As Research & Innovation Coordinator for the European Democratic Education Community - EUDEC, I have to travel a lot. Speaking several languages is a perk when communicating with people from different cultures. This summer took us across four countries in a matter of weeks: an academic stay at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland (I used Estonian languages sometimes when a Finn would forget a word in English - they are pretty similar), a workshop for the FutureEd project in Luxembourg (where I had the chance to practice some of my rusty French), a keynote at the University of the Basque Country Summer School (made in English, but also having some exchanges with locals in Spanish), and the EUDEC Conference in Şirince, Turkey (Where I could gravitate through English, Spanish, Italian and even Estonia!). That last gathering was fantastic and inspiring: 340 people, from toddlers to grandparents, representing 28 countries, sharing 163 self-organised sessions, meals, late-night conversations, and a great deal of dancing. The conference could be seen as a community of committed adults and young people who believe that young people are right-holders, learning happens better when young people participate in the decisions that affect them, and language learning is something natural that happens when we engage meaningfully with speakers, explore the culture freely, and find our inner (autonomous) motivation to keep on making mistakes and learning from them. This is is where this article really begins.

Amid all that warmth and inspiring experiences, one thing stood out: many of our generous Turkish hosts, fluent in their own language and culture, could not hold a conversation in English, the conference’s de facto lingua franca. It was not a failure of intelligence or effort. It was, in miniature, a picture of how conventional foreign language education so often falls short — and it is the starting point for everything Unmute Learning believes about how languages are actually learned.

The Myth of Being “Bad at Languages”

Foreign language learning is usually taught as a solitary, age-bound, grammar-first ordeal: two 45-minute lessons a week, fill-in-the-gap worksheets, a textbook disconnected from real life, and a classroom of same-age peers moving through the same material at the same pace. For many learners, this produces not fluency but a lasting, false belief

that they are simply “not good at languages.”

The research bears this out. Frontal, teacher-directed instruction remains the dominant mode in conventional classrooms, especially among more experienced teachers, while collaborative approaches like peer tutoring are used far less often. Grammar and vocabulary are frequently prioritised over the communicative skills learners actually need, and teacher-training systems have been slow to shift away from rule-based methods toward more heterogeneous, communicative ones.

Age- and proficiency-segregated language programmes carry real social and academic costs. Teachers in these settings describe students being “othered” and cut off from the social and emotional benefits of learning alongside diverse peers. Newly arrived students often experience the linear, skills-before-communication model as a delay — a queue they must stand in before they are allowed to actually use the language they came to learn.

What the Evidence Says About Learning Side by Side

If segregation by age is not the answer, what is? A growing body of research points toward age-mixed, competency-based environments — places where learners of different ages and levels share space, purpose, and conversation.

A large study of 2,743 children in Danish early childhood settings found a clear, nonlinear relationship between classroom age range and vocabulary growth: children in classrooms with a moderate age spread (up to about 24 months) showed the greatest gains — more than either narrowly age-matched or very widely mixed groupings. Mixed-age classrooms have also grown more popular across primary schools in western Europe, driven by educators’ conviction that they carry real pedagogical and social value, even where the evidence base is still catching up.

Cooperative, heterogeneous groupings show similar promise beyond early childhood: in one graduate-level course, mixed groups of native and non-native English speakers supported one another’s learning through task-based collaboration rather than separate instruction. The common thread across these findings is simple: proficiency differences, and even age differences, can become a resource for learning rather than a problem to be sorted away.

Language Is Learned Through Relationship, Not Recitation

Suvemäe, a democratic school within a public school in Estonia, has seen this principle play out again and again. Estonian children pick up English not through formal lessons but through play, through Minecraft, through overhearing older peers, through television and music. Russian-speaking children learn Estonian the same way — through free play with classmates, through the meaningful context of a shared game or a school excursion, and through the light-touch, focused support of adults who care about them and are paying attention.

My own experience learning Estonian followed the same pattern: daily contact with people of every age and background, watching the news, and asking questions about the words I noticed on the street.

The same was true of my own first foreign language. I did not learn Italian by studying it — I learned it as a 20-year-old volunteer, immersed in social work and community life, having believed for years that I was simply incapable of learning languages after a discouraging, disconnected experience with English and French in school. It was not a method that changed my mind. It was people: a community that welcomed me, needed me to communicate, and gave me room to make mistakes without shame.

This is the piece that grammar-first, age-sorted classrooms structurally cannot provide: a web of supportive relationships with adults and peers of different ages, in which language is not the subject of study but the medium of belonging. When a caring adult helps a child understand what a game requires, or a peer patiently repeats a phrase during play, language acquisition happens as a by-product of connection — not as a goal pursued in isolation.

Designing for Age-Mixing and Connection

None of this means grammar and vocabulary don’t matter, or that all structure should disappear. It means the starting point should shift: from “how do we deliver content efficiently to a uniform age group” to “how do we build a community in which language naturally needs to be used, and in which caring adults and mixed-age peers are always within reach.”

In practice, this looks like:

• Mixed-age spaces — clubs, projects, excursions, and free play — where communication is necessary, not simulated.

• Adults who model warmth and curiosity rather than correction, offering focused support exactly when a learner needs it, not on a fixed schedule.

• Authentic content — games, music, real conversations, real tasks — in place of textbook dialogues with no connection to learners’ lives.

• Learning-strategy support that builds learners’ confidence and independence, so that differences in starting level become a strength for the group rather than a sorting criterion.

• Permission to make mistakes inside relationships that already feel safe, so that no learner internalises the false belief that they are “bad at languages.”

The Question Worth Asking

Conventional schooling continues to group children by age, not by proficiency, curiosity, or need, on the assumption that “to everyone, the same” is fair and efficient. The evidence — and lived experience, from a democratic school in Estonia to a community conference in Şirince — suggests otherwise. Age-mixing, done in moderation and paired with the steady presence of caring adults, does not just make language learning more pleasant. It appears to make it work.

Perhaps it is time we, as researchers, educators, and parents, started questioning the conventional grouping of children by age when it comes to learning languages. Or, really, when it comes to learning anything at all.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning

References

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Whenever I start a conversation with pre-service or in-service teachers, I ask them whether they support public education. Usually, every hand goes up. Then I ask if they support state-run schooling. People look at me, confused: aren’t those the same thing? They are not — but that is a story for another day. What matters here is that I am, in every sense, a “son” of public education: elementary and secondary school near my home, a bachelor’s degree in philology and languages at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a Master’s in social and cultural anthropology at Tallinn University, and a PhD in democratic education and education fotr social justice at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. I believe deeply in what public education can offer: a lever for social equity, a focus on human needs over economic profit, and the richness that comes from learning alongside classmates from every kind of background. And yet, public, charter, and private schools alike are all prisoners of the same force: time.

When I was around nine years old, I started refusing to go to school. Other children had found friends there, and the pull of that social need is stronger than most things — stronger than boredom, stronger than being told to sit still for hours copying whatever the teacher wrote on the board. I hadn’t found close friends at school, so my own need for connection turned elsewhere: toward my grandmother’s encyclopaedia, toward stories from far-away lands, toward drawing and imaginary worlds where medieval knights explored the Amazon and fought enormous snakes. My resistance to school grew, until my mother heard about a small experimental school on the outskirts of Bogotá, about ninety minutes from home.

I only spent a year there, but the memories are still vivid: a warm, approachable teacher (“Profe Fercho”) who could be called by his first name, joked with us and led us into the forest for science and geography lessons, long afternoons playing soccer, and even longer bus rides. The experiment ended after a year — perhaps the logistics were too much for my family, perhaps the cost, perhaps the fact that there was “no evidence” that anything remarkable was happening. I went back to the ordinary local school: long hours of following orders, unfairness around every corner, adult authoritarianism, military and catholic routines.. boredom. That single year, though, marked me. It is probably part of why I ended up studying culture, education, and learning from a different angle altogether.

Years later, as the leader of Suvemäe, a democratic school inside a public school in Tallinn, Estonia, parents would often ask me to explain our “innovative methodologies” — as if “the right teaching methodology” could turn their phone-dependent, low-motivation children into avid learners overnight. My answer was always some version of the same thing: patience, connection, respect and dignity, functional boundaries, room to be bored, room to explore, and a lot of simply accompanying the child. Even so, I could feel how many parents, especially “high-achievers” arrived in a hurry, anxious to see quick results and to prepare their child “for the real world.” In fact, I often quoted the late Ken Robinson in a TED Talk, when he pointed out that we - as a global society - ignore what the future will look like, but feel confident that the Prussian schooling system will provide children and young people with skills necessary for such a future. Tremendous fallacy!

Interestingly, when I later spoke with adult graduates of democratic schools (here, here, and here), nearly all of them pointed to the same things: self-directed (meaningful) learning emerges from creative boredom (nobody is telling you what to do), positive relationships (without hierarchical coercion), and enough time and space to follow their own interests. They described theirs as meaningful lives, based on genuine self-determined learning experiences, and a strong sense of equity and participation.

We understand, at least in theory, why creative boredom matters — real, undirected time and space to explore, as opposed to the induced boredom of sitting through a lesson you didn’t choose. We understand why positive relationships and free play matter. And yet, systemically, we keep hurrying things along: more content, more extracurriculars, more measurement — as if more and faster were simply synonyms for better.

I saw the same pattern a few months ago in Flanders, Belgium, where a “knowledge-rich curriculum” replaced an exploratory, interdisciplinary, project-based approach after only three years. The exploratory curriculum had allowed for non-directive play and unstructured time for children to connect what they were learning to their own lives. What was missing, in the end, wasn’t results. What was missing was the patience to treat learning as a slow process — one that needs time to be “cooked,” in community.

If human growth is something that takes time — exploration, testing, losing interest, recovering, scaffolding — how is it that we keep expecting results so quickly?

What the research actually says

Slow education is not a fringe idea. It is a growing, if still young, field of research that pushes back against acceleration, standardization, and assessment pressure in schools and universities. Across early-childhood, higher-education, medical-education, and nature-based settings, the literature converges on a similar definition: slow education is not simply about making lessons slower, but about prioritizing depth over speed — reflection, dialogue, attention, and meaningful time.

The recurring tension in this research is a familiar one: rigid curricula, constant assessment, and pressure for measurable productivity conflict directly with the conditions deep learning actually requires. Early-childhood scholars argue that children need play, tangible interaction, and time to internalize what they learn — and that overloaded schedules quietly compress the very conditions that make deep learning possible. Higher-education researchers extend the same critique to universities, where speed incentives can push students toward credentialing rather than discussion, reflection, and genuine growth.

The field’s honest limitation is that most of this evidence is conceptual, qualitative, or drawn from single-site case studies rather than large controlled trials — a gap the researchers themselves acknowledge openly. But within that body of work, one recent narrative case study offers a vivid, concrete picture of what slow education can look like inside an ordinary school day.

An example: “Sit Spot” in a high school science class

In a 2026 study published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Environmental and Science Education, researchers Steph Dean, Jim Lane, Paul Bocko, Andrew Gilbert, and Devan Jones set out to understand the long-term influence of a simple outdoor practice called Sit Spot on students’ holistic well-being. The practice itself could hardly be simpler: each week, in a semester-long field ecology course, a high school teacher (given the pseudonym Wally) took his students outside to a self-chosen spot in the woods, where they sat alone, quietly, to observe, journal, and reflect — sometimes freely, sometimes in response to a light prompt connected to that week’s science content.

The researchers didn’t just study the practice while it was happening. They tracked down seven of Wally’s former students, now in their twenties, between four and eleven years after they had graduated, and asked them to look back. What emerged were three consistent, long-lasting outcomes: an enduring impact on the whole person, a renewed engagement with emotion and wonder, and a lasting connection and sense of care for the natural world.

One former student, recalling a school culture that was intensely grades- and data-driven, described Sit Spot as a “stress reliever that we all really needed.” Others described returning to their own Sit Spot years later, during moments of real difficulty, simply to feel grounded again. The researchers also identified three ingredients that made the practice work: trust and vulnerability between teacher and students, a repeated process of observing and making connections, and — perhaps most importantly — a teacher whose own calm, curious, and non-judgmental attitude made it safe for fifteen-year-olds to sit still in the woods and simply notice things.

None of this required new technology, a bigger budget, or a curriculum overhaul. It required a teacher willing to protect a recurring block of unhurried time, and a school willing to let him. This experience could be considered an inclusive example of a “negotiated curriculum” approach. Worth exploring.

An invitation

None of us — parents, teachers, or school leaders — set out to build systems that rush children. It happens gradually, through good intentions: more content because more feels like more preparation, more assessment because we want to be sure, more structure because structure feels safer than the unknown. But the research, and the quieter evidence of our own memories, both point in the same direction: learning that lasts is learning that is given time.

This is not a call to abandon rigor, structure, or ambition for our children. It is an invitation to hold those things alongside patience — to ask, together, where in the school day or the school year there might be room for a Sit Spot of our own: a recurring, protected, unhurried space for students to observe, reflect, and simply be

If you are a parent, that might mean resisting the urge to fill every afternoon, and trusting your child with some unscheduled time. If you are a teacher, it might mean carving out fifteen quiet minutes a week, even inside a packed curriculum. If you are a school leader, it might mean asking your staff what it would take to protect that kind of time system-wide, rather than treating it as a luxury the schedule can’t afford.

None of us can build this alone, and none of us should have to. I’d love to hear from you — parents, teachers, school leaders — about where slow education already lives in your community, and where you’d like to grow it. Let’s think this through together.

Charlie Moreno-Romero (Ph.D)

References

Carbonell, J. (2015). Pedagogías del Siglo XXI. Alternativas para la Innovación Educativa. Octaedro.

Catalano, H., Albulescu, I., Stan, C., Mestic, G., & Ani-Rus, A. (2023). Child-centered approach through slow education principles: A view to child personality development in early childhood. Sustainability, 15(11), 8611. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15118611

Dean, S. N., Lane, J., Bocko, P., Gilbert, A., & Jones, D. A. (2026). Slow education, Sit Spot, and holistic well-being: A narrative case study in secondary science education. Interdisciplinary Journal of Environmental and Science Education, 22(2), e2610. https://doi.org/10.29333/ijese/17848

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracia y Educación. Una introducción a la filosofía de la educación. Ediciones Morata.

García, T. (2005). El valor de la democracia en la escuela: alternativas pedagógicas. Perspectiva Educacional, Formación de Profesores, (46), 27–42.

Gorbunova, Y., & Boronikhina, I. O. (2022). Slow science and slow education in a digitalized university: An anthropopractic approach. Discourse, 8(5), 5–17. https://doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2022-8-5-5-17

Haruta, J., Kikuchi, T., Kitanaka, J., & Kurata, M. (2026). How time, narrative, and discomfort shape learning: A realist evaluation of behavioral science education for medical students. Perspectives on Medical Education, 15, 397–409. https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.2332

Hecht, Y. (2010). Democratic Education: A Beginning of a Story. Developing a Culture of Innovation Company Ltd.

Impola, J. (2023). Reconsidering Newtonian temporality in the context of time pressures of higher education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 42, 431–448. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09879-3

Krasulja, N., Vasiljević, B., & Radojević, I. (2024). Challenges of modern universities and redefining educational paradigms in the age of globalization. Zbornik radova Pedagoškog fakulteta, Užice. https://doi.org/10.5937/zrpfu2426101k

López-González, J. (2023). The resonance approach for non-alienated relationships: Beyond slowness in higher education. Ethics and Education, 19, 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2023.2297141

McNair, L. J., & Papaspyropoulou, K. (2025). The impact of the ‘accelerated childhood’ culture in the UK’s ECEC: Practitioners’ and policy makers’ views during a professional development course. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 33, 889–901. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2025.2452547

Mikelevičienė, D., & Čerečkienė, R. (2025). Creating the bond between preschool children and animals in the slow education process. Natural Science Education in a Comprehensive School (NSECS). https://doi.org/10.48127/gu/25.31.68

Ritscher, P. (2013). Escola slow. Pedagogia del quotidià. Rosa Sensat.

Sardalova, L. R. (2025). Pedagogy of slow education: Against the culture of acceleration and productivity. Ekonomika i Upravlenie: Problemy, Resheniya. https://doi.org/10.36871/ek.up.p.r.2025.12.20.018

Shaw, P. A., Cole, B., & Russell, J. (2013). Determining our own tempos: Exploring slow pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and professional development. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2013(133), 319–334. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2334-4822.2013.tb00713.x

Smith, S. (2018). Slow down and smell the eucalypts: Blue Gum Community School and the slow education movement. Journal of Global Education and Research, 1(1), 16–34. https://doi.org/10.5038/2577-509x.1.1.1006

Van Der Sluis, H. (2020). Slow Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.36828/newvistas.105

Vocational Education and Training (VET) has never been just about producing skilled workers. At its best, it prepares young people to think critically, participate in democratic life, and take ownership of their own futures (Oberle, 2016; Geurts et al., 2023). Yet across Europe and beyond, growing numbers of young people are falling out of this system entirely — becoming what policymakers call NEET: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Understanding why this happens, and what VET can do about it, increasingly points back to one idea: young people need to feel autonomous, competent, and connected in their learning — the very foundations of Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

The Motivation Gap in VET

Many students arrive in vocational programmes with mixed or externally imposed motivations — enrolled because they had to be, not because they chose to be. Research consistently shows that when teaching and workplace learning fail to support autonomy, competence, and relatedness, students disengage (Cents-Boonstra et al., 2018; Gross et al., 2020; Khalid et al., 2023). The consequences are measurable: weaker self-regulation, lower persistence, higher test anxiety, and ultimately greater dropout risk (Burke et al., 2018; Tadesse et al., 2022).

Conversely, when VET learners experience self-determined motivation, the effects ripple outward into performance, satisfaction, workplace commitment, and long-term career planning (Khalid et al., 2023). Self-directed learning (SDL) — where students take an active role in setting goals, choosing tasks, and monitoring their own progress — is one of the clearest practical expressions of this theory in the classroom and on the shop floor (Pylväs et al., 2022).

This is not only a motivational issue. It is also a civic one. Several scholars argue that VET has a responsibility to prepare students for democratic participation and active citizenship, not merely compliance with workplace norms (Rosvall & Nylund, 2022; Geurts et al., 2025). Too often, however, civic and personal development goals are squeezed out by employability pressures and rigid, top-down teaching models (Kärnebro et al., 2025; Eiríksdóttir & Rosvall, 2019). The fix in both domains — motivation and citizenship — looks remarkably similar: give learners more voice, more choice, and more genuine responsibility for their own path.

Where This Connects to NEET

The NEET population is not a single group with a single cause. Structural disadvantage, poor school-to-work transitions, low qualifications, and mental health burdens all interact to push young people out of education and employment (Gunnes et al., 2025; Rahmani et al., 2024; Lindblad et al., 2024). But underneath these structural drivers, a psychological pattern recurs: low self-esteem, weak social connection, and a sense of having no real choice or control over one’s circumstances (Gunnes et al., 2025; Paabort et al., 2023).

This is where SDT offers a genuinely useful lens. One study following young people who successfully moved out of NEET status found that re-engagement was strongly linked to supportive relationships, inner resilience, and a stronger sense of preparedness for adult life — mapping directly onto the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Gabriel, 2015). Elsewhere, the same pattern holds: autonomy in how young people access support services, competence built through qualifications and career guidance, and relatedness through consistent, caring relationships all appear repeatedly as factors that help young people re-engage (Paabort et al., 2023; Broeck et al., 2016; Willhardt et al., 2025).

In other words, the same psychological needs that determine whether a VET student stays engaged in their studies are the ones that determine whether a disengaged young person finds their way back in. This is not a coincidence — it suggests that VET providers who build strong SDT-informed practice into everyday teaching may also be building a stronger buffer against NEET drift in the first place. Prevention and re-engagement are, in this sense, two ends of the same rope.

Training the Trainers: Making SDT Practical

Knowing the theory is one thing. Living it in a classroom or workshop is another — and the evidence is clear that teachers and trainers are the decisive variable.

