consider learning negotiating skills to be important in
education, even though they are essential to all good relationships
and the enjoyment of a high quality life.
Learning to negotiate is not considered important because
public schools are autocratic institutions in which negotiation is
irrelevant and interferes with indoctrination. Schools’ de-facto
mission is to train workers for industry and turn out passive
citizens of plutocracies that serve the rich and allow just enough
freedom to middle and lower class citizens to keep them
compliant.
In our experience, up to grades 5 or 6 students willingly follow
their teacher’s recommendations and eagerly learn basic reading,
writing, speaking, math and cooperation skills. Never-the-less,
from the first day of school onward, students need to be given
choices and learn to make decisions so that when adolescence sets
in and they want to make choices for themselves, they will have
already experienced both the good and bad results of their earlier
decisions and will be better prepared to negotiate reasonably with
their teacher/mentors for courses they want and to take charge of
their own learning and lives.
Teacher/Coaches’ Management Of The Stress Of Challenges
It is a teacher’s job to challenge all their students according to
their abilities. Challenges must be a bit beyond the reach of each
student and each student must learn to persevere to overcome
failures and the stresses that go with them, otherwise they will
never learn how much they can do. The stress of challenges is
motivating and positive when it is finally dispelled with success
and feelings of pride, satisfaction, self-efficacy and the desire to
take on new and even greater challenges.

34
A coach’s job also includes convincing students to give up
unrealistic, stressful challenges that threaten their motivation and
life quality. When a challenge turns out to be insurmountable,
coaches must negotiate new, more achievable learning goals with
the student and encourage her or him to persevere in order to
achieve the positive emotional and motivational effects of success
with the new goal.
Misguided Challenges
According to Ex Yale Professor and author. “Far too many
[elite students] are going into the same professions, notably finance
or consulting. He detects a lack of curiosity, of interesting
rebellion, of moral courage, of passionate weirdness. . .
“We’ve spawned a generation of polite, striving, praise-
addicted, grade-grubbing, [risk avoiding] nonentities — a legion of
“Excellent Sheep.”. . . “The only real grade is this: how well
you’ve lived your life.”47
Great expectations and challenges bring out students’ best work.
When a project interests students they challenge themselves. They
will also accept challenges from teachers who give them regular
attention; honest and supportive feedback and show that they care
for them.
When students fail to meet their own or their teachers’ high
expectations there is always a risk of discouragement and giving
up. But they must understand that their greatest satisfaction comes
from risking failures or bad grades and by overcoming challenges.
By persisting they discover their limits and who they really are.
Achieving success with hard work and persistence is always
desirable, but it is important for students to know that there is no
shame in giving up on what is impossible, and that the stress of
obsessing over the unreachable goals is dangerous. It can damage
47 Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz, Free Press, 2016

35
health, induce depression or even suicide.48
Treating Traumas That Prevent Learning
“The effects of childhood trauma do not magically disappear at
the front steps of a school building. Without early intervention,
trauma drives down academic performance and increases the
likelihood of grade retention . . . depression, disengagement, and
disillusionment.
El Dorado Elementary School in San Francisco, California,
provides a promising example of trauma-sensitive education.
Students at El Dorado are predominantly African American and
Latino. They live in the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco.
Now when they are upset and act out they have access to an on-site
facility called the Wellness Center that is fully equipped with a
school social worker, family therapist, and behavior coach.
Whenever a student misbehaves in class, rather than receive an
out-of-school or in-school suspension, the student receives a pass
to the Wellness Center, with a safe space for them to recover
emotionally and receive services from the mental health support
team. .
Since implementation, the number of disciplinary referrals for
misbehaviors—such as yelling or fighting—has dropped from 674
incidents in the 2008-09 school year to 50 incidents in the 2014-15
school year. Suspension rates have also plummeted by 76 percent
over the same time frame.”49
48 Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, St. Martin’s Griffin,
1994. Pages 271-277.
49https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/reports/2016/09/22/14463
6/counsel-or-criminalize/

36
Zones Of Proximal Development
Lev Vygotsky’s concept of ‘the zone of proximal development
posits that ‘the acquisition of new knowledge is dependent on
previous learning, as well as the availability of instruction.’ The
instruction can be provided by a computer, a book, a teacher,
another student, a friend, etc.
Applied to learning in schools, it means that if an intent is made
to teach a student something that does not relate to his or her
previous learning, the student will fail to understand or learn it.
Schools place students of the same ages in a class because they
assume that they all have nearly the same ‘zone of proximal
development’, but, in fact, their zones vary widely. The result is
that the most advanced students are bored with what is taught, the
less advanced fail to learn it, and only the average students
benefit.50
Schools In Which All Students Learn
In her book, HOW IT’S BEING DONE51,, Karin Chenoweth
reports on nine schools or districts in the United States in which
large populations of highly disadvantaged students surpass by large
margins the average learning achievements of their more
privileged counterparts. This is how they do it.
1. They believe that all students can meet high learning
standards, and provide them.
2. All teachers focus their teaching on the same common core
with high standards.
3. They keep up-to-the-minute data on the learning progress
50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky
51 HOW IT’S BEING DONE, Karin Chenoweth, Harvard Education Press, 2009

