When I write a love song, I’m trying to hold time like a tiny silver fish. Or, I shape language and melody into my gratitude and form a still life to show the world what I love. The function is partly to remember, and partly to wish something fleeting into sticking around for longer.

Thanks to some wise voices around, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we form and dissolve, all day long. Suddenly there is a beam of light onto the mundane, and we briefly remember that sitting next to someone while they learn is holy. No, not in the sense that public education is missionary work. What I mean by holy is that we are multigenerational in a space, and that in that space we might exchange ideas and life force. Feeling that for real should still us with reverence.

To picture democratic practice in a classroom as raising our hands to vote on things is not what I’m here to write about. That’s a straw poll, and straw polls are fine, but let’s not confuse straw polls with democracy.

Teachers bear witness to the struggles young people bring into our classrooms every day–the interplay between their despair and joy, the energy pulling them towards each other, towards learning, language, ideas, and the irrepressible creativity which is their birthright. Some adults admonish the young for the ways in which they might numb themselves from terror, dread, and uncertainty, while the young shake their heads at the glaring inauthenticity, stale ideologies and false pathways that constrain their time in school.

A democratic education is radical, and I believe it should be a human right. Democracy is built from community. Community rises from trust. We earn trust by listening and supporting dreams, mutuality, and spirit—in an interplay of the individual and the collective. In a democratic school, we bring a willingness to engage with a vision or dilemma in a sustained way, over time. This kind of collaboration calls for a reciprocal, empathetic intelligence, where we allow for differences of opinion that don’t break us. Diversity of opinion must be fostered, held in a framework for compromise that, ultimately, weaves a fabric and a history.

Children, even 17 year old children, love a story… the stories about the tough decisions we made together, our awkward stumbles and growth, the most hilarious mistakes we made on the road to something sweet, the smallest moments of making a school community. We need to tell the stories about the times we walked into school when we thought we couldn’t because of something that happened the day before, and found grace. Shared stories bring belonging, place, and identity. Through story, public schools gestate democratic life.

In the space of my classroom I aim to help us breathe. It’s not abstract. I try to keep the window open a little and, it’s true, from time to time someone has brought in a sweet thing they baked to share. I make tea, even though having an electric kettle is against code. In my best classes, there is an understanding that, in this space, we get to laugh, cry, not know, argue, and also not play around about how smart we are. This is what I mean by a classroom community. I use the word facilitator often, because I see teaching as a job that mentors students in the tools, frameworks, ideas, language and experience to feel their own power, intellects, and creativity. Facilitator comes from the root word, facil, to make something easier.

I have reached a few breaking points in my career: exhaustion with the numbers of kids in front of me moving in and out too quickly, exhaustion with myself, exhaustion with the pace of the world, all of its rapid change so terribly relevant. I have needed to still my own noise in a serious way, to stop speaking at people, especially things I am no longer sure are true.

For almost 25 years, I’ve been working in pockets of progressive education that center social justice and fly under the radar. The crisis in civics education is clear across the board, even within these so-called bubbles. I believe in the institutional importance of public schools, and in democracy, as much as I might criticize both to their core. Real civics education transcends an understanding of the Constitution, as important as that is, too. Bettina Love names it:

“Our impact on this country, whether it is recognized or not, is where mattering rests; it is where thriving rests. Mattering is civics because it is the quest for humanity. I do not mean civics narrowly defined as voting, paying taxes, and knowing how the government works; instead, I am referring to something much deeper... the 2010 National Assessment of Education Progress surveyed twelfth graders from around the US and found that 70 percent of students self-reported having never once written a letter to give an opinion or help solve a problem… We are now living with the repercussions of our citizens having low media literacy (everything as ‘fake news’) and not being able to solve problems that impact us all collectively (e.g., climate change, living wages, and food scarcity)... There is a civic empowerment gap because… civics education is no longer a space that teaches youth how to petition, protest, speak in public, solve social issues with groups of people from diverse backgrounds, and commit to acts of civil disobedience.” (Bettina Love, We Want to Do More than Survive)

The people I look to in history and letters are those who survived tyranny with free minds. The work of democratic teaching is visionary and hopeful, a blueprint that aims to survive this moment & create the next, handing the world over for transformation to the young, and equipping them not to replicate it as we have done.

When we engage everyone in a school with its leadership, empowering students and teachers especially, responsibilities and interests have the potential to overlap and inform each other. We might blur our roles at school and our projects, curriculums, dreams, and initiatives might feed on each other and cross-pollinate. I know this from experience–it’s not impossibly visionary. It is not just possible, but essential, that collaborative leadership defines what happens in public schools.

This democratic education means we all get a say in naming what matters. Democratic education means there is a process where anyone can call for a conversation. Democratic education means everyone has an access point to the agenda, in every space of the day. Democratic education means we know how the decisions that affect us are made, we all get to participate, and the process is transparent. For starters.

The young people I know come to the tough conversations of our times from many angles: idealism, cynicism, despair, trauma, fear, depression, technicalities, justice, etc. A real barrier is that it is hard to reach students who do not want to engage with those questions at all. Being real doesn’t all have to be heavy, so long as the heaviness is also not shunned. Democratic education might be explicit, and it also might be invisible. Because it might be honey.

I walked into my friend’s music design classroom recently, and left understanding the man is a benevolent wizard. The room was buzzing, each student at the center of their own time, doing their own creative work. The teacher would answer questions, tell stories and, sometimes, students would stop to listen to advice he was offering others–unless they were in a flow state. Towards the end of the class, students workshopped their short creations. They were jumping out of their seats with observations and feedback, using the vocabulary and norms of the room and offering each other ideas and appreciation. Students left with songs in their heads. They spilled into the hallway talking about music.

All humans deserve a public education in which they experience flow. When we recognize that the disengagement we sense might come from a valid struggle to see a future with hope, we need to tell our stories, we need to listen, we need quiet, we need room to create. The curriculum rises from the ideas and tools we have assembled over our lives that help us get by. It is what we have learned about facing adversity and responding to injustice with audacity, chasing the feeling of a pounding heart and the deep breath. There is a difference between a space that gives airtime to naive institutional optimism, platitudes, window-dressing agency, and a space where genuine, collective empowerment in service to a steely hope and flickering vision is held. There is a difference between listening to a song, and making a song. I am here for that giant and genuine, collective empowerment. I am here for the honey.