Autonomy-supportive behaviour looks different in different settings: at school it shows up as listening and availability; in a training company it shows up as independence and equal recognition. Controlling climates, by contrast, are experienced by learners as pressure, unreasonable demands, and a lack of recognition (Gross et al., 2020).

This means that improving self-determination in VET is not primarily a curriculum problem — it is a trainer-development problem. Practical, evidence-based strategies include:

• Shared curriculum input — giving students real influence over learning activities and decisions builds both autonomy and satisfaction (Khalid et al., 2023; Geurts et al., 2025).

• Authentic, work-based tasks — practical, enterprise-linked training builds competence through real-life relevance (Khalid et al., 2023; Pylväs et al., 2022).

• Joint goal-setting — trainers and learners setting goals together, rather than goals being imposed, is both feasible and effective in VET settings (Zhu & Karabalaeva, 2025).

• Reflection and emotional support — structured, teacher-led reflection builds confidence in career decision-making (Hasyim, 2025).

• Explicit self-determination instruction — directly teaching goal-setting, self-monitoring, and self-advocacy skills has the strongest evidence base, particularly for learners at higher risk of disengagement (Burke et al., 2018; Licardo & Schmidt, 2016).

None of this works as an isolated add-on. The literature is consistent that implementation succeeds as a system: trainer training, a supportive institutional culture, and genuine partnerships with employers, families, and support services all need to move together (Licardo & Schmidt, 2016; Williams, 2021; Proturenko & Sher, 2025).

A System Worth Building

Taken together, the picture is coherent. VET exists to prepare capable citizens and capable workers — and the same psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, sit underneath both goals. When these needs go unmet, students disengage, and in the most severe cases, drift out of education and employment altogether. When trainers are equipped to actively support these needs, through choice, authentic tasks, joint goal-setting, and consistent relationships, students are more likely to stay motivated, complete their training, and successfully transition into work and civic life.

The opportunity, then, is not simply to talk about self-determination in VET, but to build it deliberately into how trainers are trained, how curricula are designed, and how institutions support young people at risk of NEET status.

Let’s Build This Together

At Unmute Learning, we believe this shift — from compliance-based instruction to genuinely self-determined learning — is one of the most important levers available to VET providers today. If you are working on trainer development, curriculum design, or re-engagement strategies for young people at risk of becoming NEET, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch with Unmute Learning to explore how we can help you build autonomy-supportive, self-directed learning into your programmes.

References

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I remember a student in my 8th-grade social science class: he made jokes, never did his homework, and was always getting into trouble. I felt a certain pity for him — but I also watched how quickly teachers were ready to label him: troublemaker, lost cause, loser. I was not like that. I was a mediocre student in most subjects, like physics and chemistry; but I was also passionate in others, like social sciences, algebra, and philosophy. My Spanish, physics and chemistry teachers would hand back my last-minute homework with an average grade, and I would accept it without protest — never disrupting the class, never challenging the system. I was, in the language researchers now use, a Passenger: going through the motions, doing the bare minimum, quietly disengaged. I did not know it then, but that experience would shape everything I later did as an educator.

Twenty-two years ago, I became a teacher. And as I stood on the other side of the classroom in front of 42 students, I began to see the same quiet disconnection I had once embodied — in child after child, row after row. I also began to see something else: the kids who were not quiet about their disengagement. The ones who acted out, played power games, disrupted lessons. The ones the system had already written off.

This article is about those children. And it is about what we — adults, educators, school builders — need to change in ourselves before we can change anything for them.

Four Modes of Learning — and What They Really Signal

In their 2025 book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, journalists and researchers Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop identify four modes of learning that young people use to navigate school:

The Passenger — the most common mode, affecting roughly half of all students. Passengers coast along, do the minimum, and quietly conclude that school is pointless. They are not disruptive; they are simply absent in spirit.

The Achiever — the student who delivers results and gets praised for them. But beneath the grades lies invisible disengagement: a self-worth so tightly bound to performance that failure becomes existential. These children are anxious, competitive, and fragile — always seeking external validation, rarely learning from mistakes.

The Resister — the child who ignores homework, plays sick, acts out, or disrupts class. These students are struggling silently with profound feelings of inadequacy or invisibility. Their behaviour is communication: they need their skills, interests, and learning needs to be seen and connected to something meaningful — perhaps something emerging out of their own interests.

The Explorer — the mode Anderson and Winthrop identify as the goal. Explorers are driven by internal curiosity, pursue questions they care about, and persist toward self-chosen goals. Crucially, this is not a fixed personality type. Any child can be an Explorer under the right conditions.

These are not fixed types — they are modes. A child can shift between them depending on the subject, the teacher, and whether they feel safe enough to try.

The Misfits Who Were Actually Paying Attention

When I became the Theory of Knowledge (similar to an epistemology course for young people) coordinator for an IB Diploma Programme school in 2010, I met a young student who had struggled through conventional schooling and arrived at our door as a last resort. His parents were desperate. He was labelled a misfit.

He was not the only one. When I co-founded Suvemäe, a democratic school within a public school in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2019, two of our first students carried similar labels. One had a history of bullying and would disrupt lessons dramatically — at one point pretending to be a dog and biting classmates’ ankles. Another was the class clown, branded a troubled boy, someone who supposedly could not concentrate on anything.

Something might be wrong with them — right? I do not think so. Looking back, I believe these children were among the most clear-eyed people in the building. They were the only ones courageous enough to resist a system designed, whether intentionally or not, to foster compliance and submission to authority. In fact, I remember having the most passionate conversations with them in our informal philosophy club, which was not an obligatory lesson in our school. They chose to be there and engage in dialogue about the most fascinating and the most ridiculous topics. They chose.

My theory is simple: Resisters can become Explorers. But only when two conditions are met: the relationships they have with adults are rooted in trust, intellectual challenge, genuine care, and patience; and they enjoy enough autonomy to explore their interests, ask their own questions, and engage in meaningful learning experiences. Only then can they find a balance between freedom and responsibility.

What Expectations Do to Children

Research confirms what many educators sense intuitively: the expectations adults hold about young people shape those young people’s futures — sometimes as self-fulfilling prophecies.

Studies spanning 35 years show that teacher expectations can set in motion a cycle in which initially inaccurate beliefs about a student lead to differential treatment that makes those beliefs come true. The effects are stronger for stigmatised groups and those from disadvantaged backgrounds — precisely the students most at risk of being labelled as troubled, incapable, or beyond reach.

It goes further. When children receive generic messages about ability — ‘students like you struggle with this’ — their motivation and emotional responses deteriorate, particularly after making mistakes. Gender-based stereotypes in STEM lower children’s sense of belonging from as early as preschool. A teacher’s fixed mindset about ability is transmitted to students, feeding their own fixed mindsets, their test anxiety, and their reluctance to take risks.

In other words: how we see children becomes part of how they see themselves.

But the reverse is also true. When parental and educator expectations are high, realistic, and paired with warmth and belief in growth, children’s own expectations, engagement, and academic self-concept improve. The mechanism runs through relationships — through the message, delivered consistently, that you are capable and you are seen.

The question is not what is wrong with this child. The question is what conditions this child has never had the chance to experience. The more we focus on equality of access (and access to what, i would ask?), the less we see the importance of equity in learning - providing the support required to thrive

Psychological Safety Is Not a Programme — It Is a Condition

Educational institutions increasingly offer pastoral support and counselling for student wellbeing. These are valuable. But they address the symptoms of a problem that lives in the classroom itself: the absence of psychological safety.

Psychological safety, as defined by researchers in this field, is not a metric, a mood, or a personality trait. It is an emergent property of conditions — conditions shaped by power structures, collective responses, and the accumulated history of how speaking up has been received. It is, fundamentally, a matter of equity and rights.

The costs of speaking up are not equally distributed. Students who already carry the heaviest social burdens — those from marginalised backgrounds, those with neurodivergent profiles, those who have already been told by adults that they are problems — face the steepest gradients. For them, staying silent is not cowardice. It is a rational response to a history of punishment, humiliation, or dismissal.

A classroom can only be as safe as its least safe member. Average measures of wellbeing hide the outliers — and the outliers are the most important data points. A bridge that nine people cross safely but one falls off is not a safe bridge.

Approaches that treat psychological safety as a communication skill — coaching students to ‘speak up’ or ‘be more confident’ — miss the point entirely. They place the burden on the person with the least power. The work is on the response, not the speaker. We create psychological safety through consistent, repeated demonstrations that speaking up is valued, safe, and has impact.

What Democratic Relationships Actually Produce

The evidence from democratic school environments is unambiguous. Genuinely open, participatory climates — where students have real co-determination in class and school governance, not token involvement — are consistently linked with stronger wellbeing, more positive attitudes toward school, greater civic responsibility, and higher levels of political and community engagement in later life.

The key word is genuinely. Pseudo-participation — where students are consulted but not heard, invited to speak but not truly included — actually harms wellbeing. Young people recognise the difference between being treated as partners and being managed. The former builds agency; the latter confirms that their voices do not matter.

Studies show that when adults offer mutual respect, genuine interest, and ongoing communication, young people experience a sense of empowerment, a belief in their ability to shape their futures, and a motivation to engage — not just academically, but civically. Intergenerational learning communities, where students take leadership roles with adult mentoring, are associated with improved self-reflection, organisational skills, and a transformed sense of responsibility toward others.

What Happened to the Misfits

The three students I described — the teenager in the international school, the child who played the dog, the class clown — did not stay at our schools. For a long time, I carried the weight of feeling we had failed them. Then their parents reached out. And eventually, some of them did too.

What they told me was this: the experience of learning in a safe environment, of being supported by adults, of finding a balance between freedom and responsibility, had given them something the conventional system never had. They had learned to make mistakes and keep going. They had learned to ask for help. They had found ways to express their ideas and speak up about unfairness. They had developed, in the language often used dismissively, soft skills — which are, in fact, the hardest and most essential skills of all.

One became a sales manager for an international company, without a university degree. One is training to become a chef, driven by a passion for tinkering with food. One is working in IT, looking for ways to use technology to strengthen civil society.

The shift was not because of me. It was because they were finally in a place that believed care and dialogue were not supplementary to learning, but central to it.

Young people need to be treated with respect and dignity to flourish and explore their interests. That is not an educational philosophy. It is a human right.

The Shift That Needs to Happen in Adults

The necessary change is not primarily structural, though structures must change. It is internal. It is in how we see children.

As long as we treat young people as passive recipients of content — vessels to be filled, then tested — we will keep producing Passengers, Achievers grinding toward burnout, and Resisters labelled as problems. The system is not failing these children by accident. It is working exactly as designed, and the design is wrong.

What we need instead is a shift toward genuine partnership. The QUEST Guidelines for Teachers in Democratic Education frame this shift precisely: in democratic education, the teacher’s role moves from authority figure to facilitator and co-inquirer. Rather than directing learning, teachers create the conditions for exploration, dialogue, and shared discovery. This redefined role involves offering guidance, modelling curiosity, and supporting students as they navigate their own questions and interests.

This means acknowledging power — who holds it, how it is used, and how it shapes who feels safe to speak and who stays silent. It means recognising that every time we respond to a student with dismissal, impatience, or contempt, we generate data that every other student in the room stores and uses to calculate whether it is safe for them to try.

It also means working on how we communicate. The QUEST Guidelines highlight nonviolent communication and restorative justice as essential tools for educators who want to build classrooms grounded in respect and understanding — where conflicts become opportunities for learning and restoration rather than moments for punishment or exclusion.

It means understanding that there is no such thing as too much psychological safety. A classroom where students feel safe is not a classroom without challenge or high expectations. It is a classroom where challenge and expectation are possible precisely because students do not fear the consequences of trying and failing. High psychological safety and high accountability reinforce each other — they are not opposites.

A Practical Invitation: What Adults Can Do

Drawing on both the research evidence and the QUEST Guidelines for Teachers in Democratic Education, here is what the shift looks like in practice:

• Redefine your role. Stop asking how to make students comply with your lesson plan. Start asking how to create conditions for their curiosity to emerge. Offer guidance; model intellectual humility; share your own questions alongside your knowledge.

• Support the learning process, not just the outcome. Balance honouring students’ personal discovery with the gentle challenge of stepping outside their comfort zone. Approaches such as Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL), Self-Directed Learning (SDL), and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) position students as active protagonists rather than passive recipients.

• Work on your communication. Develop skills in empathic, nonviolent communication. Use restorative practices when conflict arises — not to avoid accountability, but to replace confrontation with dialogue.

• Prioritise wellbeing and relationships. Strong relationships are not supplementary to learning — they are the substrate of it. Integrate Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) into daily practice, model self-care, and attend to your own wellbeing as a teacher. You cannot give psychological safety to others if you do not experience it yourself.

• Ensure inclusion and equity. There is no democratic education without inclusion of differences. Reflect on how your school’s governance and curriculum may create barriers for students from different backgrounds. Actively seek out plural sources and non-dominant perspectives. Psychological safety must reach the least safe person in the room — that is the only measure that matters.

• Strengthen the school community. Cultivate a sense of belonging through daily rituals, collaborative practices, and community events. Promote real student leadership — not tokenistic roles, but genuine responsibility for shared spaces and decisions. Collaborate with families so that democratic values extend beyond the school gate.

• Connect learning to real-world contexts. Learning in a democracy must be connected to life beyond school walls. Link classroom experiences to real-world issues and global challenges. Position young people as agents of change, not just future citizens.

• Advocate for democratic school governance. Promote participatory decision-making and children’s rights within your institution. Join educational networks and share the evidence: democratic education is good for students, and it is good for democratic societies.

• Watch your responses. Psychological safety is built or eroded in the moment after a student speaks, asks a question, or admits they do not know. Your reaction becomes data for everyone watching.

• Treat repair as part of the work. Psychological safety will be damaged — by mistake, pressure, and ordinary friction. The question is not whether it breaks but whether you notice and do the work of rebuilding. Democracy in education flourishes through collaboration, reflection, and the willingness to keep asking whether what we are doing is enough.

Every child arrives at school curious. Our task — as educators, parents, and builders of learning communities — is not to awaken that curiosity. It is to stop extinguishing it.

The Explorers are already in our classrooms. They are waiting for the conditions that allow them to emerge.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D.

Research and Innovation Coordinator for EUDEC

Co-founder of Suvemäe Democratic School, Tallinn, Estonia

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Parents are attending voluntary meetings to develop basic literacy and numeracy, and learning how to support their children’s holistic learning and development. Adults in this community reflect openly on the “violent education” they themselves endured — the silencing, the ranking, the demand for obedience over wonder. And from that honest reckoning, they begin to learn differently. Not just new methods, but new ways of being with children. It could be argued that this is what researchers Encina and Ezeiza, in their work on the Zapatista movement, described through two interconnected concepts: unlearning and disempowerment.

CONCEPT 1 • Unlearning

Actively releasing the deficit narratives, hierarchical habits, and disempowering assumptions absorbed through one’s own education — making space for something genuinely new.

CONCEPT 2 • Disempowerment

Letting go of positional power over children — not as an abdication of responsibility, but as a commitment to co-constructing learning through authentic relationships and shared authority.

These are not abstract ideas. They are daily practices. They ask adults to show up differently: to listen before speaking, to follow a child’s curiosity before directing it, to question what they have always assumed about how children should learn — and why.

What the research tells us

These practices are not just philosophically compelling — they are well evidenced. A growing body of research confirms that warm, trusting relationships between adults and children are among the most powerful predictors of learning, engagement, and well-being. Children who feel seen, cared for, and genuinely connected to the adults in their lives show stronger literacy and numeracy development, greater willingness to take risks, and higher levels of intrinsic motivation.

Child-centred and joint activity approaches — where adults listen, follow, and offer support rather than directing from the front — consistently produce stronger outcomes across skill levels. Making adults’ own curiosity and everyday practices visible to children, without coercive control, turns out to be one of the most effective ways to invite children into learning.

“Pedagogy that is neither purely adult- nor child-centred supports learning and dignity through intergenerational collaboration.”

— Vossoughi et al., 2021

In Sub-Saharan Africa, researchers found that warm, trusting teacher-child relationships improved academic results, confidence, and children’s willingness to attempt difficult tasks — reaffirming that care is not separate from learning. It is the foundation on which learning is built.

Unlearning and disempowerment in practice

Adults who accompany children in free and democratic pedagogical spaces — consciously or not — embark on processes of unlearning and disempowerment. In practice, this means abandoning the exercise of authority for its own sake and the monopolisation of speech, and instead focusing on supporting children’s construction of knowledge and capabilities (Korkmaz & Erden, 2014).

Disempowerment, in this sense, is not a weakening of adult presence. It is, rather, a feature of what Lobrot (1966) described as institutional pedagogy — a process in which all participants engage in active reflection, moving toward collective self-governance. Spanish researchers Encina and Ezeiza (2016) understand it as promoting relationships and interactions “characterised by horizontality and equity, collective decision-making about what and how to learn” (p. 9–10).

Central to this is the child’s need to be accepted — to be treated as a “legitimate other” (Maturana, 1992). Wild and Wild (2002) observe that when children feel genuinely accepted rather than judged, they can dedicate themselves to meeting their own developmental needs through spontaneous and autonomous activity. This creates what researchers describe as grounded trust (Corsaro, 2005; Prout & James, 1997): a trust nurtured by shared decision-making, a dialogic stance in resolving conflicts, and the recognition that children are “agents of meaning-making” (Thornberg & Elvstrand, 2012).

This perspective also challenges the idea that education belongs exclusively to school. It proposes instead a model of learning-as-learning — where students and educators learn from each other, and the pedagogical act is understood as a collective construction of knowledge, capacities, and skills. The role of the adult is not to transmit finished knowledge but to create conditions for curiosity, exploration, and discovery to flourish.

In the prologue to the history of the Albany Free School, Joseph Chilton Pearce (1998) captures the spirit of the accompanying adult:

The adult companion in a free school is equally a student, since guiding children requires a fluid openness to their continuously changing needs, and a recognition of the great diversity that each child shows. Flexibility is as demanding as it is risky. … As Mercogliano indicates, most of the time is dedicated to attending to the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of daily school life, since they believe these are the pillars of life and of learning. (Pearce, 1998)

This figure — the adult as companion and co-learner — is also central to heutagogy (Canning, 2010; Hase & Kenyon, 2007), where the educator becomes a “collaborator, mediator and facilitator of learning, and not merely a transmitter of information; never presenting knowledge as something finished and closed, but creating situations to keep alive the curiosity of students, enabling diverse experiences that encourage reflection, exploration, discovery, imagination and creativity” (García, 2011, p. 66).

According to Encina and Ezeiza (2016), for this vision of disempowerment to take concrete form, it is necessary to make decision-making structures more flexible, develop active listening skills, adapt communicative strategies to those being spoken with, and democratise spaces for discursive participation. The goal is to foster relationships grounded in respect and care which, as Borja and Castells (1997) argue, are decisive factors in creating a sense of proximity — one that enables genuine community participation in decisions that affect shared life. Max-Neef (1994) adds that “it is precisely these spaces (group, community, local) that possess a clearer dimension of human scale, a scale where the social does not annul the individual; on the contrary, the individual can strengthen the social” (p. 88).

In relation to academic activities, adults in these spaces focus on helping children find their passion — a task that, as Gerber (2010) argues, goes beyond helping students identify a “domain” or preparing them for standardised tests. It requires a closer, more respectful personal relationship. Adults take on roles of collaboration, consultation, and facilitation, which often overlap. When acting as collaborators, they work alongside children as if they were peers, holding or adjusting where needed; when acting as consultants, they bring specialised knowledge or skills into projects that have emerged from children’s own interests (Carbonell, 2015; Carpenter, 2009).

Relatedness — the heart of it all

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) gives us a useful framework for understanding why relationships matter so much. It identifies three core psychological needs that must be met for children to thrive as learners:

Of these three, relatedness is the one that is most often quietly neglected — and the one that may matter most. Feeling connected is not just nice to have. It is the safe ground from which children dare to explore, ask questions that feel risky, make mistakes without shame, and discover what they are genuinely interested in.