37
of every student and teachers collaborate on identifying
students needing special help and finding and providing
whatever learning supports those students need to achieve
and surpass the standards.
4. They assign the best teachers to the most learning-
disadvantaged students.
5. They only employ teachers with passionate vocations for
teaching and who love their students.
Learner Centered Education
“. . the learner-centered model [of education]–by focusing on
the individual learner and research on how best to support that
learner’s learning – provides a foundation for every learner to
perform better on whatever outcomes or achievement
measures might be chosen at the classroom, school, or district
level . . . . It also means getting to know and respecting the
uniqueness of each learner as a prerequisite to effective
teaching and learning.”52
Self Discovered Learning
At a 1952 Harvard conference on “Classroom Approaches to
Influencing Human Behavior” Carl Rogers confessed that in his
own teaching experience:
“It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is
relatively inconsequential, and has little or no influence on
behavior. . . I am only interested in learnings that significantly
influence behavior. . . And that the only learning which
significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-
appropriated learning.”
52 How Students Learn, Reforming Schools Through Learner-Centered Education,
Edited by Nadine M. Lambert and Barbara McCombs, American Psychological
Association, 1998, Page 12.

38
“ . . Self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally
appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be
directly communicated to another. As soon as an individual
tries to communicate such experience directly, often with a
quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its results
are inconsequential.”53
What naturally derives from Carl Rogers’ negation of the
efficacy of teaching is the conviction that inspiring students to
choose challenging new experiences and coaching them when they
encounter difficulties is the best service teachers can provide. In
short, instead of being traditional instructors, they become
therapist/coaches.
Teachers As Therapists
The mission of therapy is the same as the mission of education:
to improve the quality of life of the patient or student. Carl
Rogers, maintains that teachers can be therapist for their students
by being honest, trustworthy, interested in them and caring for
them.
When such a therapeutic relationship exists, students are better
able to understand themselves and solve their own problems.
Providing such a relationship is the main qualification of
teacher/coaches; it dissipates stresses that inhibit student learning
and improves the quality of their lives. At the same time it also
enhances the quality of life of teacher/therapists.54
Teacher Verbal And Physical Modeling
Since so much of what students learn comes from observing
others, teachers can add to students’ repertoires of problem solving
skills by speaking their own thoughts out loud so students can hear
53 On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961, Page 276
54 Derived from On Becoming a Person, by Carl Rogers, Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1961

39
just how they solve a particular problem.
‘Interactive modeling’ occurs when teachers physically act out
and explain how something is done and then asks students to
repeat the actions in the same way. This, according to teacher-
writer Margaret Barry Wilson, works well for teaching very young
children. For example, for teaching four and five year olds how to
move themselves or their desks in a quiet, orderly manner from
one place to another. 55
According to the American Psychological Association,
interactive modeling of kind and cooperative behaviors also helps
control bullying.
Maximizing Learning Of All Students
The bottom section of this graph
represents a normal curve of student
learning abilities; a few slow learners
on the left, a few fast learners on the
right and the majority in the middle.
The darker, center part shows estimates of learning when
standard tests are used. Slow learners will learn nothing or very
little and good students learn somewhat more because they are
better able to prepare for tests, but less than they would if they
were challenged according to their greater, individual abilities.
The top part estimates the maximum learning in the school
when students are tested diagnostically on their progress toward
tough, negotiated personal learning goals that correspond to their
actual abilities and previous learning. Diagnostic tests identify
what students still have to learn to reach their goals. They are not
used for grading students.
Only with a diagnostic testing program can Public Education
55 Interactive Modeling, Margaret Berry Wilson, Northeast Foundation for
Children, 2012

40
fulfill its responsibility to educate all students; the very able and
the not so able. These tests are intrinsically fair and motivating
because when all students have learning goals that correspond to
their abilities and prior preparation, all of them have equal
opportunities to enjoy success.

