Civil Disobedience in Democratic Education

The study's goal was to examine the tension between democratic school governance, requiring its participants to obey school rules, even though they might disagree with those rules, and personal responsibility, requiring the participants to act morally, in accordance with their conscience and their sense of what is right and makes sense for them, regardless of the democratic nature of the imposed school rules. This examination was based on three sources: 1) three Open Symposia with American and Russian democratic educationalists, 2) my review of the existing literature on civil disobedience and democratic education, and 3) my empirical study based on the interviews of participants of an American private democratic school, known as The Circle School, regarding their instances of civil disobedience. The three Open Symposia allowed me to develop a working definition of civil disobedience as a particular principled disobedience. One important finding arising from these Open Symposia was that neither democratic educator could come up with an example of civil disobedience in democratic schools. My literature analysis revealed four types of civil disobedience: instrumental, existential, safeguarding, and expedient. The participants of my interviews in a democratic school - current teenage students, staff, and alumni - reported many instances of diverse types of civil disobedience, but primarily existential. Despite a lack of discussions of civil disobedience in the school, I discovered that the democratic school apparently promotes civil disobedience as its unintended curriculum by promoting and supporting students' authorial agency, aiming at the students deciding what is good for them, and opposing educational paternalism.