Relatedness is shaped not only by teachers, but by peers, parents, and the wider community. It is built in the texture of daily interactions — in whether adults get down to the level of children, literally and figuratively. In whether a child’s question is welcomed or dismissed. Whether the difference is celebrated or quietly corrected.

The democratic school in Chiapas understands this intuitively. Rather than feeding on individualistic and consumerist values, it invests in building collective fabric — a web of mutual care and belonging that holds every child’s development. This is not a soft add-on to education. It is its architecture.

Unlearning as an adult practice

For educators and parents wishing to create these conditions, the work begins with ourselves. Professional learning framed as unlearning asks adults to examine and release the deficit narratives, hierarchical habits, and misaligned assumptions absorbed through their own schooling. It asks pre-service teachers to recognise internalised views of communities — multilingual children, working-class families, children whose ways of knowing look different from the dominant norm — and to replace these with asset-based, participatory approaches.

This is not comfortable work. Unsettling deeply held assumptions, relinquishing familiar structures of authority, sitting with uncertainty — these require courage. But the research is clear: where adults do this work, something opens up. Space for more equitable, genuinely shared learning. Room for children to be the authors of their own curiosity.

We do not want children who are simply functional. We want children who love life — who bring their full selves into learning, who are curious, connected, and free.

GET INVOLVED

Help build learning environments where every child belongs

At Unmute Learning, we work with educators, families, and communities to create spaces grounded in safety, wellbeing, inclusion, and equity. If this vision resonates with you, we would love to connect.

Get in touch →

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

References

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Canning, N. (2010). Playing with heutagogy: Exploring strategies to empower mature learners in higher education. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 34(1), 59–71.

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Colliver, Y., Arguel, A., & Parrila, R. (2020). Formal literacy practices through play. International Journal of Early Years Education, 29, 6–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2020.1779668

Corsaro, W. A. (2005). The sociology of childhood. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press.

Earl, S. (2019). Building autonomous learners: perspectives from research and practice using self-determination theory. British Journal of Educational Studies, 67, 269–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1577592

Eberle, J. (2009). Heutagogy: What your mother didn’t tell you about pedagogy and the conceptual age. Proceedings from the 8th Annual European Conference on eLearning, Bari, Italia.

Encina, J., & Ezeiza, A. (2015). Desempoderamiento, juego y oralidad. Autogestin de la vida cotidiana. Sevilla/Donostia: Colectivo de Ilusionistas Sociales.

Encina, J., & Ezeiza, A. (2016). Desempoderamiento, Educación y Complejidad: viviendo la construcción de procesos educativos centrífugos. Toluca: Colegio de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Educación CICE.

Encina, J., & Ezeiza, A. (2017). Sin Poder. Construyendo colectivamente la autogestin de la vida cotidiana. Guadalajara: Editorial Volapuk. https://archive.org/details/SinPoderJavierEncinaYAinhoaEzeiza

Fernandes, A. C., & Gattolin, S. (2021). Learning to Unlearn, and then Relearn. Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, 21, 521–546. https://doi.org/10.1590/1984-6398202117277

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Then I share a personal memory. My first encounter with the word “democracy” at school came when my teacher announced: “Today, we are going to learn about democracy!” As a shy but curious child, I raised my hand and asked, “Why?” The teacher’s reply: “Because I say so — shut up!”

Audiences always laugh. There is something absurd and painfully ironic about being introduced to democracy through an act of authoritarian silencing. I laughed too — until I walked into a classroom a few weeks ago and watched it happen all over again.

A Classroom Frozen in Time

The setting: an English lesson in a teacher-training school in a country widely regarded as having one of the best education systems in the world. The topic: Democracy. I arrived curious and hopeful.

The classroom was arranged in traditional rows — students staring at each other’s backs, a smart screen displaying questions, the teacher setting the tone. The lesson unfolded in three rounds of ‘discuss with your neighbour for 3 minutes’, each cut short after ninety seconds or so. First: Is democracy good or bad? Then: Does democracy need limits? And finally — astonishingly, as an afterthought — what actually is democracy?

The answer to the last question came not from the students, but from a textbook, where the teacher directed them: “Democracy is the rule of the majority. As a minority, you need to respect the rule of the majority and abide by what they decide.”

I looked around the room. The students were apathetic — checking the clock, chatting about unrelated things, or simply sitting in silence, waiting for it to end. No round tables. No exploration of their own experiences as citizens. No reference to the tensions, contradictions, or ongoing struggles that make democracy a living, contested idea rather than a textbook definition. An agenda had to be delivered, and deliver it the teacher did.

Furthermore, the lesson’s historical framing was narrow and largely Eurocentric — Greece, the French Revolution, the United Nations, elections — with no space for the richer and more contested story of democracy worldwide. Missing entirely were the participatory democratic traditions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the brutal irony of France demanding 122 years of reparations from Haiti after refusing to recognise its right to self-determination (and Human Rights!) following the very Revolution being celebrated, or the ongoing struggles of minorities across the globe to have their basic rights upheld against authoritarian majorities.

Democracy, it seemed, was the rule of the majority — full stop — with little curiosity about who gets counted in that majority, and who gets left out.

When the teacher stepped outside to supervise the students during the break — remarking that “they don’t know how to behave and might mess up” — the irony was complete. Young people being taught democracy by an adult who trusted them neither with ideas nor with fifteen minutes of unsupervised time. I seized the 15 minutes to share a different perspective of democratic education with some student teachers who were doing their practice. Not all was lost!

What the Research Tells Us

This classroom is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of a systemic pattern, and the research is unambiguous about its consequences.

The ICCS (International Civic and Citizenship Education Study) 2022 European Report — drawing on surveys of over 66,000 eighth-grade students across 18 European countries — paints a sobering picture. Civic knowledge stagnated or declined across nearly all participating countries between 2016 and 2022; not a single country showed a significant increase, while six showed significant decreases.

The proportion of students falling below the minimum threshold of democratic competency rose from 9% to 13%. Although roughly three-quarters of students expressed support for democracy in principle, only about half believed their political system actually works well, and around 1 out of 3 boys said that women should have limited political rights. Trust in national and European institutions has fallen across many countries, as has the expectation that students will even participate in elections as adults. Socioeconomic inequalities run deep through these results: students from more privileged backgrounds consistently demonstrate stronger civic knowledge, attitudes, and engagement (Damiani, Losito, Agrusti & Schulz, 2024).

These are not abstract statistics. They represent a generation of young people who have been told about democracy rather than invited to practise it.

Scholars who study democratic education are clear about the limits of teacher-directed, transmissive approaches. When democracy is reduced to formal procedures — voting, opinion-forming, individual choice — it treats participation as optional and private, obscuring the collective, contested, and often messy reality of democratic life (Seland & Kjøstvedt, 2024; Sant, 2019). When content about democracy is delivered without democratic methods, there is a real risk of something closer to indoctrination: learners adopt the teacher’s view rather than developing their own capacity to deliberate (Hoggan & Hoggan-Kloubert, 2023). Strongly teacher-directed, transmissive models create reliance on ready-made answers from authorities — echoing, however unintentionally, autocratic tendencies rather than democratic inquiry (Coulter & Herman, 2020; Hoggan-Kloubert et al., 2024).

Even in contexts where the stated goal is democratic or ‘radical’ education, coercive or manipulative methods aimed at producing ‘right’ views undermine the autonomy and plurality that democracy depends on (Hoggan & Hoggan-Kloubert, 2023). And when political actors or institutions use adult education to steer people toward specific orientations — however well-intentioned — they risk paternalism of a different kind (Nohl, 2025).

The classroom I visited that day was not doing anything illegal or even unusual. It was following a standardised curriculum, separating children by age, using an approved textbook, and ticking the required boxes. That is precisely the problem.

The Hidden Curriculum of How We Teach

There is something that researchers call the ‘hidden curriculum’ — the implicit lessons transmitted not through content but through structure, relationship, and power. When we teach democracy in rows, with timed pair discussions that are cut short, from a textbook that reduces a complex political idea to majority rule, we are teaching something. We are teaching that knowledge comes from authorities, that young people’s experiences and questions are secondary to the syllabus, that participation means compliance.

Scholars advocate instead for what some call ‘thick’ or ‘deep’ democracy in education: approaches grounded in dialogue, shared decision-making, futures literacy, and what Carr-Chellman and colleagues describe as ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’ learners (Carr-Chellman et al., 2023; Barcinas & Fleener, 2023; Przybylska & Dobrzyniak, 2024). The educator’s role shifts from transmitter of fixed truths to facilitator of open-ended conversation, multiple perspectives, and shared responsibility (Petrie et al., 2019; Hill et al., 2023).

Democracy, in this view, is not a subject to be taught. It is a practice to be cultivated — and that cultivation begins in the very spaces where young people spend most of their waking hours.

A Century-Old Alternative We Keep Forgetting

The good news is that we do not need to invent a new model. Educators and communities have been building it for over a hundred years. Democratic schools — from the early experimental communities of the early twentieth century to the thriving network of schools affiliated today with EUDEC (the European Democratic Education Community) — have long demonstrated that learning about democracy works best when it is inseparable from living it. Their core practices are worth naming clearly, because they represent not a utopian fantasy but a documented, replicable reality:

Democratic governance: Students and adults participate together in making decisions that shape school life — rules, learning possibilities, conditions, conflict resolution, excursions, budget allocation, and even, in some schools, the hiring and dismissal of staff. Decision-making power is shared, not delegated as a token gesture. Young people experience themselves as genuine stakeholders in their community. This, in other words, means learning about democracy while finding a balance between freedom and responsibility.

Self-directed learning: Rather than delivering a standardised curriculum for standardised assessment, democratic schools centre the development of learning skills and self-knowledge. Young people are supported to discover their own curiosity, pursue their own questions, and take responsibility for their own growth. The goal is not a uniform body of content but a person capable of navigating an uncertain world with confidence and agency.

Age-mixing: Children and young people of different ages learn alongside one another, rather than being sorted into year groups. This promotes learner-initiated learning experiences, within a context of natural scaffolding — older students support younger ones, developing empathy, communication, and leadership — while younger students are stretched and inspired by what they see around them. The social fabric of the school resembles a community, not a factory.

Free play and free time: Unstructured time is not a reward or a break from ‘real’ learning — it is itself essential learning. Free play supports creativity, curiosity, and the development of communicative and social skills that no lesson plan can fully teach. Young people learn to navigate boredom, conflict, imagination, and collaboration on their own terms.

These are not soft or supplementary features. They are the structural conditions under which democratic dispositions — the habits of listening, questioning, negotiating, and taking responsibility — can actually take root. You cannot learn to swim without water. You cannot learn democracy without practising it. This is not to mean that when a conventional school wants to become a more democratic place it needs to reject a timetable, lessons or even exams. After all, a structure is needed! The true power of democratising learning is that the structure is co-created with young people, rather than imposed onto them.

The Stakes Are High

We live in a moment of acute democratic fragility. Political manipulation, polarisation, and the erosion of institutional trust are not abstract threats — they are the lived context of the young people sitting in classrooms right now. The ICCS data shows that civic knowledge is declining, trust is falling, and the expectation of participation is shrinking. Against this backdrop, teaching democracy as ‘the rule of the majority, period’ — from a textbook, in rows, with pair discussions cut short — is not merely uninspiring. It is a missed opportunity of historic proportions.

The challenge is not simply one of pedagogy. It is one of imagination, courage, and political will. Schools are institutions embedded in systems — systems that often reward compliance, standardisation, and measurable outputs over the messy, living work of genuine democratic formation. Changing that requires actors at every level: teachers willing to reimagine their role, school leaders willing to share power with their communities, families willing to trust young people with real responsibility, and local authorities willing to create the conditions — legal, financial, cultural — in which democratic schools can flourish.

An Invitation

Unmute Learning and EUDEC (European Democratic Education Community) believe that the democratisation of learning is not a distant ideal — it is a present possibility. Across Europe and beyond, democratic schools are demonstrating every day that young people, when trusted, rise to that trust. That when given genuine voice, they use it thoughtfully. That when invited into community, they build it.

We invite teachers, school leaders, families, and local authorities to join us in that work. Not to adopt a single model or follow a single script, but to ask the question that the classroom I visited that day never asked: What would it look like if our students actually experienced democracy here, today, in this room?

The conversation starts with that question. We would love to have it with you.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

References

Barcinas, S., & Fleener, P. (2023). Adult Education, Futures Literacy, and Deep Democracy: Engaging Democratic Visioning and Anticipatory Futures For More Sustainable Futures. Adult Learning, 34, 131–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/10451595231166726

Bienengräber, T. (2014). Educating competencies for democracy. Journal of Moral Education, 43, 536–539. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2014.906936

Carr-Chellman, D., Rogers-Shaw, C., & Hill, L. (2023). Democracy and Adult Education Practice: Pathways Towards Renewal. Adult Learning, 34, 127–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/10451595231193420

Coulter, X., & Herman, L. (2020). The Lure of Autocratic Education in a Somewhat Democratic Society. Athens Journal of Education. https://doi.org/10.30958/aje.7-4-1

Damiani, V., Losito, B., Agrusti, G., & Schulz, W. (2024). ICCS 2022 European Report: Young Citizens’ Views and Engagement in a Changing Europe. IEA. https://www.iea.nl/publications/study-reports/national-reports-iea-studies/iccs-2022-european-report

Fleener, M., & Barcinas, S. (2022). Democracy’s Relationship With the Future: Transforming Society’s Promise. Journal of Transformative Education, 20, 176–188. https://doi.org/10.1177/15413446221103174

Hill, A., Appel, M., Fuentes, A., & Nixon, M. (2023). Book Review: Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures. Adult Education Quarterly, 73, 335–337. https://doi.org/10.1177/07417136231181887

Hoggan, C., & Hoggan-Kloubert, T. (2023). The Ethics of Radical and Transformative Education. Adult Education Quarterly, 73, 363–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/07417136231187840

Hoggan, C., Hoggan-Kloubert, T., & Owen, R. (2023). Living Democracy: Social Structures that Promote Civic Learning. Adult Learning, 34, 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/10451595221149765

Hoggan-Kloubert, T., Hoggan, C., & Luthardt, N. (2024). Adult education, democracy, and totalitarianism. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults. https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.2000-7426.4940

Lima, L. (2023). Democratic adult education as a research problem in the context of post-democracy. Adult Education Discourses. https://doi.org/10.34768/dma.vi24.693

Nohl, A. (2025). Directive adult education by political actors. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults. https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.2000-7426.4794

Petrie, M., McGregor, C., & Crowther, J. (2019). Populism, democracy and a pedagogy of renewal. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 38, 488–502. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2019.1617798

Przybylska, E., & Dobrzyniak, M. (2024). Professionalisation of Adult Educators in the Context of Democracy. Viae Educationis: Studies of Education and Didactics. https://doi.org/10.15804/ve.2024.02.02

Sant, E. (2019). Democratic Education: A Theoretical Review (2006–2017). Review of Educational Research, 89, 655–696. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654319862493

Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Losito, B., Agrusti, G., Damiani, V., & Friedman, T. (2024). ICCS 2022 International Report: Education for Citizenship in Times of Global Change. Springer/IEA. https://www.iea.nl/publications/iccs-2022-international-report

Seland, I., & Kjøstvedt, A. (2024). How do teacher educators from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden teach for active democratic participation? Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 69, 607–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2024.2322967

Somewhere in southern Spain, in the sun-warmed courtyard of a democratic school, a child arrived one morning with an idea. Not a worksheet. Not an assignment handed down from above. An idea:

I want to build a geodesic dome.

The school had no expertise in this. No geometry teacher with a unit plan. No carpentry curriculum. What they had was something more important — a culture that took children’s ideas seriously. So they looked around. A parent turned out to be an architect. He said yes. And just like that, a learning project was born — not from an institution’s syllabus, but from a child’s curiosity.

What happened next is worth sitting with. Other children, drawn by the sight of activity and wood and plans being sketched out, began to drift over and join in. They measured lengths of timber. They talked through angles. They argued about how the pieces should fit together. They learned — not because someone told them to, but because they wanted to see this thing get built.

“The mistake wasn’t the end of the project. It was, in a very real sense, the beginning of the deeper one.”

Then, at a critical moment, something went wrong. One of the children had made an error in the calculations. The pieces they had cut with such care didn’t fit together. The dome wouldn’t close.

In a conventional classroom, this might have been a quietly devastating moment — a red mark, a corrected score, a lesson in what happens when you get it wrong. But here, something different unfolded. The mistake wasn’t assigned to its maker as a source of shame. Instead, it became the group’s shared problem. The children gathered around it. They puzzled over what had gone wrong. They re-examined the geometry. They talked about how to fix the pieces, or whether to start again. They navigated frustration, disagreement, and — eventually — resolution.

The mistake wasn’t the end of the project. It was, in a very real sense, the beginning of the deeper one.

What the research tells us about errors

This story might sound like a romantic anecdote, but it maps closely onto what decades of research in learning science actually shows. Making errors — and then working through them with support and feedback — is one of the most powerful drivers of genuine understanding. Studies consistently find that errorful generation followed by corrective feedback can outperform error-free study for long-term memory and comprehension.¹²³

Errors are particularly potent when learners are asked to explain why an answer was wrong, and to compare it with the correct solution. This kind of elaboration — the very thing those children were doing around their mismatched wood — significantly boosts post-test performance.⁴⁵ A wrong calculation, actively examined, teaches geometry in a way that copying a correct formula simply cannot.

Perhaps more importantly, researchers describe conditions that make errors productive: timely and meaningful feedback, tasks that activate prior knowledge, and the opportunity to revisit and resolve earlier mistakes.³⁶ The dome project met all three. The architect-parent was there to guide. The children’s own curiosity was prior knowledge in its most alive form. And the mistake was not swept under the rug — it was returned to, examined, and worked through together.

Yet despite all this evidence, students typically try to avoid errors even in low-stakes settings, while teachers — under institutional pressure — rarely build structured opportunities for deliberate mistake-making into their teaching.⁷⁸ The culture of schooling, in most places, is a culture of getting things right the first time.

Age-mixing, collaboration, and learning as a social act

There’s another dimension to the dome story that deserves attention: nobody assigned those roles. An older child who understood trigonometry worked alongside a younger one who was better at spatial thinking. An architect offered knowledge without taking over. Children who joined mid-project learned from those who had been there from the start.

This is age-mixed, peer-driven, experiential learning — and it is vastly underused in formal education. When learners of different ages share a space and a purpose, knowledge flows in multiple directions. Younger children are exposed to concepts beyond their usual grade level. Older ones consolidate their own understanding by explaining it. Everyone sees that nobody knows everything — and that asking for help is simply part of how learning works.

Experiential learning of this kind — learning by doing, by failing, by rebuilding — has long been understood as one of the deepest forms of knowledge acquisition. But it demands time, uncertainty, and the willingness to not know how things will turn out. These are qualities that standardised systems struggle to accommodate.

The problem with punishment and grades

Imagine for a moment that, instead of gathering around the problem, the adults in that Spanish schoolyard had pulled the child responsible for the miscalculation aside and given them a failing mark. What would have been lost?

Grades and punitive feedback send a clear signal: mistakes have consequences. The rational response, for any child who has absorbed this message, is to minimise risk — to attempt only what you’re already sure of, to avoid the creative leap, to stay close to what the teacher wants rather than follow your own thread of thinking. Research bears this out: fear of failure actively constrains initiative, creativity, and willingness to collaborate.⁹¹⁰ When the penalty for being wrong is humiliation or a bad mark, the impulse is not to try harder next time — it is to try safer.

There is a profound irony here. Grades are meant to communicate learning. But when applied punitively — when a child’s natural process of figuring something out is interrupted by judgment — they can actively suppress the very conditions under which learning flourishes.

What standardised examinations miss

The dome project assessed nothing — in the formal sense. No rubric. No test paper. No score to submit to a ministry of education. And yet what those children learned — geometry, spatial reasoning, measurement, planning, collaboration, conflict navigation, persistence, empathy — was extraordinary.