41
CHAPTER 5 – LEARNING GOALS AND MEASUREMENT
Crucial Student-Teacher Relationships
Practically everyone agrees that the single most important factor
in student learning and the quality of a student’s life is having
caring, interested teacher/mentors.
When students know that the main concern of their teachers is
not just their grades but the quality of their lives, they are relieved
of stress and motivated by their inherent desire to learn. Every
successful person remembers those teachers who loved them,
piqued their interest, and gave them a boost at critical times. This
emotional support is, in the long run, far more important than
teachers’ academic support, although the two ideally go hand in
hand.
Negotiated Individual Student Learning Goals
Students are seldom motivated sitting in rows, listening to the
teacher lecturing and being required to learn the same material and
pass the same tests on the same schedule. This is a discredited,
lock-step dictatorial system that bores students and needs to be
replaced with a system of personally negotiated learning plans.
All students can succeed when each one has such a plan,
complete with examinations, that fits their abilities and prior
preparation and they feel their teachers and peers want to help
them learn.
It is the responsibility of the teacher/coaches to negotiate such a
plan with each student and see every student is given the time and
coaching he or she needs to succeed.
A negotiation “is a back and forth communication designed to
reach an agreement when you and the other side haves some
interests that are shared and others that are opposed.”56 Negotiating
56 GETTING TO YES, Roger Fisher and William Ury, Penguin Books, 1983, x

42
with students to set learning goals is one of the most important
functions of teachers. It is important because having goals
increases student self-regulation, motivation, responsibility,
persistence, creativity and achievement. When the needs and
desires of the negotiating parties are mutually respected, the
negotiations dignify both teachers and students. 57 They also build
social capital.
According to the founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation,
Dr. E. D. Hirsch, half of every student’s courses should be chosen
from the core academic curriculum58 provided by the school and
the other half chosen by students on the basis of their personal
interests. To achieve this 50/50 division in student study plans is
the object of the negotiations. When negotiations are fair and just,
they develop students’ autonomy, their power to take charge of
their own lives and become responsible for the quality of their own
futures.
Often students are disinterested in academic courses because
they do not understand how they will improve the quality of their
lives. It is a teacher/coach’s job to convince their students that they
will.
Helping students make good study choices is challenging
because until students are sufficiently mature to know what they
want, having to choose among courses they know very little about
is likely to stress them and erode their trust in their teachers.
Students should delay taking any course until an artful
teacher/mentor has convinced them that doing so will improve the
quality of their lives.
Students must be allowed to repeat examinations until they
score 100%. Failed or partially failed exams serve to identify what
57 Harvard Initiative For Teaching And Learning, Setting Goals: Who, Why,
How -https://hilt.harvard.edu/files/hilt/files/settinggoals.pdf
58 CoreKnowledgeSequence, Core Knowledge Foundation, 1998, Page 2.

43
remains to be learned in order pass. When tests are non-
competitive and all students are given the help they need, the fear
of examinations will disappear, and when students finally score
100% they will take pride in their accomplishment.
When a student is confident of success he or she can take a test
a final time under the supervision of the teacher/coach and be
permitted to move on to the next learning unit.
Once individual study plans are negotiated, and recorded in the
school’s computer, students can study in small groups and record
their progress towards each of their goals. Teachers can also
follow their progress to give needed feedback and support.
Individual Learning Plans Require Computerized Learning
Management Systems
A feature of the most successful USA schools is a data system
that provides the immediate feedback on all students’ progress
towards their goals and keeps students motivated.59 MOODLE is
a freeware computerized administrative system used around the
world by schools and businesses. It automates many tasks usually
done manually at great cost and makes it easy and inexpensive for
Student/Coaches to provide feedback, identify and serve the
special needs and opportunities of every student, and for students
to manage their own learning.
MOODLE supports students’ individual study as well as teacher
presentations to groups. It also provides a closed e-mail system
among students, teachers, administrators and parents that clarifies
and simplifies communications and improves student reading and
writing skills. It also saves teachers a great deal of time in
communicating with students.
Selecting And Training Teacher/Mentors
Teacher/mentors are responsible for helping students learn to
59 Karen Chenoweth, How it’s being done, HARVARD EDUCATION PRESS,
2009.

44
achieve quality lives. To do so they need professional training at
least equal to that of psychologists, lawyers and doctors. They
need familiarity with all the cultures of the world, broad
knowledge of academics, Internet mastery and the therapeutic
skills of child psychologists. Like these professionals they need
the time and means of keeping up with the professional knowledge
in their field.
School superintendents and principals, instead of being
appointed to schools by their unions or school boards need to be
hired by the constituents of the schools they serve, by committees
whose memberships are school principals, teachers, students,
parents and community leaders. Their task is to create better
schools in their communities and to do so they must have the
authority to fire superintendents, principals and even teachers
when students fail to learn how to analyze and improve the quality
of their lives.
Measuring Student Learning
The measurement of learning is perhaps the area in which
immeasurable school mission statements do their greatest harm.
Their high-minded wording seems to have the magic power to
delude the minds of otherwise exceptionally intelligent people into
believing that letter or numeric grades have something to do with
preparing students to become good, productive citizens.
To repeat the words of William Deresiewicz, the effect of
grading is to diminish democracy and quality lives.
“We’ve spawned a generation of polite, striving, praise-
addicted, grade-grubbing, [risk avoiding] nonentities — a legion
of “Excellent Sheep.”. . . “The only real grade is this: how well
you’ve lived your life.”60
As the writer Alfie Kohn succinctly puts it:
60 Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz, Free Press, 2016

45
“We are a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way
out of the box we have reinforced ourselves into.”61
Because our politicians and leaders of public education are
infected with this inability to think clearly on the purpose of
education, our democracies are stuck with educations designed for
times that ceased to exist a hundred or more years ago. For an
agrarian society grades were probably of some help in teaching
basic language and numeric skills. Now, however, the needs of
society and of individuals is for using the stupendous benefits of
the industrial revolution in creative new ways throughout our
growing populations. We need graduates that can think
profoundly, who are persuasive, loving, respectful activists. This
is a need that is not fulfilled by using grades and other autocratic,
Skinnerian practices.62
When the purpose of education is to help students achieve
quality lives, measuring student learning depends on
teacher/mentors and their students having negotiated only learning
goals that the students believe have the power to improve the
quality of their lives. They must later meet from time to time to
discuss both the student’s and the teacher’s assessment of how well
the students have achieved their goals and also to negotiate new
ones. At these times teacher/coaches can also encourage their
students that they have what it takes to be successful and let them
know that help is available if they encounter difficulties.
A form similar to the following could be used in these
evaluations,
61 PUNISHED by REWARDS, Alfie Kohn, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
COMPANY, 1993, Page xii
62 In the author’s opinion, to rank students according grades is irrelevant. They
have little to do with advances toward the mission and they diminish the
confidence and trust between students and teachers.

46
Quality Of Life Evaluation Form
Student___________ Teacher/Mentor____________ Date ____
1. Health Evaluations
a. Diet/weight_______________________________
b. Sleep_____________________________________
c. Exercise _________________________________
2. Learning:
a. Goals/progress____________________________
b. Autonomy________________________________
c. Self realization ____________________________
d. Leisure activities___________________________
3. Personal relationships:
a. Cooperation in learning_____________________
b. Group Memberships________________________
c. Friendships_______________________________
d. Family relationships________________________
e. Relations with mentors______________________
4. Moral development:
a. Respect for others _________________________
b. Tolerance ________________________________
c. Justice and honesty ________________________

47
d. Negotiation of differences ___________________
e. Helping and sharing________________________

49
CHAPTER 6 – A DEMOCRATIC CURRICULUM
Students’ Rights To Know And to Investigate
Students in a democracy have a right to study any material or
activity that they think could improve the quality of their lives. So
the curriculum needs to be expandable to include courses on any
topic of interest either to students or teachers. The curriculum also
needs to be on the Internet so it is available to students and
teachers 24/7 so there are no limits to the time students can work
on their projects. The Internet curriculum must be well indexed so
students and teachers can find the information they want.
Quality Of Life Criterion For Administration and Curriculum
Selection
What school children are intended to learn in school is
contained in a school’s curriculum, in a school’s rules of behavior
and in the school’s teaching practices. All of these are decided by
government or school administrations on the basis of their own
judgments; sometimes and sometimes not, influenced by research.
We argue, for two reasons, that the criterion for making theses
decisions should always be how they contribute to the school’s
mission of ‘enabling students to achieve quality lives’.
1 It is a criterion that makes it possible and easy to evaluate
how everything that goes on in a school either adds to, or
detracts from, the present or future of life quality of
students. It also simplifies and provides the rational for
adding, modifying or eliminating courses or activities.
2 It is a criterion that enhances the learning motivation of
students because they readily sense what makes their lives
better or worse and universally seek to learn what makes
them better.

50
Personal Health Study In The Curriculum Of Each Grade
Good health is the most basic quality for enjoying a quality life.
Without it, practically nothing else matters. Since health issues
change, as children grow older, good health should be part of the
curriculum at each grade level.
One curriculum option would be to have organizations of
professional health service providers, such as the American
Medical Association, associations of hospitals or nurses, etc.,
provide for each grade a ‘health analysis form´ with a blank
section in which students can describe behavioral changes they
plan to make to improve their health. The back of these forms
could contain descriptions of self and professional treatment
options for the most common problems; obesity, depression,
asthma, common colds, stress, anxiety, etc.
Parents and teacher/mentors could help student complete the
forms. Once completed small groups of students of each sex could
participate in teacher guided, Socratic discussions about health
problems and prepare a Power Point or other report of their
conclusions to share and discuss with their class.
With such a program students would doubtless become much
more responsible for their own health and the quality of their lives.
Also the completed forms from year to year would constitute a
‘health history’ of each student that would be useful to medical
professionals treating students.
Diaries – Focusing On A Quality Life
One’s quality of life at any age is a matter of getting what one
wants, and what one wants changes, as one gets older. Basic wants
begin at birth at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid and move
towards the top as a person matures.
In order to maintain students’ motivation to learn, teachers must
help students maintain awareness of their changing wants and help
them find appropriate ways to satisfy them.