Standardised examinations are, by design, a narrow instrument. They tend to measure what is easily measurable: recall, pattern-matching, the ability to reproduce information under time pressure. Research across multiple countries and educational systems confirms that they routinely fail to capture creativity, problem-solving, interpersonal skill, long-term growth, or diverse forms of intelligence.⁹¹¹¹²¹³ They narrow curriculum and pedagogy, pushing teachers toward rote instruction and away from open-ended inquiry.¹²¹⁴¹⁵ And they introduce anxiety and inequity — their results are shaped as much by socioeconomic background and access to preparation as by learning itself.¹¹¹⁵¹⁶

This is not to say standardised assessment has no value. At the systems level, it can provide useful accountability data. But when it becomes the dominant logic of an entire school culture — when the question behind every lesson is ‘will this be on the exam?’ — something essential is lost. The child who wants to build a dome doesn’t fit the exam. The child who makes a magnificent, instructive mistake doesn’t fit the exam. The knowledge that emerges from collaborative struggle, from uncertainty, from the slow satisfaction of actually building something — none of this fits the exam.

“Real learning is rarely tidy. It involves not knowing, getting it wrong, trying again, and asking for help.”

Toward learning environments that honour uncertainty

The dome in that Spanish courtyard may or may not have been structurally perfect in the end. It doesn’t really matter. What was built, alongside the physical structure, was something less visible and far more durable: a group of children who had experienced what it feels like to pursue a real problem, to hit a real obstacle, and to find their way through it together.

Real learning is rarely tidy. It involves not knowing, getting it wrong, trying again, and asking for help. It involves the discomfort of a half-built structure and the satisfaction — hard-won — of figuring out why it didn’t fit. It involves the kind of empathy that grows when a group of people choose solidarity over blame.

These are not soft outcomes. They are, arguably, the most important things education can offer — and they are precisely what most standardised systems are least equipped to cultivate.

Learning environments rooted in collaboration, care, and genuine uncertainty are not idealistic luxuries. They are, the evidence suggests, closer to how human beings actually learn.

Work with Unmute Learning

If you are building, strengthening, or reimagining a learning environment — whether a school, a community project, a youth programme, or something that doesn’t have a name yet — Unmute Learning would love to hear from you. We work with educators, parents, learners, and communities to create spaces where collaboration, uncertainty, empathy, and care are not afterthoughts, but foundations. Get in touch with us to begin the conversation.

REFERENCES

1. Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044022

2. Metcalfe, J., Xu, J., Vuorre, M., Siegler, R., Wiliam, D., & Bjork, R. (2024). Learning from errors versus explicit instruction in preparation for a test that counts. British Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12651

3. Mera, Y., Rodríguez, G., & Marin-Garcia, E. (2021). Unraveling the benefits of experiencing errors during learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29, 753–765. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-02022-8

4. Loibl, K., & Leuders, T. (2019). How to make failure productive: Fostering learning from errors through elaboration prompts. Learning and Instruction. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2019.03.002

5. Zhang, Q., & Fiorella, L. (2022). An integrated model of learning from errors. Educational Psychologist, 58, 18–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2022.2149525

6. Wong, S., & Lim, S. (2018). Prevention–Permission–Promotion: A review of approaches to errors in learning. Educational Psychologist, 54, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2018.1501693

7. Pan, S., Sana, F., Samani, J., Cooke, J., & Kim, J. (2020). Learning from errors: students’ and instructors’ practices, attitudes, and beliefs. Memory, 28, 1105–1122. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2020.1815790

8. Steuer, G., Tulis, M., & Peterson, E. (2024). Learning from errors and failure in educational contexts. British Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12723

9. Paramole, O., & Adeoye, M. (2024). Reassessing standardized tests: Evaluating their effectiveness in school performance measurement. Curricula: Journal of Curriculum Development. https://doi.org/10.17509/curricula.v3i2.74535

10. Narciss, S., & Alemdag, E. (2024). Learning from errors and failure in educational contexts: New insights and future directions. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 197–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12716

11. Santos, S. et al. (2025). O desempenho em testes padronizados e a realidade escolar: um diálogo necessário. ARACÊ. https://doi.org/10.56238/arev7n6-288

12. Okafor, J. (2024). Perspectives on the limitations and challenges of standardized testing in education. JURNAL ILMIAH MAHASISWA. https://doi.org/10.22373/jim.v2i2.690

13. Nahar, L. (2023). The effects of standardized tests on incorporating 21st century skills in science classrooms. Integrated Science Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.37251/isej.v4i2.324

14. Hutt, E., & Schneider, J. (2018). A history of achievement testing in the United States. Teachers College Record, 120, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811812001102

15. Mittal, S. (2024). Influence of standardized test for knowledge evaluation. International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research. https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2024.v06i06.31756

16. Lai, Y. (2023). The double effects of standardized testing on students and environment. Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.54097/ehss.v8i.4533

In my last post, I drew a distinction that often surprises people: public education and state-controlled schooling are not the same thing. Public education is a democratic commitment to the collective flourishing of young people; state-controlled schooling is a historical institution with roots in compliance and political utility — one designed, as its Prussian origins make clear, for obedience rather than genuine learning. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and decades of research (links in the previous post), I argued that conventional schooling routinely frustrates the three basic psychological needs — autonomy, competence, and relatedness — that underpin real motivation and wellbeing. The result is a system that measures what is easy to measure, rewards performance over understanding, and produces learners who are disengaged by design, not by choice.

I also looked at what the evidence says actually works. Autonomy-supportive teaching, flexible curricula, democratic governance, and alternative models like Montessori, forest schools, and democratic schools consistently produce stronger intrinsic motivation, deeper learning, and better wellbeing — without sacrificing rigour. The post ended with a provocation: the next time someone says they support public education, it is worth asking which kind they mean, and whether the institution they are defending is actually serving young people or simply managing them.

This article picks up from there. It focuses on what could actually change — particularly when we are willing to unlearn old relational habits based on hierarchy, and to disempower ourselves enough to create real opportunities for young people to take responsibility, develop agency, care for themselves and others, and engage in practices that address the real challenges faced by their communities and by the natural world they inhabit.

What follows is not a blueprint. It is an invitation to consider possibilities. Please — let me know what you think.

At the Level of School Governance

The most entrenched power in conventional schooling sits at the top: governments set curricula, inspectorates evaluate compliance, and school leaders implement whatever is handed down. Students — the people for whom all of this ostensibly exists — occupy the bottom of the hierarchy, receiving decisions made entirely without them.

This arrangement is so normalised that challenging it can feel radical. It is not. It is simply democratic.

Meaningful change at the governance level means:

• Creating participatory school councils with real decision-making power — neither “pijama day” organising committees, nor advisory bodies that get consulted and then politely ignored — for students, parents, and community members.

• Reducing dependence on standardised testing as the dominant measure of school quality, and redirecting accountability toward holistic wellbeing, engagement, and genuine learning outcomes.

• Protecting teacher professional autonomy. Educators who can adapt their practice to the human beings in front of them are consistently more effective than those following a national script.

• Treating learning as a shared public good — an educational commons, co-governed with young people — rather than a service to be standardised, packaged, and delivered.

None of this requires abolishing public funding or dismantling institutions. It requires asking who schools are actually for, and then reorganising decision-making accordingly.

At the Level of Classroom and Curriculum

If governance is where the architecture of control is maintained, the classroom is where young people experience it every day — in timetables they did not choose, in subjects imposed on them, in the particular humiliation of being assessed on someone else’s terms for someone else’s purposes.

The following shifts are well-supported by research, practically achievable, and transformative when genuinely implemented:

• Introduce meaningful student choice in topics, projects, pacing, and how learning is demonstrated. “Meaningful” is the operative word: token choices within a rigidly controlled framework are not autonomy.

• Shift assessment toward formative, authentic forms: portfolios, presentations, peer feedback, self-assessment. These require more thought to design, but they measure more of what actually matters — including the capacity to reflect, communicate, and apply knowledge in real contexts.

• Build curriculum around a small shared core with significant flexibility to accommodate different interests, cultures, languages, and developmental rhythms. One size does not fit all. It never did.

• Move away from rigid age-based groupings toward flexible, mixed-age collaborative structures that reflect how learning actually happens — through mentorship, peer exchange, and community, not through cohort-based competition.

• Bring experiential, project-based, and nature-based learning in from the margins. These are not enrichment extras. They are often the most educationally rich experiences available in schools, and research consistently supports their impact on motivation, wellbeing, and durable understanding.

• Create spaces and opportunities for young people to engage in micro-projects of their choice: learner-initiated learning. The 20% Proposal by Derry Hannam is a great way to start!

At the Level of Teacher Development

Teachers are frequently the scapegoats of failing systems and the unrecognised heroes of working ones. What they rarely are is genuinely supported to develop the kind of practice that the research says matters most.

Changing that requires:

• Making Self-Determination Theory and autonomy-supportive pedagogy core content in initial teacher education — not optional modules or weekend workshops, but foundational professional knowledge. Partly, this is one of the objectives of the Swell Academy, a large-scale Erasmus+ project, where the European Democratic Education Community and partners from organisations and universities in Ireland, Italy, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Spain, and Portugal focus on developing teacher training based on self-determined learning and wellbeing.

• Investing in ongoing professional development in democratic and collaborative teaching methods, with actual time and protected space for genuine reflection.

• Building communities of practice where teachers can experiment, share failure safely, and learn from each other across institutional boundaries. Teachers cannot model intellectual risk-taking for students if the system punishes them for taking any.

Teacher autonomy and student autonomy are not in competition. They are mutually reinforcing. Schools that trust their teachers tend to produce students who trust themselves.

At the Policy Level

Individual teachers and school leaders can do a great deal within the constraints they are given. But the constraints themselves also need to change. Policy is where the boundaries of what is possible are set — and where democratic education either receives the infrastructure it needs or remains a set of inspiring experiments on the margins.

• Recognise children as rights-holders in education legislation and policy, not merely as subjects of adult decisions made on their behalf. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child already requires this. Most systems have yet to take it seriously.

• Fund research and pilots of democratic and self-directed learning models within public systems, similar to Suvemäe, a democratic school within a public school in Tallinn, Estonia. We know these approaches work. What we lack is the infrastructure to normalise them.

• Create regulatory space for educational innovation that does not force schools to choose between creativity and accountability. These are not opposites. Treating them as such is a political choice, not a logical necessity.

• Make equity non-negotiable in all reform. Democratic participation that only reaches already-advantaged families does not democratise education. It reproduces inequality with better branding.

Conclusion: What Brain Science Is Telling Us — and Why We Keep Ignoring It

There is a strange paradox at the heart of contemporary schooling. We live in an era of extraordinary advances in neuroscience and the psychology of learning. We understand, better than any previous generation, how the human brain develops, how memory works, how motivation is built or destroyed, how stress impairs cognition, and how social belonging is a prerequisite — not a bonus — for effective learning. And yet the dominant model of schooling proceeds almost entirely as if none of this had been discovered.

The neuroscience is unambiguous on several points. The brain is not a passive receiver of transmitted information. It is an active, social, emotionally regulated meaning-making organ. It learns best through experience, connection, narrative, and genuine challenge — not through passive reception of decontextualised (mostly theoretical) content under conditions of anxiety and surveillance. Chronic stress — the kind reliably produced by high-stakes testing, rigid hierarchies, and the daily experience of having no meaningful agency — is not a neutral background condition. It actively impairs the prefrontal cortex functions most central to learning: reasoning, attention, self-regulation, and creativity.

We understand how learning works better than ever before. And we keep building schools as if we do not.

The developmental psychology is equally clear. Children do not develop on a fixed calendar that can be managed through age-sorted cohorts. They develop at different rates, in different domains, shaped by different cultural, linguistic, and relational contexts. The practice of sorting children by birth year and routing them through identical content on identical timetables is not an educational decision grounded in evidence. It is an administrative convenience inherited from a model designed for industrial-era mass compliance — and it persists because changing it is institutionally inconvenient, not because it serves learners.

Self-determination is not a philosophical nicety. It is a documented psychological need whose frustration produces measurable harm. Decades of research in Self-Determination Theory show that when young people are denied genuine agency — over what they learn, how they learn it, and how they demonstrate what they know — they do not simply learn less well. They learn to see themselves as incapable of directing their own intellectual lives. That is not an accident. It is a structural outcome of a system that was never designed with their learning at the centre.

What would it look like to actually centre neuroscience and developmental psychology in educational practice? It would look like schools designed around belonging and emotional safety rather than competition and fear. It would look like curricula shaped by genuine curiosity — students’ and teachers’ alike — rather than by what can be measured on a national examination. It would look like assessment that reveals growth rather than ranking performance. It would look like mixed-age communities of practice rather than age-segregated cohorts. It would look, in short, considerably different from what most of us experienced, and from what most children are experiencing right now.

None of the changes proposed in this article require waiting for a political revolution. They require something harder in some ways and easier in others: the willingness to examine our assumptions, to follow the evidence rather than the convention, and to ask honestly whether the structures we have inherited are serving the human beings inside them.

A Final Question Worth Sitting With

When we design our schools, build our curricula, and defend our examination systems — what are we actually trying to achieve?

Are we trying to improve the conditions of life — for young people, for communities, for a planet under pressure? Are we trying to nurture curious, capable, caring human beings who can think clearly, collaborate honestly, and act with courage in a complicated world?

Or are we running schools primarily to generate examination scores that can be displayed in the news, cited in political speeches, and deployed in the service of nationalistic pride? Are we optimising young people for performance on tests that measure a narrow slice of human capacity — not because that is what prepares them for a meaningful life, but because it is what makes governments look good in international comparisons?

These are not comfortable questions. They are necessary ones. Because the choice between them is not abstract. It is made every day, in every policy decision, every curriculum framework, every school inspection, and every classroom. It is made in the assumptions we bring to education about what children are, what learning is, and what schools are for.

If we are serious about education — rather than just schooling — it is time to let the science of learning lead, rather than trail behind the politics of performance.

The good news is that thousands of teachers, schools, and communities around the world are already making the other choice. They are demonstrating, day by day, that schools can be places where young people are genuinely known, genuinely heard, and genuinely supported to grow into the fullness of who they are. That is not utopianism in the pejorative sense. It is the most practical thing imaginable.

The only question is whether the rest of us are willing to learn from them.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

Unmute Learning publishes evidence-informed perspectives on education, digital citizenship, and young people’s rights. Contact us to collaborate and build educational communities that nurture children’s autonomy, self-directedness, and wellbeing.

Introduction: Two Questions That Change Everything

My job as Research and Innovation Coordinator at the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC) takes me to a lot of rooms with a lot of different people — civil society representatives, pre-service teachers, professors, ministry staff, think-tank researchers. I have a little routine I do at the start of almost every session with student teachers. I ask: “Who here is in favour of public education?” Every hand goes up. Sometimes all of them. Then I ask: “Who is in favour of state-run schooling?”

The room goes quiet. Faces shift. “Isn’t it the same thing?” someone usually asks.

It’s not. And that confusion matters more than most people realise.

Education is a lifelong process. It happens in kitchens and playgrounds and libraries and forests and informal conversations. Schooling, as most of us experienced it — with its age-sorted classrooms, standardised curricula, bells, grades, and adults making every meaningful decision — is not “education” by nature. It’s a historical invention, a cultural product, and a deeply ideological one at that.

The school model most of the world uses today was designed in Prussia around the 1750s, originally by August Hermann Francke - a military archbishop - with the explicit goal of producing a compliant, obedient population for his Kaiser Frederick. It was later imported to the United States by Horace Mann — who, notably, homeschooled his own children — and spread globally as American influence expanded in the mid-twentieth century. It was built for a purpose. Just not the purpose we’ve been told.

You don’t need a Ph.D to notice the contradictions. We sort children by birth year as if humans develop on a fixed schedule. We design lessons around knowledge that’s often outdated by the time students might use it. We claim to be preparing young people for democratic life while running institutions where they have almost no say in anything. We measure what’s easy to measure and call it learning. And we repeat practices (based on submission, competition, fear, and individualism) that the science of learning consistently tells us don’t work.

This article is an attempt to name that gap clearly, look at what the research actually says, and imagine something better.

1. Public Education and State-Controlled Schooling Are Not the Same Thing

Here’s a useful thought experiment. Imagine a publicly funded school that is genuinely governed by its community — teachers, students, parents, and local residents all have a real voice in how it works. The curriculum is flexible, adapted to the children who actually show up. Learning is assessed through portfolios and projects, not high-stakes exams. Students have meaningful choices about what, how and with whom they learn.

Now imagine a different school, also publicly funded, where the curriculum is dictated nationally, teachers are evaluated on test scores, students have no say in school rules, and the main goal is performance on standardised exams. Both schools are “public.” But they are doing very different things.

Public education, at its best, is a democratic commitment: the idea that a society takes collective responsibility for the learning and flourishing of all its young people. State-controlled schooling is something more specific: a bureaucratic arrangement in which governments decide what children should learn, how they should be taught, and how their progress should be measured — usually with goals that go well beyond education itself: obedience to authority, discipline when following orders, banal patriotism to defend the motherland.

Research confirms that this isn’t just a semantic difference — it has real consequences for how schools work. Public schools are usually funded by the state, but vary enormously in how much the government actually controls what happens inside them (Hudson, 2007; Hall et al., 2024). In recent decades, many systems have shifted from regulating inputs (what gets taught, who teaches it) to regulating outputs — test scores, league tables, inspection reports — which creates a new kind of centralised control while appearing to give schools more freedom (Hudson, 2007; Wermke & Prøitz, 2019).

Example: England’s academy schools were introduced partly as a way to free schools from local authority control — more autonomy, the argument went. But research shows they remain tightly steered by national accountability frameworks, Ofsted inspections, and performance targets. The governance changed; the control didn’t disappear (West et al., 2023; Neri & Pasini, 2023).

There’s also a less comfortable history to reckon with. Mass public schooling has been used, repeatedly, for explicit political purposes: cementing national identity after conflicts, producing loyal citizens, and in more extreme cases, direct indoctrination (Dieudé & Prøitz, 2022; Lott, 1998). Banning books in schools has become a pastime for some U.S. lawmakers and ideological leaders. This isn’t only a story about authoritarian regimes. It’s built into the structure of schooling as an institution — one that was, from the start, designed to shape behaviour and belief, not just transmit knowledge. That was Franke’s task, nothing else.

The distinction that actually matters isn’t public versus private. It’s between systems designed around genuine human development and systems designed around compliance and standardisation. One can exist in publicly funded schools. The other often pretends to be the first.

2. What Controlling Schools Actually Do to Young People

There’s a well-established framework in psychology called Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. The core idea is straightforward: people thrive when three basic needs are met. They need to feel that their actions are genuinely their own ( autonomy ). They need to feel capable and effective ( competence ). And they need to feel genuinely connected to the people around them ( relatedness ) (Deci & Ryan, 2015; Ryan & Deci, 2020).

These aren’t optional extras. Decades of research show they are the foundation of sustainable motivation, wellbeing, and real learning. And the research on conventional schooling is consistent: it tends to frustrate all three.

The Autonomy Problem

Think about what a typical school day asks of a child. Arrive at a fixed time. Sit in a specific seat. Follow a timetable set by someone else. Study subjects chosen by someone else. Be assessed in ways chosen by someone else. Comply, perform, repeat. The few moments of genuine choice — which elective to take, which topic to write about for an essay — exist within a structure of near-total external control.

Unsurprisingly, research shows this pattern is directly linked to need frustration, low motivation, and sometimes outright defiance (Wehmeyer et al., 2021; Vasconcellos et al., 2020; Eckes et al., 2018; Deci & Ryan, 2015). When teaching becomes controlling — when it relies on pressure, surveillance, and threats — students don’t just disengage. They resist. This has been found in physical education, science, language learning, and across subjects and cultures (Haerens et al., 2015; Vasconcellos et al., 2020).