51
If students keep a weekly diary in MOODLE of what they want
and what they are doing to get it, it will help them adjust their life
quality learning goals as they mature.
Diaries are also excellent exercises in writing. Teacher/coaches
can help students become excellent writers by encouraging them to
be more fully expressive and inclusive in their diary entries and by
giving them regular feedback on the content, spelling and
grammar.
Using Diaries In Student Assessments
Reading student dairies enables teacher/coaches to intimately
know each student and help them negotiate appropriate learning
goals and then coach their students effectively. In order to use
dairies for assessments, students’ entries should list the subjects
studied each day and include their opinions on how particular
studies effected, or will affect, the quality of their lives.
At the end of each week, or at anytime students need help with
their dairies, they should e-mail their questions and/or their dairies
to their mentor/coaches, or to other students, so they can receive
feedback, encouragement and suggestions.
Student dairies can be written on a computer and stored in the
student’s MOODLE file for easy access to the student, the teacher,
parents or administrators. The dairies can and should be an
important source of student assessments. Diary entries can have
‘links’ to all of the student’s work mentioned in the diary so all of
it can be considered in his or her assessments.
Bringing The World Into The Classroom
John Holt wrote in 1967 that ‘Bringing the world into the
classroom’63 was a task for teachers. Since that time the Internet’s
millions of videos, texts and photos have made the world
63 HOW CHILDREN LEARN, John Holt, A MERLOYD LAWRENCE BOOK,
1967, Page 293.

52
accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
Today I am sure he would agree it is the task of students to use the
Internet as a personal window on the world.
In our experiments in the schools of Las Trincheras, we found
that students loved investigating on the Internet the things and
ideas they were curious about and then organizing what they
learned in texts and pictures in Power Point that they could present
to their classmates. These personal investigation projects turned
the students we worked with on to learning more than any thing
else we did.
Core Curriculum For Teaching Broad Superficial Knowledge
The building of a culture or nation requires that the citizens
share a broad base of knowledge that makes it possible for them to
communicate effectively with one another. An important role of
public educations is to provide students from the earliest grades on
with this base. The broader the base, the more varied types of
people with whom a person can communicate. According to Dr. E.
D. Hirsch, this ability to communicate with all types of people
defines a truly literate person or nation.
People who share this base of knowledge understand the
implied meanings in speech and writing that are beyond the
specific meanings of the words. Building this knowledge base is
the purpose of a core curriculum.
Some characteristics of a core curriculum:
 ‘Much shared information is superficial, but true education
is profound. Broad superficial knowledge is the door to
profound learning because it provokes thought and
questions. It makes reading between the lines possible and
provides the meanings that the words by themselves do not
convey.
• Possessing broad superficial knowledge is the best
guarantee that one will continue reading and learning. It

53
always opens doors.’64
Videos To Expand Broad Superficial Knowledge
In an experimental program Juan Luis Trejo, a member of our
staff, created a catalogue of over four hundred 5 to 10 minute
YouTube videos on a variety of themes. He sorted them for each
age level, and offered them to all six grades of the Trincheras
primary school in Morelia. When a teacher wanted to show a video
listed in the catalog, Juan carried a 50-inch television into the
classroom to present it.
When teachers found out how interested their students were in
these videos they began to ask Juan to find ones that supported
what they were presenting in classrooms, which he did.
Before each presentation either Juan or the teacher briefly
described what the students were about to see and what they could
learn from the video. Afterwards the students discussed what they
had learned.
Its hard to imagine that seeing one or two of this type of video
each day for 12 school years would not vastly increase every
students’ knowledge of the world, his or her reading ability and
choice of options for a desirable style of life.
The Employment Curriculum Using Training Programs Of
Large Organizations
Large organizations; manufacturing, distribution, finance,
museums, orchestras, sports, libraries, governments, etc. are
patronized or known by practically everyone. All these
organizations have training programs for their employees and
product or service expositions for their customers that could be
easily modified for student instruction and put on the Internet as
64 E.D. Hirsch, Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil, Houghtton Mifflin Company,
THE NEW DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL LITERACY, 2002, Page xvi

54
elective courses.
If these organizations that dominate modern life were to provide
such on-line courses with brief tests to students as free public
service, the students would have access to information on
practically all types of employment and how to prepare themselves
as future job applicants.
Courses could be presented in a series in which the information
is tailored for each grade level. This would make it possible to
begin piquing students’ interests in various types of work from first
grade on and enable them to enrich their knowledge of work that
interests them as they proceed from grade to grade.
The courses should describe the work entailed each particular
job, why it is important, the qualifications needed to apply for it,
the quality of life enjoyed by a typical job holder, and how to
present oneself as desirable job applicant. This program would be
especially helpful to impoverished students who have little
knowledge of types of employments outside of their local
communities.
National Secretaries of Education have the power to induce
large organizations to participate in such a program and provide a
much needed service to public education.
Making such courses universally available on the Internet
would provide participating organizations invaluable free publicity
to their future customers or constituents. It would also likely
increase employment nationally and raise the average earnings of
citizens.
The Curriculum - Universities
Students should begin whetting their appetites to learn about
their options for quality lives as soon as they start school.
Since university educations contribute so much to the quality of
graduates' lives, every university department should provide K-12
courses on the Internet that explain in terms appropriate for each

55
grade level, how their courses contribute to the lives of their
graduates.
These courses should describe each department’s specialty, how
students qualify themselves for admittance, the career possibilities
open to graduates and provide examples of the quality lives their
graduates enjoy.
Enticing descriptions of university studies and their benefits
would surely help universities attract more and better qualified
applicants.
The Curriculum – Leisure And Culture
The quality of people’s lives is determined to significant degree
by how they spend their leisure time. While in school, students
should learn about as many rewarding pastimes and cultural
pursuits as possible; how to engage in them, the skills required, the
costs and where and how to become involved. The courses should
show videos of people enjoying each activity, for examples: sports,
art, music, nature, travel, reading, etc.,
School facilities should also have studios, playing fields,
libraries, etc., that give all students a taste for a variety of pastimes
while they are still in school.
A Video Production Curriculum
There may be no other student activity as exciting or motivating
to students as producing videos. Video production is an especially
powerful learning experience because its success depends on good
academic skills; writing, planning, cooperation, art, design and
being responsible for completing one’s share of the work on
schedule.
"The Educational Video Center in Manhattan’s Lower East Side
began 24 years ago with a simple idea: put video cameras in the
hands of young people from underserved communities and
teach them to go out into the city, ask hard questions and tell
stories about the world as they see it – with all its problems and

56
possibilities. The result was impactful and immediate . . .
This was a life changing experience for the youth making these
documentaries and for the parents, teachers and community
audiences who watched them. These students who had never
succeeded in school before began winning awards and
scholarships and were hired to work in the media industry.”65
A few years later, across the continent, Chris Kennedy, the
school superintendent in West Vancouver, Canada, initiated a
student production of videos that changed the perception of
learning of students as well as teachers and administrators. In 2010
West Vancouver students were invited to compete to become one
of twenty-five ‘student video reporters’ for the Winter Olympics
held that year in Vancouver.
“The experience was transforming for the students as well as
the teachers. The winning student reporters worked shoulder to
shoulder with professional reporters. They interviewed the
athletes and the spectators, attended press conferences and
found that everybody wanted to be interviewed and videoed by
them and follow their reports on the local television channel.
Administrators discovered what they had not known before, that
large numbers of citizens were available to help the students.
Students learned to use the social media to increase the
audiences for their reporting and that doing so was hard work.
Formerly, most of them had only used the media to
communicate with their friends.
By seeing what the other students produced, they learned
how to improve their own work. They found that working in the
‘real world’, communicating with real people, and not just their
teachers, was exciting and motivating; so much so that after the
conclusion of the program it was difficult for them to accept
going back to the artificial school world of fixed schedules,
classrooms and standard courses.
65 http://www.evc.org/about/mission, May 22, 2011

57
Administrators, teachers and students all developed a conviction
that good education requires that students be involved in
important work outside of classrooms and with real people in
their communities. Such real world experiences fosters
responsibility, cooperation, builds character, trust and
confidence of the participants.”66
Curriculum – Student Produced Courses
Their addiction to the social media and the Internet suggests
that future students will be increasingly use social media for school
assignments and projects. To take advantage of this addiction,
students should be given the option of creating courses that
combines information from their personal experiences with that
they research in the social media, and put what they learn in
MOODLE courses, along with examinations they create.
Creating courses employ and develop all sorts of useful skills,
writing, graphic arts, personal communication skills, promotion,
the technologies of production, cooperation, social media use, etc.
The student creators of the courses should also promote their
use by other students on Facebook and other social media, and
invite other students anywhere in the world to make improvements
in their courses. By doing this they will begin unifying all the
schools of the world into a single global education system.
Socratic Courses To Develop Knowledge And Opinions On
How To Solve Critical World Problems
The gravest problems in the world, such has how to end war,
poverty, prejudice, hate, hunger, slavery, etc., do not have finite
solutions. The best hope for solving them is in finding ways to get
peoples of opposing philosophies and agendas to meet and
respectfully discuss in a Socratic format the most viable solutions.
66 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERZ4MEYXXB8 (Slightly abridged,)