Example: A study of children learning English in a collectivist school setting found that fear of making mistakes — and specifically fear of being scolded by teachers — was a significant barrier to participation and agency in the classroom (Hargreaves & Elhawary, 2021). The children weren’t disengaged because they didn’t want to learn. They were disengaged because the environment made trying feel dangerous.

Traditional disciplinary practices also make genuine back-and-forth between teachers and students structurally difficult. The power differential isn’t incidental — it’s architectural. It’s built into the raised teacher’s desk, the rows of chairs facing the board, the rule that you raise your hand to speak, but the teacher can interrupt whenever it is deemed (Polivanova & Bochaver, 2022).

The Grades Trap

Most of us have been through it: studying hard for an exam, performing reasonably well, and then promptly forgetting almost everything within a few weeks. That’s not a personal failure. It’s what happens when motivation is external — when you’re learning for the grade rather than for the learning itself.

Heavy reliance on grades and extrinsic rewards, which is the daily currency of most schools, predictably erodes intrinsic motivation and self-determination (Ryan & Deci, 2020; Lillard, 2019). Research directly comparing teacher-directed instruction with self-directed learning finds that teacher-directed approaches produce no meaningful gain in autonomous motivation, while self-directed learning consistently increases students’ sense of ownership over their learning, their intrinsic interest, and their wellbeing (Schweder & Raufelder, 2023; Gupta et al., 2024; Saad & Abdullah, 2025).

Example: In high-stakes testing systems like those in South Korea, Japan, or the UK’s GCSE model, research consistently finds that students become increasingly driven by external pressure as exams approach — and that this narrowing of motivation is accompanied by higher anxiety, lower creativity, and a diminished sense of what learning is actually for (Ryan & Deci, 2020; Deci & Ryan, 2015). Students learn to perform, not to understand, or learn how to learn better, collaborate with others, think critically and understand the world as a complex system.

The consequences don’t stay in school. Young people who have been educated primarily through controlling, reward-focused systems often arrive in adulthood with a diminished sense of themselves as capable, curious, self-directed learners. That’s not a side effect. It’s a predictable outcome of a system that was never really designed with their learning in mind.

3. What Actually Works: Self-Direction, Autonomy, and Wellbeing

Here’s the good news: the research on what helps is just as consistent as the research on what harms.

When students are given real choice, when the purpose behind learning activities is explained rather than just imposed, when teachers acknowledge how students feel and treat their perspectives as worth taking seriously — motivation increases, wellbeing improves, and learning deepens (Guay, 2021; Yengkopiong, 2025; Ryan & Deci, 2020). This kind of teaching, called autonomy-supportive teaching, has been studied extensively across subjects, age groups, and countries, and the results are remarkably stable (Vasconcellos et al., 2020; Eckes et al., 2018; Muth & Lüftenegger, 2024; Duchatelet & Donche, 2019).

Example: A meta-analysis of SDT research in physical education — covering over 100 studies — found that autonomy-supportive teaching styles consistently produced higher intrinsic motivation, better emotional experience, and greater engagement compared to controlling styles (Vasconcellos et al., 2020). The subject was PE, but the pattern holds across every subject researchers have looked at.

One important nuance: structure and guidance are not the enemy of autonomy. Students benefit from clear frameworks, materials, and support. What matters is whether that structure comes with genuine autonomy support or with control. Structure combined with control — telling students what to do and pressuring them to comply — does not improve motivation. Structure combined with autonomy support — offering guidance while also giving genuine choice and rationale — does (Eckes et al., 2018).

What Alternative Models Show Us

Some of the most compelling evidence comes from schools and educational settings that have deliberately moved away from the conventional model.

Montessori schools, which give children significant choice over their activities and pace of learning, consistently show higher self-determination, stronger intrinsic motivation, and greater student wellbeing than matched conventional schools (Lillard, 2019). This isn’t because Montessori children are different. It’s because the environment is different.

Example: In Montessori classrooms, children of different ages work together on projects they choose themselves, moving around freely and returning to materials at their own pace. There are no gold stars, no grade-based rankings. Research finds that these children not only show higher intrinsic motivation — they also show stronger executive function and social skills (Lillard, 2019).

Self-directed education settings — where students have substantial agency over what, when, and how they learn, and where adults act as resources rather than authorities — show similarly striking results. A recent study found that young people in self-directed education settings reported strong intrinsic motivation and significantly better wellbeing than they had experienced in prior mainstream schooling (Carden, 2025).

Example: Democratic schools like Sudbury Valley in Massachusetts or Summerhill in England operate with no fixed curriculum and no compulsory classes. Students decide what they learn, for how long, and with whom. School meetings — attended equally by students and staff — make all institutional decisions. Critics predict chaos. Research finds high levels of self-direction, wellbeing, and — in follow-up studies — successful adult lives (Morrison, 2024; Marjanovic-Shane et al., 2023).

Even more modest innovations, like flipped classroom models and hybrid approaches that genuinely redistribute agency to students, show improved self-determination outcomes — as long as the shift in agency is real, rather than just a new packaging for the same top-down content (Hu et al., 2022; Schweder & Raufelder, 2023).

4. What Genuinely Democratic Schools Look Like

By now a pattern should be clear: the problem with conventional schooling isn’t any single bad practice. It’s the architecture. Changing one element while leaving the rest intact — adding a student council here, a “choice” period there — produces cosmetic change, not real transformation. Research on democratic education is blunt about this: you can’t bolt democracy onto an authoritarian institution and expect it to take root (Sant, 2019; Marjanovic-Shane et al., 2023).

What does real transformation require? The evidence points to changes across four interconnected areas.

Who Gets to Decide: Governance and Power

Genuine student voice is not a suggestion box or a student council that gets consulted and then ignored. It means structured roles in actual school decision-making — school meetings with real authority, governance councils where students help set the rules, projects that students initiate and lead (Lee, 2025; Morrison, 2024; Moreno-Romero et al., 2024).

Example: At many democratic schools, weekly school meetings bring together students and staff with equal voting rights on institutional decisions — from how shared spaces are used to how conflicts are resolved. Students who participate in these structures show significantly higher civic engagement and self-efficacy (Marjanovic-Shane et al., 2023).

Oftentimes, shared governance also means including parents and community members, not as passive recipients of newsletters, but as genuine partners in curriculum and school culture (Meireles & Neto, 2023; Allen & Gann, 2022). And it means being honest about who gets excluded from participation: democratic practices that only reach already-advantaged families don’t democratise anything (Sant, 2019; Charteris & Smardon, 2019).

What Gets Learned: Flexible, Living Curricula

A democratic curriculum isn’t the absence of content. It’s a curriculum flexible enough to be shaped by the actual people doing the learning — their interests, cultures, languages, and ways of making sense of the world — while retaining a small shared core that provides common ground (Adekanbi & Oladele, 2024; Walia, 2024; Daud et al., 2024).

Holistic aims matter here: intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development, not just exam performance (Farid et al., 2025; Suharto et al., 2025; Li, 2025; Praviţchi, 2025). This isn’t soft or unambitious. It’s a recognition that a person who leaves school with high test scores but no curiosity, no social and emotional skills, and no sense of themselves as a learner has not been well educated.

Example: Forest schools in the UK and Scandinavia, which move much of their learning outdoors and allow children to set the agenda for exploration, have shown improvements in wellbeing, self-regulation, and intrinsic motivation — without any decline in literacy or numeracy outcomes (Suharto et al., 2025). The children are not learning less. They’re learning differently, and more durably.

How Learning Happens: Pedagogy and Assessment

Student-centred learning — projects, debates, collaborative problem-solving, experiential and nature-based work — develops autonomy, critical thinking, and social skills in ways that passive, teacher-fronted instruction simply cannot (Farid et al., 2025; Bhardwaj et al., 2025; Tendo, 2025). This doesn’t mean teachers disappear. It means they change role: from deliverers of content to facilitators of learning, designers of environments, mentors.

Assessment needs to catch up. Portfolios, presentations, peer feedback, and self-assessment are not easier than exams — they’re often harder, and they measure things that actually matter: the ability to reflect, communicate, collaborate, and apply knowledge in context (Li, 2025; Bhardwaj et al., 2025; Tendo, 2025).

Example: In some Finnish schools — which consistently rank among the best-performing in international comparisons — formal standardised testing is minimal, especially in early years. Assessment is primarily formative and dialogic: teachers talk with students about their learning rather than ranking them against each other. Finland also gives teachers significant professional autonomy to adapt their practice. The result is high performance and high wellbeing — a combination that high-stakes testing cultures struggle to achieve.

Teachers can’t do any of this without genuine institutional support: training in democratic and student-centred methods, professional freedom to experiment and adapt, and time for collaboration and reflection (Sant, 2019; Adekanbi & Oladele, 2024; Marjanovic-Shane et al., 2023). Teacher autonomy and student autonomy are not in competition. They reinforce each other.

Who Young People Are: Rights, Not Just Recipients

Underneath all of this is a more fundamental question: do we actually believe children are people? Not future people, not people-in-training — people, right now, with perspectives, preferences, rights, and a legitimate stake in the institutions that shape their daily lives?

Recognising children as rights-holders — not just recipients of adult decisions made on their behalf — is not a radical idea. It’s in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which most countries have ratified. What’s radical is actually acting on it (Esteban, 2022). Schools that do so tend to look quite different from schools that don’t.

Conclusion: What Kind of Education Are We Defending?

Public education and state-controlled schooling are not the same thing. The first is a democratic commitment — the idea that society takes collective responsibility for the flourishing of its young people. The second is a historical institution with roots in social control, compliance, and political utility, one that has too often been dressed up as the first.

The research reviewed here makes the stakes concrete. Controlling, test-pressured, reward-focused schooling reliably frustrates autonomy, erodes intrinsic motivation, and damages wellbeing. Autonomy-supportive, student-centred, democratically governed learning does the opposite. We are not short of evidence. We are short of political will.

The good news is that the alternatives already exist. Democratic schools, forest schools, Agile Learning Centers, Sociocratic schools, Montessori schools, self-directed education communities, autonomy-supportive classrooms inside ordinary state schools — thousands of teachers and communities around the world are already demonstrating that learning can be more alive, more equitable, and more genuinely human. The question is whether we’re willing to learn from them.

So the next time someone asks “Are you in favour of public education?” — it might be worth pausing. The more important question is: what kind of education are we actually defending? And does it deserve defending?

The next article will offer practical suggestions for teachers and schools. This is not about utopianism in its negative sense — dreaming of solutions that will never materialize. On the contrary, Utopia represents a mindset committed to transforming the status quo, rooted in the belief that a better world is possible. Contact us at Unmute Learning (Estonia) and Evolving Education Consultancy (worldwide) to collaborate and build educational utopias that nurture children’s autonomy, self-directedness, and well-being.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

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Learner agency is not a new idea. But translating it from aspiration to lived reality requires more than goodwill. It requires structural change, deliberate pedagogy, and a willingness on the part of educators, administrators, and policymakers to genuinely share power. This article explores what the research tells us about how exploratory learner inquiry can serve as an entry point to that transformation — and what it looks like when it works.

From Passive Recipients to Active Shapers

For too long, schools have been organized around a fundamental asymmetry: adults design learning, and students receive it. Curriculum, timetables, assessment frameworks, even the physical arrangement of furniture — all have traditionally been determined without meaningful student input. The implicit message is clear: you are here to be educated, not to shape what education means, what skills you need, or what interests you have.

Research consistently shows that this model underestimates learners and underserves them. Studies across primary, secondary, and higher education demonstrate that when students engage in open-ended, exploratory inquiry — particularly around issues that matter to them — they develop not only content knowledge but what researchers call transformative agency: the capacity to identify problems, generate solutions, and take meaningful action in the world (Kirk, 2024; Cook-Sather, 2020).

A landmark example comes from primary science classrooms in Australia, where students were given the freedom to investigate a real health issue — microbes discovered in a lost-property box. Rather than simply completing a pre-designed experiment, students identified the problem themselves, designed their own tests, and ultimately proposed health policy changes to their whole school. This is what researcher Marg Kirk (2024) calls “impactful inquiry”: student-driven investigation in “matters that matter,” leading directly to real-world change.

“When students are genuinely empowered to investigate problems that affect their own lives, they don’t just learn about the world — they begin to change it.”

Inquiry as the Entry Point to Governance

Exploratory inquiry does more than deepen content understanding. When structured thoughtfully, it creates what Siry, Wilmes, and Haus (2016) call “participatory structures” — classroom/school arrangements in which students negotiate methods, reshape teacher-student roles, and collectively steer the direction of their learning. These structures are not simply nice to have; they are the scaffolding through which genuine governance becomes possible.

In Canada, year-long knowledge-building projects with Grade 5 students showed that when learners co-formulate “big questions” and are given agency to reframe investigation pathways, they develop what researchers Tao and Zhang (2021) describe as epistemic agency — the power not just to answer questions, but to decide which questions are worth asking. Students collectively steered the depth, direction, and organisation of a community-wide inquiry into human body systems, reshaping shared norms and groupings in the process (Zhang et al., 2022). Similar work is facilitated by Christopher Sarkonak at his high school in Canada, where learners are empowered to engage in meaningful learning experiences in Physics.

In the UK, secondary students in a progressive school involved in sustainability projects went further still: they designed and ran community initiatives, and teachers reported genuine power shifts — finding themselves in the unfamiliar position of listening and ceding control (Vare, 2021). These are not anecdotes from progressive outliers. They are documented outcomes of replicable pedagogical approaches.

Exploratory Inquiry Around the World: Six Inspiring Examples

Learner agency is flourishing in diverse cultural contexts. Here are five examples of exploratory student inquiry that have produced remarkable results.

1. Youth Participatory Action Research in the United States

In urban schools across the US, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has become a powerful tool for educational equity. Students from marginalized communities — including those with disabilities and from minority ethnic backgrounds — have used research to define problems in their own schools, produce reports, make policy recommendations, and become sustained actors in educational reform (Campano et al., 2020; Mojtar-Mendieta et al., 2025). In one notable project, students created inclusive education guides that were subsequently adopted by their school district, giving their inquiry a direct policy impact.

2. Wellbeing Research by Students in South Australia

In a Positive Education initiative at a secondary school in South Australia, students led a participatory action research project into their own wellbeing. Rather than passively completing a wellbeing program designed by adults, they examined what wellbeing meant to them, identified gaps in the school’s approach, and co-designed interventions with staff. The result was a set of school practices grounded in student expertise — a model that showed measurably stronger outcomes for student engagement and belonging (Halliday et al., 2019).

3. Knowledge-Building Communities in Canada

Researchers at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) have developed Knowledge Building pedagogy, in which students collectively construct understanding as a community of inquiry. In one year-long Grade 5 science project, students co-configured the entire inquiry arc: they generated their own questions about human body systems, tracked the evolution of their understanding, and held public “knowledge-building talks” to advance the class’s shared ideas. Teachers acted as facilitators and fellow learners rather than knowledge transmitters. The model has since expanded to dozens of schools across Canada, China, and Singapore (Tao & Zhang, 2021; Zhang et al., 2022).

4. Student-Led Sustainability Projects in the United Kingdom

In England and Wales, secondary students engaged in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) have been given ownership of real community challenges — from reducing food waste to redesigning school outdoor spaces. A study by Vare (2021) found that these projects led to genuine changes in school culture: students reported feeling listened to for the first time, while teachers acknowledged meaningful shifts in power dynamics. Critically, the most successful projects were those where students had control not just over execution, but over problem identification and goal-setting.

5. Co-Research for Decolonisation in South African Higher Education

At universities in South Africa and the UK, students have been positioned as co-researchers in projects examining how to decolonise teaching and learning. Rather than being the subjects of educational research, students become partners in designing studies, collecting and interpreting data, and shaping institutional recommendations. This approach, documented by Timmis et al. (2024), treats students as experts in their own learning experiences — a posture that has led to substantive curriculum reforms and new frameworks for inclusive academic practice.

6. Suvemäe: A School Within a Public School

Suvemäe is a school in Estonia where democracy is lived, not just taught. Young people and adults meet together as genuine equals to make decisions about school life, while students also have their own dedicated meeting space to shape the rules, learning arrangements, timetable, and activities that define their days. It’s not token participation — it’s real agency, based on Student Voice by Laura Lundy, where young people’s voices carry the same weight as those of adults, fostering a deep sense of ownership and belonging in the community they help build.

Breaking Systemic Limitations: What Needs to Change

Despite compelling evidence, the gap between aspiration and systemic reality remains wide. Systematic reviews reveal a troubling pattern: students are frequently consulted on low-stakes matters — the color of the canteen walls, the theme of a school event — while deeper co-research and genuine decision-making remain rare (Geurts et al., 2023; Stenalt, 2020). This is not agency. This is what Alison Cook-Sather calls the difference between being “heard” and being “heeded.”

Breaking this pattern requires attention to several systemic constraints:

• Curriculum rigidity: High-stakes testing cultures leave little room for open-ended inquiry. Schools need protected time and structural flexibility to enable student-driven investigation without it being treated as a deviation from “real learning.” Learner-initiated learning, like the 20% proposal by Derry Hannam make it possible for young people to engage in meaningful learning that relates to their interests and passions.

• Teacher preparation and confidence: Supporting student agency requires a fundamentally different kind of teacher presence — one that alternates between authority and responsiveness (Kim, 2021). Many educators have not been trained for this role and need sustained professional development and peer support. The questions is: are universities listening?

• Tokenistic participation: Involving students in focus groups or advisory panels without genuinely acting on their input damages trust and reinforces cynicism. Authentic agency requires transparency about how student perspectives inform decisions, and honest feedback when they do not (Stenalt & Lassesen, 2021).

• Inequity in access: Student voice initiatives often amplify already-privileged voices. Genuine learner agency must be attentive to who gets to participate, ensuring structures actively include students from marginalized communities, those with additional learning needs, and younger children (Campano et al., 2020).

• Learning analytics and data transparency: In digital learning environments, data about students’ learning is rarely shared with learners themselves - the same goes with learning goals or competence frameworks in “analog” learning environments. A growing body of research calls for students to have access to and shared interpretation of their own learning data — a shift that can meaningfully extend agency into the digital sphere (Hooshyar et al., 2023).

Involving Every Actor: A Whole-School Approach

Learner agency cannot be the responsibility of individual teachers alone. It requires a whole-school commitment that involves every actor in the learning ecosystem.

Students

Students need explicit invitations to critique and redesign learning practices — not as a one-off event, but as a sustained dimension of school culture. Action research on student governance shows that when students are supported to investigate school issues over time, they develop co-agency and a genuine sense of ownership over their institution, while their learning motivation boosts (Lee, 2025; Charteris & Thomas, 2017). This requires trust on the part of adults, and skill-building on the part of learners.

Teachers

Teachers are not diminished by sharing power with students — they are freed to play a richer and more impactful role. Research on dialogic teaching highlights the importance of “dialogic teacher talk” that moves fluidly between authority and responsiveness: teachers who can assert knowledge and expertise while also genuinely listening, following student leads, and being surprised by student ideas (Kim, 2021; Moses et al., 2020). Professional learning communities, coaching, and structured reflection time are essential supports.

School Leaders and Administrators

School leaders set the conditions under which agency flourishes or withers. This means moving beyond compliance-based governance to co-designing school policies with student input; creating flexible timetabling that accommodates long-term inquiry projects and stops reducing learning to age-segregated groups; allocating resources for teacher professional development in facilitative pedagogy; and establishing clear, transparent mechanisms through which student perspectives shape real decisions (Geurts et al., 2023).

Families and Communities

Learner agency does not stop at the school gate. Community-based research approaches, particularly in underserved communities, have shown that when students investigate problems in their neighborhoods — housing, health, environmental issues — and bring those investigations back to school, the boundary between learning and living dissolves in the most productive way (Campano et al., 2020). Families and communities become co-educators, and schools become genuine community assets.

The Conditions That Make It Work

Research is consistent about what makes learner agency sustainable rather than a short-lived experiment. The key conditions include:

1. Open-ended structures that resist premature closure — tasks without predetermined answers, investigations without fixed endpoints.

2. Co-designed curriculum in which students participate in shaping what is studied, how it is studied, and how learning is assessed.

3. Explicit invitations to critique — students actively encouraged to challenge existing practices, not just comply with them.

4. Recognition of students as experts in their own lives and learning — a posture that requires genuine epistemic humility from adults.

5. Transparency about how student input influences decisions, with honest feedback when it does not — to avoid the drift toward tokenism.

6. Sustained, not episodic, commitment — agency built through one-off workshops or isolated projects tends not to persist. Cultural change requires structural change.

A Different Kind of School Is Already Here

The evidence gathered across more than a decade of research in multiple countries and contexts is unambiguous: when students are given genuine opportunities to ask real questions, investigate real problems, and act on real findings, something profound happens. They become more engaged, more motivated, and more capable. Their schools become more equitable and more responsive. And the adults around them become better educators.

The systemic barriers are real — standardised testing, rigid curricula, under-resourced teachers, and cultures of compliance have deep roots. But the examples profiled here demonstrate that they are not insurmountable. In classrooms and schools in Australia, Canada, Estonia, the UK, the US, and South Africa, a different kind of school is already taking shape: one in which students are not prepared for a future someone else has imagined for them, but are actively building the future they want to inhabit.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

That is what Unmute Learning is for. Not to describe an ideal — but to amplify the voices of those already living it.

References

Campano, G., Ghiso, M., Badaki, O., & Kannan, C. (2020). Agency as collectivity: Community-based research for educational equity. Theory Into Practice, 59, 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1705107

Charteris, J., & Thomas, E. (2017). Uncovering ‘unwelcome truths’ through student voice: teacher inquiry into agency and student assessment literacy. Teaching Education, 28, 162–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2016.1229291

Cook-Sather, A. (2020). Student voice across contexts: Fostering student agency in today’s schools. Theory Into Practice, 59, 182–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1705091

Geurts, E., Reijs, R., Leenders, H., Jansen, M., & Hoebe, C. (2023). Co-creation and decision-making with students about teaching and learning: a systematic literature review. Journal of Educational Change, 25, 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-023-09481-x

Halliday, A., Kern, M., Garrett, D., & Turnbull, D. (2019). The student voice in well-being: a case study of participatory action research in positive education. Educational Action Research, 27, 173–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2018.1436079

Hooshyar, D., Tammets, K., Ley, T., Aus, K., & Kollom, K. (2023). Learning analytics in supporting student agency: A systematic review. Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.3390/su151813662

Kim, M. (2021). Student agency and teacher authority in inquiry-based classrooms: Cases of elementary teachers’ classroom talk. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 20, 1927–1948. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-021-10233-7

Kirk, M. (2024). Student voice and agency for transformative change in matters that matter: Impactful inquiry in primary science. The Australian Educational Researcher, 52, 411–430. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-024-00721-4

Lee, J. (2025). Centering student voice in school: An action research. Korean Educational Research Association. https://doi.org/10.30916/kera.63.1.449

Mojtar-Mendieta, L., Rascón-Gómez, T., & Calderón-Almendros, I. (2025). Students as subjects: Resistance, youth agency, and inclusive education through participatory action research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 38, 338–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2025.2454281

Moses, L., Rylak, D., Reader, T., Hertz, C., & Ogden, M. (2020). Educators’ perspectives on supporting student agency. Theory Into Practice, 59, 213–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1705106

Siry, C., Wilmes, S., & Haus, J. (2016). Examining children’s agency within participatory structures in primary science investigations. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 10, 4–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2016.01.001

Stenalt, M. (2020). Researching student agency in digital education as if the social aspects matter. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46, 644–658. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1798355

Stenalt, M., & Lassesen, B. (2021). Does student agency benefit student learning? A systematic review of higher education research. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47, 653–669. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1967874

Tao, D., & Zhang, J. (2021). Agency to transform: How did a Grade 5 community co-configure dynamic knowledge building practices in a yearlong science inquiry? International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 16, 403–434. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-021-09353-7

Timmis, S., Mgqwashu, E., Trahar, S., Naidoo, K., Lucas, L., & Muhuro, P. (2024). Students as co-researchers: Participatory methods for decolonising research in teaching and learning in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 29, 1793–1812. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2024.2359738

Vare, P. (2021). Exploring the impacts of student-led sustainability projects with secondary school students and teachers. Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13052790

Zhang, J., Tian, Y., Yuan, G., & Tao, D. (2022). Epistemic agency for co-structuring expansive knowledge-building practices. Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21717

Whenever I’m not travelling for work, I try to spend one day a week volunteering at Suvemäe — a democratic school within a public school that I co-founded in 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia, and where my daughter is now studying in the 9th class. The school serves around 70 families and is built around a deceptively radical premise: that young people are capable of meaningful participation in the decisions that shape their learning lives.

Suvemäe makes this real through three core strategies — project days driven by learner-initiated ideas, negotiated learning that weaves curriculum content together with students’ own interests, and two school meetings per week where the community gathers to decide on things that matter to them. It is not a perfect school, but it is, I think, an honest one.

Last year, students made a proposal that stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it. They argued that one of the two weekly meetings should be for students only. No adults. Adults would be invited to join at the end of that meeting — to hear what had been decided and to integrate those decisions into how the school runs.

The proposal passed.

A Thursday Surprise

This past Thursday, I arrived expecting to walk into a full school meeting — staff and students together. Instead, I found only students. I confirmed with one of the kids: yes, this was the students-only meeting. I started to gather my things to leave.

Most of the students asked me to stay.

The meeting facilitator — a twelve-year-old — paused the proceedings and asked the group: “Does anyone have any objection to Charlie staying in the meeting?”

No objections were raised. I stayed. And what I witnessed over the next thirty minutes quietly confirmed something in my understanding of what democratic education can actually look like.

What Happened in That Room

The meeting opened with a practical matter: a large room in the school had recently been divided into two, creating a new quiet classroom, and the community needed to agree on rules for how it would be used.

Each age group had already met separately during the week — younger students, older students — to discuss their ideas and bring them to the whole-school meeting. One by one, class representatives shared their suggestions. Then the group voted. The rules were agreed. When it came to consequences for breaking them — losing access to the quiet room for two weeks — there was broad consensus, reached calmly, without drama.

Then came the moment I found most striking. The facilitator asked: “Who can make a poster to put on the door, so everyone knows the rules?”

One student invited his mates to join him in making the poster. The other two agreed. Three students volunteered. The room moved on.

Watching this, I kept thinking about how often I have sat in adult meetings where something similar needed doing — and how much longer it took, how much more complicated it became, how many follow-up emails were needed to confirm who had agreed to do what. These students had, in the space of a few minutes, made a collective decision and distributed responsibility for seeing it through. Nobody was assigned anything. Everyone knew what came next.

The next agenda item was about lateness to lessons. Students raised their hands in turn, explained their positions, and listened to each other. They reached a conclusion together: students and teachers needed to negotiate their own arrangements around arriving late, and the consequences for that, classroom by classroom. Not a one-size-fits-all rule handed down from above, but a framework for local agreements. It was, frankly, more sophisticated than many adult policy discussions I’ve sat through.

The Moment That Said Everything

About thirty minutes into the meeting, one student raised his hand and pointed out that another student had been fooling around — making rude gestures, provoking people. The group turned to address it together. There was no adult to appeal to, no teacher to manage the situation. The collective simply said: this isn’t acceptable. The student agreed to stop before the full weight of group disapproval had even finished landing.

No punishment. No referral. No escalation. Peer accountability, handled with more directness and less drama than most adult-managed disciplinary conversations I have witnessed.

When staff members were invited to join at the end of the meeting, students walked them through what had been discussed and decided. The staff members listened. Together they considered how the decisions would be integrated into the school’s daily arrangements. And then young people moved on — to lessons, to interest-based activities — calmly and with evident satisfaction. Something real had happened, and they knew it.

What the Research Tells Us (and Why This Matters)

None of what I witnessed that Thursday was accidental. It was the result of years of deliberate community-building and a structural commitment to what researchers call authentic participation — as distinct from the hollow substitute that passes for student representation in too many schools (organizing parties, pyjama days, and bingo meetings.

The evidence on this is unambiguous. Studies consistently show that when students have genuine influence over decisions that affect them, academic motivation and performance improve (Mager & Nowak, 2012; González et al., 2021). When learners have real agency in their education, they become invested in its success. The relationship is intuitive once you see it: people care about things they have helped to shape.

The wellbeing data is equally compelling. Students who experience genuine influence in school decisions report significantly higher life satisfaction and emotional wellbeing (Ott et al., 2023; Anderson et al., 2022; Graham et al., 2022). Democratic school cultures — where students engage in authentic co-design alongside teachers — create measurably better outcomes for how young people feel about themselves and their place in the world.

But here is the finding that carries the sharpest warning: pseudo-participation — the kind where students are asked for input but their contributions aren’t genuinely valued or acted upon — doesn’t just fail to help. It actively harms wellbeing (Ott et al., 2023; Anderson et al., 2022). Tokenism isn’t neutral. Being asked to participate without real influence is worse than not being asked at all.

That is worth sitting with. Every student council with no real power. Every consultation exercise that leads nowhere. Every feedback survey followed by silence. These aren’t just ineffective. They are corrosive.

What Genuine Participation Requires

The research points to three elements that distinguish authentic participation from its hollow twin:

Real influence. Students don’t just voice opinions — they help make decisions that get implemented. That Thursday meeting wasn’t a rehearsal or a simulation. The rules those students agreed upon will be on the door of that classroom. The arrangements they decided about lateness will shape their daily experience. Their decisions had weight.

Authentic choice. Young people have genuine options, not a curated menu of pre-approved alternatives. The students at Suvemäe proposed having a meeting without adults. That proposal was taken seriously, discussed, and passed. No adult had designed that outcome.

Collaborative relationships. Students work alongside adults as partners — not as subjects being consulted. Notice what happened at the end of that Thursday meeting: staff weren’t called in to ratify or override. They were invited in to hear what had been decided and to consider how to integrate it. The direction of information flow had shifted.

When these elements are present, the classroom becomes what one research team called a space of genuine partnership rather than benevolent dictatorship. When they are absent — or performed without substance — the benefits evaporate, and something worse takes their place.

The Hardest Part

I want to be honest about what this requires, because the research can make it sound more straightforward than it is.

Meaningful student participation asks adults to relinquish control. Real control, not symbolic control. It means creating structures where young people have actual power over things that matter, and then living with the decisions they make — including decisions you might not have chosen yourself. It means tolerating the messiness that comes with genuine democracy: the slower processes, the unexpected directions, the occasional twelve-year-old facilitating a meeting you thought you were leading.

For many educators, this is genuinely difficult. Our instinct is to guide, to correct, to optimise. We have been trained to see adult directivity as care — as protection, even. And sometimes it is. But the research suggests that we systematically underestimate what young people are capable of when we step back, and that our protective instincts often carry costs we don’t fully account for.

What I saw at Suvemäe that Thursday was a group of young people — ages roughly ten to fifteen — running a structured, inclusive, productive meeting without adult supervision. They managed a difficult interpersonal moment with more grace than many adult teams I have worked with. They made decisions, distributed responsibilities, and moved on. They did not need me there. The fact that they asked me to stay was, perhaps, its own kind of generosity.

An Invitation

The question is no longer whether to involve students in decision-making. The evidence has settled that. The question is how — how to do it with enough substance and sincerity that it actually transforms the culture of a school, rather than decorating it.

That is the work Unmute Learning exists to support. Not to offer a template that can be lifted and placed into any school unchanged, but to help educational communities think seriously about what authentic participation looks like in their specific context — with their students, their staff, their constraints and possibilities.

Democratic education is not a programme. It is a practice, and like all practices it requires commitment, iteration, and a willingness to learn from the people you are learning alongside. By the way, join us for the European Democratic Education Conference (30.07-6.08) in Turkey!

If you are thinking about what this could look like in your school — or if you are already doing this work and want to connect with others who are — we would love to hear from you. Get in touch with the Unmute Learning team. Let’s build educational environments where young people’s voices don’t just echo in consultation rooms but actually shape the communities they inhabit.

The research gives us permission to be bold. What was witnessed on Thursday gives us reason to believe it’s worth it.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

Unmute Learning helps educational communities implement evidence-based practices to support personalised learning, school wellbeing, and circle practices — ensuring that change is both meaningful and sustainable. Contact us to explore how we can support your school’s journey toward authentic student participation.

References

Anderson, D., Graham, A., Simmons, C., & Thomas, N. (2022). Positive links between student participation, recognition and wellbeing at school. International Journal of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2021.101896

González, C., Varela, J., Sánchez, P., Venegas, F., & De Tezanos-Pinto, P. (2021). Students’ participation in school and its relationship with antisocial behavior, academic performance and adolescent well-being. Child Indicators Research, 14, 269–282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09761-5

Graham, A., Anderson, D., Truscott, J., Simmons, C., Thomas, N., Cashmore, J., & Bessell, S. (2022). Exploring the associations between student participation, wellbeing and recognition at school. Cambridge Journal of Education, 52, 453–472. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2022.2031886

Mager, U., & Nowak, P. (2012). Effects of student participation in decision making at school: A systematic review and synthesis of empirical research. Educational Research Review, 7, 38–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.EDUREV.2011.11.001

Ott, M., Meusburger, K., & Quenzel, G. (2023). Adolescents’ participation opportunities and student well-being in school. Frontiers in Education. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1111981

Last week I was invited to participate in an International Week at a local university in Flanders, Belgium, together with colleagues from Kenya, Finland, South Africa, Turkey and the Netherlands. Both the hosting and visiting colleagues were very kind and hospitable, interested in each others’ experiences and willing to share theirs. Part of the programme included a visit to a local school. The school we visited looked nothing like the one Friedrich Wilhelm I would have built for his military conscripts in eighteenth-century Prussia. The walls were freshly painted, the corridors smelled of new carpet, and every classroom was equipped with a floor-to-ceiling smart screen that probably cost more than a small car. The books stacked on the desks were glossy, untouched, and perfectly aligned. On paper, this was a modern school. A school of the future.

And yet, within ten minutes of walking its corridors, I felt the ghost.

This particular school serves as the practicum site for trainee teachers — young people, fresh with idealism, learning how to teach. What they were learning to replicate, I’m afraid, was something much older than their enthusiasm. The classrooms were arranged in the only configuration that Prussian educational architects ever sanctioned: rows. Rows of desks, rows of children, rows of eyes fixed forward — except that, as I moved from the younger classrooms toward the older ones, I noticed that the eyes were losing something. In the youngest rooms there was still brightness, fidgeting, the occasional unprompted question. In the older ones, the eyes had grown quieter. More obedient. Less alive.¹²

“The rows of desks, the silence, the ticking clock — these are not neutral design choices. They are a philosophy made concrete.”

The school I visited was not operating in a political vacuum. In 2024, Flanders installed a new Minister of Education, Zuhal Demir of the Flemish nationalist N-VA party, whose first official trip in office was not to a forest school in Scandinavia, nor to a democratic learning community in Spain, but to London — specifically to Michaela Community School in Wembley, run by Katharine Birbalsingh, often described by the British press as “England’s toughest headmistress,” and renowned for its disciplined approach. The visit was framed as a search for solutions to the declining performance of Flemish pupils highlighted by an international TIMSS report, particularly in science and maths.

What Minister Demir brought home from London was a blueprint: a new knowledge-rich minimum curriculum for primary and nursery education, inspired by the English model, with a strong focus on Dutch, mathematics, science and technology, and more explicit behavioural standards intended to foster classroom discipline. She also announced that school days should once again be “full teaching days,” arguing that too much learning time was being lost to free exploration, study days, evaluation days, and administrative closures — noting that Flemish pupils already receive around 11 per cent less teaching time than the OECD average. In other words: after a brief and tentative opening toward more flexible, learner-centred approaches in the preceding policy period, Flanders did what anxious systems so often do when test scores dip — it reached for the familiar, the measurable, the controllable. It reached for the rows. Michaela, the school held up as the model, has been described as having an ethos generally associated with pre-1960s or private schools, with a “zero tolerance” policy on behaviour and a “boot camp” week at the start of the year to teach new pupils the rules and the consequences of breaking them. That this vision — conjured in the nineteenth century to produce obedient soldiers and factory workers — is now being exported from one European education system to another as a cure for declining PISA scores should give us all pause.

Back to the school visit. Every classroom door I passed had the door open, but the scenes were the same. Every teacher was at the front. Knowledge, in this building, travelled in one direction only: from the authority at the board to the vessels arranged in rows before them. The curriculum was described by staff with evident pride as “knowledge-rich” — a phrase that has become something of a banner in contemporary education policy, and one that sounds, on the surface, entirely reasonable. Of course children should acquire knowledge. Of course content matters. But there is a version of the knowledge-rich curriculum that, as the research makes plain, reduces complex knowing to the recall of decontextualised facts, treating knowledge as fixed content to be transmitted rather than something to be encountered, questioned, and made one’s own.^3/4

What I witnessed felt closer to the latter.

Twenty-five minutes (x 2)

At some point during my visit, I asked about break time. I was told the children received two pauses of twenty-five minutes outdoors each day.

Twenty-five minutes (X2).

I later learned that in Belgium, as in many countries, prisoners are legally entitled to a minimum of one hour of outdoor exercise per day. In many facilities the standard is closer to two. The children in this gleaming Flemish school — children who had committed no offence beyond being young and curious — were given 50 minutes of outdoor time, similar to what is granted to incarcerated adults. I do not make this comparison to be polemical. I make it because the comparison is accurate, and accuracy sometimes unsettles in ways that politeness cannot.⁵

CONTEXT

The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture recommends a minimum of one hour of outdoor exercise daily for people in detention. Most Belgian and Dutch prisons meet or exceed this standard. Free, unstructured outdoor play is not a luxury — it is a documented contributor to cognitive development, emotional regulation, and social learning.^5/6

The irony is compounding: the school was a training ground for future teachers. What these young trainee educators were absorbing — through observation, through participation, through the quiet habituation of practice — was a model of schooling built not around children’s development, but around institutional control. The smart screens and the new books were surface renovations to a structure whose load-bearing walls had not moved in two centuries.¹²

What the evidence tells us

There is now a substantial body of research on what exam-driven, teacher-centred, age-segregated schooling actually produces — not in the promotional language of policy documents, but in peer-reviewed findings that follow students over time. The picture is not flattering.

FROM THE RESEARCH

A heavy focus on teaching to the test narrows the curriculum and emphasises memorisation over understanding, limiting critical thinking, problem-solving, and the transfer of knowledge to new contexts. Traditional lecture-based methods often create passive learners who can perform on standardised assessments but struggle with long-term retention and real-world application.^7/12

High-stakes, exam-driven systems are consistently linked to elevated stress, anxiety, burnout, and fixed mindsets — not just in students, but across educational contexts from secondary school through university. Perhaps most concerning: exam-oriented environments can actively suppress creativity and intrinsic motivation, particularly in high-achieving students whose curiosity becomes a liability rather than an asset.^9/10/18

On age segregation specifically, reviews find no consistent academic advantage to strict age-grading, while noting meaningful social and affective benefits when children of different ages are allowed to mix, learn together, and play together. In early childhood in particular, increasing age segregation is tied to competition, the ‘schoolification’ of young children, and the reinforcement of narrow developmental norms that serve institutions more than they serve children.^11/12/13

The school I visited had, in its defence, the most expensive equipment that educational procurement budgets could supply (Mental note: I wonder whether publishing houses and edtech companies are behind the move for more standardised learning). What it did not have — or did not choose to use — was the research that the field has been accumulating for decades. The evidence does not suggest that we are simply doing the right thing inefficiently. It suggests that the model itself is misconceived.^3/4

“We are not preparing children for an uncertain world. We are preparing them for an examination that pretends the world is certain.”