58
Socratic discussions pose questions about these critical
problems that bring forth further questions and these new questions
are followed with ever more questions, until the parties come to
share and agree on solutions that have at chance of resolving the
problems.
Since Socratic learning requires the respect and restraint of the
participants, the best way to develop Socratic skills is to imbue
students with these qualities as they conduct weekly Socratic
sessions throughout their K-12 years. The desired end results of
these sessions is that students learn respect, restraint and debating
skills while they are forming opinions on the best solutions to these
problems; and to other problems they feel degrade the quality of
their lives.
As students develop an interest in these critical, universal
problems and the Socratic skills to deal with them, they will
undoubtedly interest other students in their discussions to the point
that Socratic learning may become the most interesting and
productive part of most students’ school experiences.
When Socratic discussion groups become confident in their
solutions for particular problems, it would be appropriate for them
to summarize their discussions and conclusions in new Internet
courses which they could promote on the social media, and to
invite students elsewhere to offer comments, new questions,
solutions and modifications that would continue and expand the
debates. They should also learn how to influence politicians with
their ideas so that the best of their thinking has a chance of
improving lives ‘in the real world’.
Socratic learning has the potential for turning out each new
generation of graduates better prepared to solve the world’s most
critical problems.
Student Written Reform Books And Videos
I believe that students groups can publish books and videos ‘in
the real world’ that could acquire great prestige among their peers

59
and such a program could become a powerful factor in creating a
school culture in which values of learning and doing dominate.
I have learned that publishing a book on Amazon is not
difficult, and can be done at no cost by students as young as ten
years old, providing they have the motive and guidance. It is
simply a matter of putting the text and photos in book size
PowerPoint or Word pages and saving and uploading the pages in
PDF format on Amazon’s createspace.com.
A book, or series of books by different student groups, that
could attract a large audience of teachers and administrators would
be one in which students describe their views on what constitutes
life quality of life for them, and what experiences in their schools
would most contribute to it. As it is now, teachers are more
interested in proving to their supervisors that they are teaching
what they are required to teach than in the quality of their students’
experiences.
In my opinion, if teachers would act and teach in ways that
students say they want, democracy, and ultimately high quality
learning, would blossom in schools. At first teachers would
probably have to present some pretty silly programs based on
students’ suggestions, but when students realize that the teachers
are giving them real responsibilities in shaping their own futures,
they would soon learn to think more deeply than they ever have
about what they want and the programs that will enable them to
realize their dreams. Acting on these better ideas would
revolutionize public education because it would be designed to
meet students’ needs rather than those of far away, powerful
adults.
Student Promotion Of Their Books And Videos
If the above program worked, it is likely that news of it would
spread like wildfire, especially since millions of students are
already adept in social media communications. It is my hope that
students would be so enamored of the program that it would ‘go
viral’ and be irresistible to other school systems. If so, students

60
would become the reformers of public education, and graduates of
this new system would soon reform politics and nations.
Social Media Course
Students need parental and/or teacher guidance in how to use
social media because it is increasingly notorious that growing
numbers of adolescents are using Facebook and other media in
offensive, antisocial ways such as ‘sexting’ and verbal bullying.
Schools, teachers and students all need to take responsibility for
controlling these abuses and instruct students in constructive ways
of using the social media.
The social media has very important uses besides just
communicating with friends. As examples, its effective use is
credited with helping Obama get elected to the US presidency, and
President Trump uses Twitter daily to promulgate his latest
programs and ideas. Social media is perhaps today`s the best way
to inform and influence large groups of people, and students need
to learn to use it in this way. It also has the benefit of a very low
or zero cost.
Courses Created By Teachers
Courses created by students may turn out to be the most popular
part of any school’s curriculum. It is important, therefore, that
teachers demonstrate how to produce courses by producing some
of their own that reveal their interest in continuing to learn and in
continuing to improve the quality of their lives. Their students can
then use these courses as models in producing their own courses.

61
CHAPTER 7 – SEX EDUCATION
Adolescent Need For Emotional Guidance
The flood of sexual emotions and desires of that come with the
sexual maturing dominate their attention of adolescents and require
them to make choices that often have life-long consequences.
Because of the almost universal taboos surrounding sexual talk and
behavior, adults seldom communicate openly with their children
about these feelings and do much less than they could to help them
make good choices.
Sex education is generally deemed to be a family
responsibility, but in most cases, parents only inform their children
about basic reproductive physiology, often by giving them a book.
Few offer on-going discussions what to do about their sexual
feelings.
This was true in my family. In retrospect I am certain that my
parents’ reluctance to talk openly about sex, either to me or each
other, limited their ability to talk openly about other sensitive
issues; money, shared activities, friends, etc. While they were both
loving, good, productive people, their lack of open communication
limited the quality of their lives. Although this ‘Victorianism’
seems to be diminishing with each generation I got a good dose of
it that I have worked for decades to overcome.
Schools and teachers are particularly ill prepared to help
students adjust to their sexuality because they, and about everyone
else, consider their roles to be teaching academics and nothing
else. If the mission of schools is to help students learn to achieve
quality lives this is simply dead wrong. In life, emotional
decisions almost always trump reasoned ones. Students need help
and it ought to be available to them in school.
Objective Of Sex Education
Innate sexual desire is the force that perpetuates the human
race and all forms of animal life. Acting on sexual desire has both