The world children are actually entering

The children sitting in those rows in Flanders will enter a world that their teachers cannot fully describe, because much of it does not yet exist. The jobs that will matter most in their adult lives are, in significant proportion, jobs that have not been invented. The problems they will be asked to solve are not the problems in the textbooks. The collaborators they will work with will not sit in ordered rows, will not wait to be called upon, and will not have a single correct answer to offer.¹⁷

And yet the model persists. It persists because it is legible. Because it is measurable. Because it offers the comfortable illusion of control to administrators, to policy-makers, to inspectors with clipboards — and, sometimes, to teachers themselves, for whom the alternative feels like chaos.^2/9

But the alternative is not chaos. This is perhaps the most important thing to say clearly.

Structure made with, not for

Participatory governance in schools does not mean the absence of structure. It does not mean that children run free and teachers disappear. It means something more demanding, and more rewarding, than either rigid control or permissive neglect. It means that the structures around learning and community life are created together — with young people, drawing on their voices, their needs, their emerging sense of justice and belonging.

When young people have a genuine stake in the rules they live by, something shifts. Engagement deepens — not because of a reward system, but because the environment feels like it belongs to them. Empathy develops, because circle practice and collaborative decision-making require participants to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. Life skills — communication, conflict resolution, self-regulation, the capacity to disagree productively — emerge not as outcomes of a dedicated lesson slot, but as the natural product of a community that practises them daily.^14/15

Age-mixing amplifies all of this. When younger children work and play alongside older ones, the cognitive benefits that neuroscience has identified become social facts: language acquisition, creativity, and problem-solving flourish in children who are allowed to learn from a peer community wider than their birth year. Older students, meanwhile, develop patience, mentorship instincts, and a different relationship to their own knowledge when they are asked to share it — not with an examiner, but with a younger child who is genuinely curious.^11/12/16

And free play. We keep having to rediscover this, which is itself something of an indictment. Free, unstructured play is not wasted time. It is the laboratory in which children develop the executive function, social negotiation, risk assessment, and imaginative capacity that no curriculum has yet found a way to teach directly — because these things cannot be taught directly. They can only be practised, and play is their natural medium.^6/16

WHAT THE RESEARCH ALSO SHOWS

Mixed-age learning environments support brain development by allowing diverse cognitive strengths to complement each other. Age-diverse groupings, combined with programmes that foster socio-emotional learning, encourage resilience, empathy, and self-regulation — and reduce school violence. Schools that promote flexible groupings and intergenerational learning opportunities create more inclusive and developmentally rich environments than those organised strictly by age and examination band.^11121416

The trainee teachers and teachers I watched in Flanders were not bad people. They were, by all appearances, caring, conscientious, and genuinely motivated to serve children well. But they were learning within a system that has not updated its fundamental logic in three hundred years — and the system is more powerful than any individual within it. The ghost does not announce itself. It simply shapes what feels normal, what feels professional, what feels like teaching.¹²

Unlearning a ghost requires more than good intentions. It requires tools, communities of practice, and a different set of experiences to draw upon. It requires someone to help design a different room.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

— ◆ —

AN INVITATION

Build something different with us

At Unmute Learning, we work alongside schools, communities, and organisations to design learning environments where young people are genuine participants — not passive recipients. Through participatory governance frameworks, circle practice for conflict resolution, and self-directed learning structures and mechanisms that are evidence and science-based, we help communities build the kind of schools that the evidence, and the children, have been asking for.

If you are a school leader, a teacher, a policy-maker, or a parent who recognises the school in this article — and who wonders whether something else is possible — we would welcome a conversation.

We offer support in developing tools for participatory governance: from student councils that have real power, to restorative circle processes that replace punitive discipline, to curriculum structures co-designed with the communities they serve. The ghost of Prussia is not inevitable. It is a choice, and it can be unchosen.

unmute.learning@gmail.com

References

1. Amirova, N. (2025). Traditional vs. Non-Traditional Teaching in Secondary Education: A Comparative Analysis. Porta Universorum. https://doi.org/10.69760/portuni.010309

2. Kukiboyeva, M. (2025). Comparison of Central Aspect of Teacher-Centered and Learner-Centered Pedagogical Models. Pubmedia Jurnal Penelitian Tindakan Kelas Indonesia. https://doi.org/10.47134/ptk.v2i1.2112

3. Magee, J., O’Connor, K., & Swain, N. (2025). Knowledge-rich curriculum: towards definitional clarity in the context of reform in Australia and England. Education 3–13, 53, 1190–1203. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2025.2514696

4. Deng, Z. (2025). Knowledge and curriculum: towards an educational and Didaktik/curriculum way of thinking and theorizing. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 57, 64–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2025.2455690

5. European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). (2015). The CPT Standards. Council of Europe. https://www.coe.int/en/web/cpt/standards

6. Ginsburg, K. R. (2007). The importance of play in promoting healthy child development and maintaining strong parent-child bonds. Pediatrics, 119(1), 182–191. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2006-2697

7. Levitt, G., & Grubaugh, S. (2023). Teacher-centered or Student-centered Teaching Methods and Student Outcomes in Secondary Schools. EIKI Journal of Effective Teaching Methods. https://doi.org/10.59652/jetm.v1i2.16

8. Ghaleb, B. (2024). Effect of Exam-Focused and Teacher-Centered Education Systems on Students’ Cognitive and Psychological Competencies. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Approach Research and Science. https://doi.org/10.59653/ijmars.v2i02.648

9. Kirkpatrick, R., & Zang, Y. (2011). The Negative Influences of Exam-Oriented Education on Chinese High School Students: Backwash from Classroom to Child. Language Testing in Asia, 1, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/2229-0443-1-3-36

10. Tackett, S., Jeyaraju, M., Moore, J., Hudder, A., Yingling, S., Park, Y., & Grichanik, M. (2022). Student well-being during dedicated preparation for USMLE Step 1 and COMLEX Level 1 exams. BMC Medical Education, 22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-021-03055-2

11. Pratt, D. (2008). On the Merits of Multiage Classrooms. Research in Rural Education.

12. Brandt, L., & Menning, S. (2024). Age segregation in ECEC: tracing arguments and reanimating the critique of developmentalism. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 32, 1051–1068. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2024.2355098

13. Bland, A. (2025). An Educational Experience to Address Age Segregation in the Contemporary United States. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678251350176

14. Schachner, M. et al. (2016). Cultural Diversity Climate and Psychological Adjustment at School. Child Development.

15. Ainscow, M., & Messiou, K. (2018). Engaging with the views of students to promote inclusion in education. Journal of Educational Change.

16. Montemayor, R., & Komen, R. (1980). Age segregation of adolescents in and out of school. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 9, 371–381. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02087675

17. Belga News Agency. (2025, March 10). Flemish education minister to visit London schools for inspiration. Belga News Agency. https://www.belganewsagency.eu/flemish-education-minister-to-visit-london-schools-for-inspiration

18. Belga News Agency. (2025, May 9). Education minister unveils new knowledge-rich curriculum for Flemish primary education. Belga News Agency. https://www.belganewsagency.eu/education-minister-unveils-new-knowledge-rich-curriculum-for-flemish-primary-education

19. Belga News Agency. (2025, December 15). Demir: School days should be full teaching days again. Belga News Agency. https://www.belganewsagency.eu/demir-school-days-should-be-full-teaching-days-again

20. Eurydice/EACEA. (2025). Ongoing reforms and policy developments: Belgium – Flemish Community. European Commission. https://eurydice.eacea.ec.europa.eu/eurypedia/belgium-flemish-community/ongoing-reforms-and-policy-developments

21. Flemish Ministry of Education. (2024–2025). New minimum targets in early education and primary school from 2025: Q&A; Concept note ‘Every child language hero.’ Flemish Government.

22. VRT NWS. (2025, March 13). Education minister Demir finds inspiration at Michaela Community School in London. VRT News. https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2025/03/12/education-minister-demir-finds-inspiration-at-michaela-community/

23. VRT NWS. (2025, December 15). Term time should mean lesson time, says Flemish Education Minister. VRT News. https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2025/12/15/term-time-should-mean-lesson-time-says-flemish-education-ministe/

Walk into most classrooms today and you will find a scene that has barely changed in a century: rows of desks, a teacher at the front, a curriculum handed down from above, and learners doing their best to fit themselves into a mould designed long before they were born. The architecture is familiar. The problem is that the world outside those walls has changed beyond recognition — and the research is now telling us, in no uncertain terms, that the mould no longer fits.

A growing body of evidence points to a persistent, structural mismatch between what learners actually need and what educational institutions actually offer. This is not a marginal finding. It shows up in schools across Europe and the world, in vocational programmes, in higher education, in the experiences of disabled learners and adult returners alike. It is embedded in the gap between the skills employers say they need and the qualifications graduates arrive with. And it carries a heavy cost: disengagement, alienation, dropout, and a generation ill-prepared for the democratic and ecological challenges ahead.

This article draws on recent international research to make the case that this mismatch is not incidental — it is the predictable consequence of an education system that was never designed to listen. And it argues that the alternative is not a tweak but a transformation: toward democratic education that takes learners’ voices, interests, and futures seriously.

What the Research Tells Us

The evidence for a learner–offer mismatch is now well established across multiple educational levels and contexts.

Weak Alignment at Every Level

At the higher education level, a study conducted at a Polish university found the correlation between students’ expectations and their evaluation of the educational offer to be weak — a Pearson r of approximately 0.31 (Kwasek et al., 2023). In plain language: programmes only partially reflected what students were actually looking for — genuine knowledge, relevant qualifications, and meaningful personal development.

In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) programmes, students arrived expecting practical curricula, adequate facilities, and real opportunities to communicate. They found instead poor infrastructure, theory-heavy content, and little authentic language use — with measurable consequences for motivation and proficiency (Aprinia & Setiawan, 2025).

The mismatch is especially stark for learners with additional needs. A study of Individualised Education Plans (IEPs) in the United States found that roughly one-third of documented student needs were simply not addressed by the goals or supports in place (Kurth et al., 2024). Parents of children with physical disabilities in South Africa described poor curriculum differentiation, low empathy from staff, and mismanaged assistive technology — alongside a failure to offer appropriate vocational pathways (Sibuyi et al., 2025).

In Germany’s second-chance education system, three in ten adult learners reported that teachers were less learner-oriented than expected — a perception directly linked to lower engagement and higher absenteeism (Schuchart & Bühler-Niederberger, 2020). Swiss data reinforce the picture: secondary schools respond poorly to students’ individual needs, and perceptions of unfair treatment and low competence are associated with increasing alienation from learning (Marcin et al., 2020).

A System Out of Step with the Labour Market

The structural mismatch extends beyond the classroom walls and into the economy. Research from Portugal has shown that while broad field alignment between higher education supply and labour market demand is broadly maintained, serious shortages persist in areas such as computing and teacher education (Olo et al., 2021). Vocational education and training (TVET) programmes in many countries have seen declining enrolment as young people increasingly perceive the courses on offer as outdated and disconnected from their actual interests and employment prospects (Ibrahim & Nashir, 2022). Meanwhile, employers and recent graduates consistently report gaps between the competences taught in formal education and those actually required in the workplace (Pujol-Jover et al., 2022; Ghignoni & Verashchagina, 2014).

The evidence is clear: when learners feel unheard, they disengage. When institutions fail to adapt, both individuals and societies pay the price.

The Price of Not Listening

These mismatches are not merely inconvenient. Unmet and poorly met learner needs are consistently linked to lower engagement, alienation from schooling, elevated dropout risk, and weaker academic and employment outcomes (Schuchart & Bühler-Niederberger, 2020; Kurth et al., 2024; Ibrahim & Nashir, 2022; Pujol-Jover et al., 2022; Marcin et al., 2020). When young people are repeatedly told, in effect, that their interests do not matter, the lesson they learn is not the one intended.

Why Democracy Belongs in Education

The research summarised above might seem to call for better needs assessments, more responsive curricula, and improved teacher training. Those things matter. But they do not go far enough. The deeper problem is that most educational institutions are not designed to involve learners in the decisions that shape their own learning. They are designed to deliver content to passive recipients. And a passive learner is poor preparation for an active citizen.

Democratic education rests on a different premise: that the skills required for participation in a democratic society — listening, deliberating, taking responsibility, managing disagreement, contributing to collective decisions — cannot be taught didactically. They must be practised. This means that the school itself must be organised democratically, not merely talk about democracy in the curriculum.

Learners’ Interests as a Legitimate Starting Point

One of the most consistent findings in motivation research is that intrinsic interest is among the most powerful drivers of deep learning. Yet the standard school curriculum is organised around the interests of examination boards, government ministers, and labour market forecasters — almost never around the expressed interests of the learners themselves.

Democratic education and learner-centered learning take learner interest seriously not as an indulgence but as a pedagogical strategy. When young people are involved in choosing what they study, how they study it, and how their learning is assessed, they invest themselves differently. The knowledge becomes theirs. The learning becomes self-directed. This is not a soft option — it is the route to the kind of engaged, autonomous thinking that neither authoritarian regimes nor digital disinformation can easily co-opt.

Schools that operate with genuine learner participation — where students have real voice in governance, timetabling, and curriculum — report higher attendance, stronger relationships, and a culture in which learning is valued rather than endured (Hannam, 2001). This is what the research on alienation is pointing toward, even if it does not always name the solution so directly.

Participatory Governance as Democratic Practice

Democratic education is not simply a matter of giving learners choices about which subjects to pursue. It involves building institutions in which governance itself is participatory: where students, staff, and families deliberate together about the rules, priorities, and direction of their community.

School meetings at which every member of the community — regardless of age — has an equal vote are a powerful practice in this regard. They develop precisely the competences that workplaces, civic institutions, and a healthy democracy require: the ability to make a case, to hear a counter-argument, to accept a decision one disagrees with, and to trust that the process is fair. They also teach something that no civics textbook can: that one’s voice actually matters.

This kind of participatory governance does not happen spontaneously. It requires deliberate design, skilled facilitation, and a genuine willingness on the part of adults to share power. But where it is done well, the effects on learners — and on institutional culture — are profound.

Self-Directed Learning and the Development of Soft Skills

The research on skills mismatch consistently identifies so-called ‘soft skills’ — communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, resilience, adaptability — as the competences most valued by employers and most underdeveloped by formal education (Pujol-Jover et al., 2022; Ghignoni & Verashchagina, 2014). It is worth pausing to notice the irony: the skills that the economy most urgently needs are precisely the ones that a lecture-based, exam-driven curriculum is least well designed to develop.

Self-directed learning creates the conditions in which these capacities can actually grow. When learners set their own goals, manage their own time, seek out their own resources, and reflect on their own progress, they are not merely acquiring content — they are developing an orientation to the world. They learn to tolerate uncertainty, to recover from failure, to collaborate without being told to, and to persist in the face of difficulty. These are not personality traits. They are practised habits, and they require practice environments that look very different from a traditional classroom.

Democratic schools that prioritise self-directed learning do not abandon structure. They replace externally imposed structure with internally negotiated structure — a distinction that turns out to matter enormously for the quality of learning and the transferability of the skills it produces.

Age-Mixing and Free Play

Two features of democratic education that tend to surprise people unfamiliar with the tradition are age-mixing and the centrality of free play. Yet both are strongly supported by research and developmental theory.

Age-mixing — grouping learners across a range of ages rather than strictly by year of birth — has multiple benefits. Younger children learn from older ones through observation and informal instruction; older children consolidate and deepen their understanding by teaching; the social dynamics of mixed-age groups more closely resemble those of families, workplaces, and communities than the age-stratified peer groups of conventional schooling. The competitive dynamic that dominates same-age classrooms is substantially reduced when there is no implied norm against which everyone is measured.

Free play — genuinely unstructured time in which children follow their own curiosity and initiative — is often dismissed as academically irrelevant. The research disagrees emphatically. Free play is the medium through which children develop executive function, emotional regulation, social competence, and creative problem-solving. It is, in developmental terms, serious work. The widespread reduction in free play time over recent decades, driven by curricular pressure and risk aversion, may be one of the most consequential and least discussed changes in children’s education.

In democratic schools, play is not the reward for finishing the real work. It is part of the real work.

Environmental Innovation and the Urgency of a Different Education

The ecological challenges of the twenty-first century present perhaps the strongest case of all for a different approach to education. Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and the collapse of ecosystem services are not problems that can be solved by better examination results or improved graduate employability metrics. They are civilisational challenges that require creative, collaborative, long-term thinking — and a willingness to act in the face of radical uncertainty.

The environments in which most children are currently educated are not designed to cultivate those capacities. They are designed to produce compliant, efficient, individually assessed workers for a stable industrial economy. That economy no longer exists. The world that today’s learners will inherit is volatile, interconnected, and ecologically stressed in ways that have no historical precedent.

Environmental innovation — the kind that can actually change trajectories — requires people who know how to work across disciplines, how to hold complexity, how to fail and iterate, and how to build coalitions across difference. These are not skills that emerge from curriculum delivery. They emerge from environments in which learners have genuine agency, genuine responsibility, and genuine relationships with the natural and social world around them.

Democratic schools that incorporate outdoor learning, environmental stewardship, and community involvement as core practices are not simply offering an enriched curriculum. They are modelling a relationship between humans and their environment that the twenty-first century urgently needs. They are also, not coincidentally, addressing the engagement deficit that the research on learner-offer mismatch identifies — because nothing motivates quite like a problem that is real.

Preparing Learners for a World We Cannot Predict

One of the most honest things we can say about the labour market that today’s children will enter is that we do not know what it will look like. Automation, artificial intelligence, climate transition, demographic change, and geopolitical realignment are reshaping economies in ways that make detailed predictions largely unreliable. The specific qualifications, technical skills, and vocational pathways that seem relevant today may be substantially less so within a decade.

This uncertainty has a direct implication for education: the goal cannot be to prepare learners for specific jobs that may not exist. The goal must be to develop people who are capable of learning, adapting, and contributing across a range of contexts — people who have what the research variously calls ‘transferable skills’, ‘meta-competences’, or, in the language of employers, the soft skills that are currently most in demand and most undersupplied.

Democratic education is not naïve about the labour market. It is, in fact, better calibrated to its genuine demands than the system it seeks to replace. A learner who has practised self-direction, who has experience of collaborative problem-solving, who has developed the resilience that comes from navigating genuine choices and their consequences, is a more adaptable worker and a more resourceful citizen than one who has spent thirteen years learning to comply and perform under examination conditions.

The most future-proof education is one that develops human beings in their full complexity — curious, capable, and free.

The research on skills mismatch is, at its root, a message from the economy to the education system: stop producing what we used to need and start developing what we actually need now. Democratic education has been delivering that message from within the educational tradition for over a century. Perhaps it is time the mainstream started listening.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

Let’s Build Something Different Together

At Unmute Learning, we believe that the evidence for democratic education is no longer a fringe argument. It is a mainstream conclusion waiting to be acted upon. The research is clear. The need is urgent. And the models exist — schools and programmes around the world that are already demonstrating what is possible when learners are genuinely heard, genuinely respected, and genuinely involved.

We work with educators, schools, and organisations who want to move from knowing to doing — who are ready to ask hard questions about the structures they have inherited and willing to experiment with the alternatives. We do this through keynote presentations that challenge assumptions and open conversations, and through practical teacher training programmes that develop the specific skills democratic education requires.

Keynote Speaking

If your institution, conference, or event is exploring questions of learner engagement, educational innovation, participatory practice, or the future of work and learning, we would be glad to talk. Our keynote presentations draw on the latest research while grounding the argument in practical examples from democratic schools around the world. We aim to leave audiences not just informed but genuinely moved to act.

Teacher Training

Democratic education requires different things from teachers: the capacity to facilitate rather than instruct, to share power rather than exercise it alone, to create environments of genuine agency. These capacities can be developed — but they need support and practice. Our teacher training programmes offer exactly that: grounded, reflective, and practical development for educators who want to do more than deliver content.

Get in Touch

We would love to hear from you — whether you are a headteacher curious about whole-school transformation, a classroom teacher wanting to bring more learner agency into your practice, a researcher interested in collaboration, a parent looking for alternatives, or an event organiser looking for a speaker who will give your audience something to think about.