62
positive and negative effects. On the positive side: are loving
relationships, sexual pleasure, desired pregnancy, and family joy.
On the negative side: violence, pain, undesired pregnancy, disease,
broken hearts and family anguish.
The objective of sex education, both within families and at
school, is for students to learn how act on, or control, their sexual
desires in ways to achieve the positive effects and avoid the
negative ones.
Public schools do a fair job of informing students of the
physiology of sex, but teach practically nothing of its emotional
and social aspects.
Responsibilities Of Sex Educators
Every child is entitled to know before reaching puberty that
when they become adolescents, not only will their bodies change
but also their thoughts, desires and behaviors, (especially in regard
to the opposite sex) and that no girl or boy is exempt from these
powerful effects.
Sex educators need to take into account that girls and boys
acquire compelling knowledge about sexual pleasure from
exploring their own bodies and both sexes have immense curiosity
about the future conditions and relationships that will allow them
to fully enjoy love and sexual pleasure.
The task of sex educators is not to try to extinguish these
feelings but to help their students manage them in life enhancing,
rather than destructive ways.
Talk For Dispelling Myth
Aside from instruction on the physiological needs and acts of
sex, pre-pubescent students must learn accept sex as a natural and
desirable aspect of a quality life and to talk about it without fear,
especially when they are older and become sexually active.
Sexual activity for children and adolescents consists of all

63
kinds of behaviors that excite them; from the exchange of looks,
modes of dress, the full range of touching from hand-holding to
dancing, kissing, petting and finally to intercourse. The culture in
which children are raised determines the appropriate ages,
conditions and styles of these sexual behaviors.
Unless boys and girls talk about their feelings associated with
each of these kinds of behaviors, as well as the consequences and
responsibilities they entail, they will be at risk of unwanted
pregnancies, disease and emotional damage.
Autonomy And Sexual Equity
For sexual equity to exist between two people, both of them
need to be autonomous, that is, be self-directed and know what
they want. Persons who are not autonomous, by definition, act in
accordance to the will of others and may never discover their own
true needs and desires. Many women in our patriarchal society fit
this description because they deny their own sexual desires and end
up serving as suffering sex objects for their men.
It may be that the crucial test of good schools is their
effectiveness in developing sexual equity between the sexes. What
makes it an especially difficult task is the courage, will and vision
required to dispel the frightening myths of sex that makes
achieving equity so extremely difficult.
If both sexes learn to respect each other’s sexual desires and to
negotiate justly for their own and the other’s sexual satisfaction,
then it is perhaps possible that they can also learn to better
negotiate and establish political equity, and discover new roads to
peace and justice in the world.
Detoxing Sex Talk
It is important for students to understand that sex slang words
are taboo because they provoke fear of unlicensed sex in ‘polite
society’ whose members do not use them. For this reason they are
not mentioned in sex education classes. The only way to negate the

64
taboos and fears these words provoke is by using them freely and
unemotionally.
Their use can begin with grade school children learning to use
their sanitized, clinical versions, such as penis, erection, vagina,
sex, intercourse, ejaculation, orgasm, etc., without shame or fear
and as they approach puberty, unemotionally begin substituting
their slang versions.
If they learn to use such the slang words comfortably and
naturally with each other in school they will be better able to
express and satisfy their needs and desires privately when they
begin more overt sexuality. Moreover, as Nancy Friday,
author of My Secret Garden, discovered, the use of these
words during sex often enhances the pleasure of the
participants. 67
Sexual Advice From A Mother
Sex researcher, Deborah Tolman describes one of her
interviewees who discussed her sexual desires and plans to initiate
intercourse with her trusting and considerate boyfriend and with
her trusted and non-judgmental mother. The result was a visit to
the gynecologist and a thorough preparation for the ‘grand event’
which turned out to be highly pleasurable and happily remembered
by the girl long after the relationship ended. The experience also
prepared the girl for similar trusting, open relationships with a
future husband, partner or friends.68
This story of how to prepare for the first time is an example of
what could be added to school sex education programs to cover the
emotional aspects of sex and its risks, if only society were ready
for it and teachers were prepared teach it.
67 Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden, Rosetta Books 1973
68 Debrah L. Tolman, DILEMMAS of DESIRE, 2002, Harvard University Press

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