📧 unmute.learning@gmail.com

🌐 www.unmute-learning.weebly.com

The mismatch between what learners need and what schools offer is not inevitable. It is a choice. And the alternative — an education built on genuine listening, genuine participation, and genuine trust in young people — is not a utopian fantasy. It is a well-evidenced, practically demonstrated possibility. The only question is whether we are ready to choose it.

Unmute Learning - Co-Create. Co-Learn. Connect.

References

Aprinia, T., & Setiawan, R. (2025). An exploration of EFL student’s expectation in English Department. LITERACY: International Scientific Journals of Social, Education, Humanities. https://doi.org/10.56910/literacy.v4i2.2289

Ghignoni, E., & Verashchagina, A. (2014). Educational qualifications mismatch in Europe: Is it demand or supply driven? Journal of Comparative Economics, 42, 670–692. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2013.06.006

Hannam, D. (2001). Investigating the impact of student participation on education. Progressive Education. https://www.progressiveeducation.org/impact-of-student-participation-by-derry-hannam/

Ibrahim, A., & Nashir, I. (2022). Demand-supply mismatch in TVET academic programmes: What is it and what should it be? Journal of Technical Education and Training. https://doi.org/10.30880/jtet.2022.14.02.016

Kurth, J., Turner, E., Gerasimova, D., Hicks, T., Zagona, A., Lansey, K., Mansouri, M., Jameson, J., & Loyless, R. (2024). Quality of IEPs for students with complex support needs: Is there alignment across IEP components? Exceptionality, 33, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09362835.2024.2389079

Kwasek, A., Kocot, M., Kandefer, K., Fiks, A., & Kaczkowska-Serafinska, M. (2023). Students’ expectations regarding the educational offer in light of personal research. European Research Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.35808/ersj/3218

Marcin, K., Morinaj, J., & Hascher, T. (2020). The relationship between alienation from learning and student needs in Swiss primary and secondary schools. Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie. https://doi.org/10.1024/1010-0652/a000249

Olo, D., Correia, L., & Rego, M. (2021). (Mis)match between higher education supply and labour market needs: Evidence from Portugal. Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning. https://doi.org/10.1108/heswbl-02-2021-0032

Pujol-Jover, M., Duque, L., & Riera-Prunera, M. (2022). The recruit requirements of recent graduates: Approaching the existing mismatch. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 34, 57–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/14783363.2022.2029695

Schuchart, C., & Bühler-Niederberger, D. (2020). The gap between learners’ personal needs and institutional demands in second chance education in Germany. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 39, 545–561. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2020.1825538

Sibuyi, M., Mathye, D., Tshabalala, M., Mphahlele, K., & Mshunqane, N. (2025). Parental perspectives on support for learners with physical disabilities at special schools. African Journal of Disability, 14. https://doi.org/10.4102/ajod.v14i0.1640

A recent podcast conversation with Suvemäe alumni offered a rare window into what this actually looks like — not in theory, but in the lived experience of young people who have since moved on to conventional gymnasia and can now see the contrast clearly.

“You Were on the Same Level”

When asked what they missed most about Suvemäe, nearly every graduate returned to the same theme: the relationship between students and teachers. “At Suvemäe you felt like you were on the same rung as the teacher — you were equals,” said one alumnus now studying at a state gymnasium. “In gymnasium now, the teacher is still an authority. You look up to them. At Suvemäe it was more like... a friendship.”

This wasn’t simply warmth or informality for its own sake. Students described teachers who were genuinely curious about their lives beyond school — what they did in their free time, what they hoped for in the future. “We very rarely talked about school things during breaks,” one graduate recalled. “It was always: what are you doing with your free time, what are your plans? A very friendly and comfortable environment to talk in. It was like that with all the teachers.”

The intimacy of small-group learning was part of it, but so was something structural: at Suvemäe, classes were not separated by age. Older and younger students worked and spent time together, creating what several graduates described as a genuinely family-like atmosphere. “It wasn’t: here are the eighth graders and there are the other eighth graders,” said one alumna. “All the classes were mixed. Older and younger were together. If there was a group somewhere, it was always — come, be with us.”

Circle Practice: Building a Culture of Voice

One of Suvemäe’s defining features is its use of circle practice — regular whole-school and small-group gatherings where students, teachers, and staff come together to address conflicts, make decisions, and simply check in with one another. For graduates, these circles weren’t just a nice ritual. They were formative.

“The fact that everyone was heard — everyone had the opportunity to express their opinion — and then together reaching a decision that suited everyone: everyone’s voice was important,” said one graduate. “That made everything feel much more personal. Right now I just get an email about what’s happening in school next week. I don’t usually even read it. It feels so impersonal.”

Several graduates noted that this experience of being genuinely consulted had a lasting effect on how they navigate institutions. One described how, in her current gymnasium, she finds herself naturally stepping into facilitative roles during group projects, trying to ensure everyone is included — a reflex she traces directly to her time at Suvemäe.

The circles also served a conflict resolution function that graduates say went deeper than rule enforcement. “We explained why we were doing things,” one alumnus said, reflecting on how phone use was handled. “In other schools they just say: put your phone away, no phones in class. But here they brought out different reasons for why it’s good to concentrate in class. That’s very different.”

Project-Based Learning and the Skills That Transfer

At Suvemäe, most subjects are taught through project work. A topic is divided among students; each prepares a presentation or project; the class learns the subject through each other’s work. It sounds simple, but graduates describe it as transformative.

“You don’t just learn that one topic you researched — you learn how to collaborate, how to listen to others, how to respect what they bring,” explained one alumnus. “It’s a much more sensible approach to learning. And much more realistic in terms of what actually matters.”

The transfer to life beyond school has been tangible. Graduates consistently outperform peers in managing deadlines, working in groups, and — perhaps most tellingly — asking for help. “I always wrote to teachers in advance if I might need an extension,” said one graduate. “I learned here that if there’s a problem, you come and talk about it. We solve it together.” Her classmates at gymnasium, she noted, often wait until everything has fallen apart before saying anything at all.

One quality that stands out in almost every graduate’s account is initiative — the willingness to act without being told to. “I find myself in gymnasium being the one who says, when a teacher offers an opportunity: yes, let’s go, who else wants to come?” said one alumnus. “I look around and everyone is waiting for someone else to move. That initiative — taking it — comes directly from Suvemäe. Passivity is what gets dismantled there.”

Freedom With Responsibility

Graduates are careful not to romanticise. The transition to a conventional school wasn’t always smooth. Some found the sudden structure — textbooks, fixed timetables, homework — jarring at first. A few acknowledged that Suvemäe’s freedom required maturity they didn’t always have. Phones were a recurring challenge; so were agreements that faded after a few weeks once collective attention moved on.

And not every child, graduates agree, will thrive in this environment. “Some people need more structure,” said one alumna. “Traditional school offers that. I know people who get better grades in a traditional school.” But she was quick to add: “I think it would be good if children had the chance to at least try it. You can never know in advance if it will suit them — and sometimes even if they think it won’t, they might discover it’s exactly what they needed.”

What the graduates universally resist is the idea that Suvemäe is an easier option. “Freedom comes with responsibility,” said one — quoting what appears to be something of a school motto — “and you still have to actually learn.” The skills they carry forward are not soft alternatives to academic achievement. They are, graduates argue, the foundation that makes academic achievement sustainable.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

An Invitation

The experiences of Suvemäe’s graduates point toward something larger than one school’s story. They suggest that when young people are treated as capable participants in their own education — when governance is genuinely shared, when conflict is addressed through circle, when learning is driven by curiosity rather than compliance — something durable is built. Not just knowledge, but agency.

At Unmute Learning, we believe these approaches deserve to travel further. We work with schools, organisations, and communities to develop practical solutions drawing on participatory governance, circle practice, and self-directed learning — the same threads woven through Suvemäe’s work.

If you’re an educator, school leader, parent, or community builder who wants to explore what this could look like in your context, we’d love to hear from you. The question Suvemäe keeps answering is whether democratic education can be real, rigorous, and replicable. We think the answer is yes — and we’d like to help more people find out.

Get in touch with Unmute Learning to start a conversation about what participatory, student-centred education could look like in your school or community.

Two important studies—one examining Sudbury Valley School graduates and another reviewing research on democratic schooling more broadly—offer compelling answers to these questions. What emerges from graduates’ own voices is a narrative that challenges many of our assumptions about what young people need to thrive.

The Research Gap

Despite growing interest in democratic and self-directed education, systematic research on graduate outcomes has been surprisingly sparse. As one recent review notes, “We did not find empirical tracer studies or outcome data on graduates of democratic schools” in peer-reviewed literature. The review emphasizes that existing work “discusses democratic schooling conceptually and explicitly calls for such graduate research.”

This gap is significant. As researcher Kira (2019) observes in a comparative study of democratic schools, “Another area of research is a tracer study of graduates of democratic schools including their professional lives.” Without such data, claims about democratic education’s effectiveness—or dangers—remain largely speculative.

The most comprehensive study to date comes from Peter Gray and David Chanoff’s 1986 follow-up research on graduates of Sudbury Valley School (SVS) in Massachusetts. Their findings challenge many conventional assumptions about what students need to succeed.

A Different Kind of School

To understand these graduates’ experiences, it’s important to grasp just how different their schooling was. At Sudbury Valley School, there are no required classes, no curriculum, no tests, and no grades. Students from age 4 to 18 spend their days as they choose—playing, socializing, pursuing projects, or studying. The school is run democratically through weekly School Meetings where students and staff each have one vote on all matters, from hiring decisions to rule-making.

As Gray and Chanoff describe: “Students have no schedules and are assigned to no groups. The school simply leaves them alone to organize their own time and associate with each other and with the staff as they will.”

When asked to estimate how much time they spent on traditional “academic work” during their school years, graduates averaged just 8 percent. Instead, their days were filled with socializing, working on practical and artistic projects, reading for enjoyment, and engaging in sports and games.

College Success Without Traditional Preparation

One might expect students from such an unconventional background to struggle with college admission and academics. The reality proved quite different.

Of the 69 graduates surveyed, over 50 percent had either completed a college degree or were enrolled in a degree program. Among those who attended all or most of their schooling at SVS (Group 1), the percentage was even higher at 64 percent. These weren’t just any colleges—86 percent of Group 1 graduates and 54 percent of Group 2 graduates attended schools ranked among the top 220 most selective colleges in the United States.

Even more striking were graduates’ reflections on their college experiences. When asked whether SVS had handicapped them in pursuing higher education, 32 of 35 college-going graduates said it had benefited them—despite 13 of those same graduates acknowledging initial gaps in academic areas like mathematics.

“The Attitudinal Difference Seems to Allow Me to Catch Up Very Quickly”

What graduates emphasized repeatedly was not subject matter knowledge but their approach to learning. One honor student who had attended SVS from age 9 explained: “A lot of the people there (in college) have had more experience in some of the substantive areas. But the attitudinal difference seems to allow me to catch up very quickly. The substantive things are trivial to acquire... My attitude is that I’m going to college for fun and I fully intend to enjoy myself by taking full advantage of whatever it has to offer.”

This sentiment echoed throughout the interviews. The two most common benefits graduates identified were:

1. Enhanced motivation and curiosity: Graduates described being more “curious” and having “a good attitude toward learning.”

2. Personal responsibility and self-direction: They characterized themselves as “self-directed,” “responsible,” and “able to find things out on my own.”

Another frequently mentioned advantage was their comfort communicating with authority figures. One graduate explained: “I would hang out in the economics department, just as I would hang out in the office at SVS, just hang out and talk with professors. I always felt I had as much right to be there as anyone else. Most of the students felt a tremendous gap between themselves and the professors—they weren’t used to relating to the ‘enemy’ in that way. I didn’t have that kind of feeling.”

Beyond College: Career Pathways and Success

Perhaps even more telling than college outcomes were graduates’ career trajectories. The 69 graduates surveyed were working in an remarkably diverse array of fields: music and visual arts, healthcare and social services, business management, applied science and technology, skilled trades, and academia.

The careers ranged from a recording artist for a nationally known rock group to social workers, from a computer company president (at age 22, without a college degree) to nurses and physical therapists, from a professional oboist to engineers and doctoral candidates in physics and anthropology.

What stood out was how many graduates had begun developing their professional interests and skills while at SVS. The photographer had built the school’s darkroom at age 13 and spent days developing his craft. The computer entrepreneur had taught himself programming on a computer he’d convinced a company to loan the school. The pattern makers, mechanics, and musicians had all immersed themselves in their fields during their school years.

As Gray and Chanoff note: “Very often those who devoted unusual amounts of time to particular activities continued to pursue those activities as careers when they graduated.”

The Value of Democratic Participation

Beyond academic and career preparation, many graduates emphasized how democratic participation at the school shaped their values and capabilities. The school’s governance structure—where students and staff each had equal votes on all matters—provided real practice in democratic decision-making.

One graduate reflected: “The articulation of democratic philosophy, particularly the debates on responsibility of individuals, impressed me deeply. I continue to try very hard to know what my responsibilities are and to carry them out. And that, of course, has been helpful in every area of my life.”

A social worker involved in community organization noted that school meetings and committees served as “a testing ground for later career training and practice in community organization.”

Current research on democratic schooling confirms these potential benefits. As Kira (2019) argues, “Democratic schooling at best can be effective because it gives participants ample opportunities to think deeply and collaboratively about their learning and their organization in order to become active agents of change, desperately needed in the larger democratic society in crisis.”

“I Acquired the Confidence in Myself to Do Anything I Want”

When asked their overall assessment of attending SVS, 56 of 69 graduates responded they were “very glad,” while 11 were “moderately glad.” Not a single graduate said it would have been better not to have attended.

Their reasons went beyond practical career preparation to fundamental questions of personal development and values. One graduate captured a sentiment expressed by many: “I’m glad I went there and experienced the people I did because it turned me from a rebellious child into a person in control of my life... I acquired the confidence in myself to do anything I want. I can fit into any social situation comfortably. I have a successful, positive outlook on things, and other people see that quality and look upon me with a benevolence and a desire to help me along and to be involved with me.”

Another emphasized values of respect and tolerance: “I am grateful to SVS for the education it gave me about people, life, and sharing. I feel I am far more tolerant of other individuals who are very different from me. At SVS everybody is an individual. At public school to be different in any way is to be avoided at all costs.”

What the Graduates’ Stories Tell Us

These narratives challenge several common assumptions about education:

1. The myth of falling behind: Graduates who did little traditional academic work caught up quickly when they chose to pursue higher education. As one noted about textbooks: “Textbooks are so systematized, so easy. You know exactly what they want.”

2. The necessity of external motivation: Rather than needing to be pushed, graduates described strong internal motivation—precisely because they had chosen their own paths. As one explained: “The school gives one the realization that whatever you want you have to work for, and my life since leaving SVS has been a good example of that.”

3. The fear of authority: Multiple graduates noted how their experience with democratic governance and informal relationships with staff members eliminated the intimidation many students feel toward professors and supervisors. This comfort communicating across hierarchies proved valuable in both educational and professional settings.

4. The value of standardized curricula: The diversity of graduates’ pursuits—and their success in fields ranging from theoretical physics to professional music—suggests that there may be many valid paths to developing competence and contributing to society.

The Need for More Research

While Gray and Chanoff’s study provides valuable insights, its limitations must be acknowledged. The sample size is small, graduates came predominantly from middle-class backgrounds, and selection effects (families choosing this unconventional schooling) may play a role. As Kira’s review emphasizes, “Systematic research is needed to clarify the impact on graduates in their adult lives.”

Most existing research offers “only anecdotal evidence” about career outcomes, with “virtually all long-term outcome data missing” from the scholarly literature. The call for rigorous tracer studies remains urgent—particularly as interest in democratic and self-directed education grows.

Implications for Participatory Governance and Self-Directed Learning

For practitioners working in participatory governance and self-directed learning, these graduates’ experiences offer several insights:

Trust generates responsibility: When students are genuinely trusted with decisions about their learning and community governance, many rise to that responsibility. As one graduate reflected: “I am attentive, communicate well, look people in the eye, ask lots of questions, work independently, and give lots of effort to whatever I do.”

Democratic practice matters: Real participation in governance—not token student councils but genuine decision-making power—appears to develop capabilities and values that graduates carry forward. The experience of serving on judicial committees, participating in hiring decisions, and debating school policies provided practical democratic education.

Self-knowledge develops over time: Without external evaluations and requirements, students had to develop their own sense of readiness and capability. The thesis defense—where students argue they’re ready to take responsibility for themselves—represented a culmination of this process of self-assessment.

Passion often trumps preparation: Many graduates succeeded in careers not because they had completed specific coursework but because they had spent years deeply engaged with their field of interest, developing both skills and authentic motivation.

Questions That Remain

The graduates’ stories also raise important questions that deserve further exploration:

• How might these outcomes differ for students from different socioeconomic backgrounds?

• What specific elements of the democratic school environment—the governance structure, age mixing, absence of grades, staff relationships—contribute most to these outcomes?

• How do graduates’ experiences in traditional workplaces or institutions evolve over longer time periods?

• What kinds of support systems or resources are essential for making self-directed education accessible to all students?

Conclusion: Listening to Graduate Voices

As educators and communities explore alternatives to traditional schooling, the voices of graduates who have lived these alternatives become crucial. Their experiences suggest that fears about students “falling behind” or being unable to adapt to traditional institutions may be overstated—at least for some populations under some conditions.

More fundamentally, these narratives challenge us to reconsider what we mean by educational success. Is it the acquisition of specific knowledge at specific ages? Or is it the development of curiosity, responsibility, self-knowledge, and the capacity to participate meaningfully in democratic society?

As one graduate simply put it: “The substantive things are trivial to acquire.” What proved harder to acquire later—and what democratic, self-directed education appeared to foster—was the attitude, confidence, and sense of agency that made acquiring those substantive things possible.

Kira links democratic schooling to the preparation of active, socially engaged adults, but mostly at the level of theory and observed school practices, not long‑term tracking:

“This study concluded that democratic schooling has great potential to educate citizens who can become effective agents of change, although the number of schools which systematically implement democratic schooling is limited.” (Kira, 2019)And more generally:

“Democratic schooling at best can be effective because it gives participants ample opportunities to think deeply and collaboratively about their learning and their organization in order to become active agents of change, desperately needed in the larger democratic society in crisis.” (Kira, 2019)These claims are about intended and observed dispositions during schooling, rather than robust data on graduates years later.

The call from researchers remains clear: we need more systematic, longitudinal research on democratic school graduates. But the stories shared by these graduates offer more than data points. They offer an invitation to imagine education organized not around coercion and standardization but around trust, choice, and genuine democratic participation.

For those of us committed to participatory governance and self-directed learning, these voices remind us why we do this work—and why it matters to keep learning from those who have experienced it themselves.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

References

Gray, P., & Chanoff, D. (1986). Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young People Who Have Charge of Their Own Education? American Journal of Education, 94(2), 182-213.

Kira, N. (2019). Dewey’s Democratic Conception in Education and Democratic Schooling: Lessons from the United States for Japan in a Time of Democracy in Crisis. Educational Studies in Japan, 13, 55-72.

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Ready to engage in building a learning environment where young people’s voices are heard, their interests supported and they learn about democracy by experiencing it? Let’s get in touch! Unmute Learning is ready to engage in meaningful collaboration to create and consolidate learning environments which are truly learner-centered!

When most people think about school, they recall rigid schedules, prescribed curricula, and adults making all the decisions. But for a growing number of young people worldwide, school looked entirely different: a place where they directed their own learning, participated in genuine democratic governance, and developed agency from an early age.

During a recent Zoom meeting at the Learning Planet Festival, graduates from democratic schools in five countries gathered to reflect on their experiences. Their stories reveal both the profound gifts and real challenges of an education built on freedom, self-determination, and democratic participation.

The Experience of Self-Directed Learning

For these graduates, self-directed learning wasn’t an occasional project or special Friday activity—it was the foundation of their entire education. They described choosing what to study, when to study it, and how deeply to explore topics based on genuine interest rather than external requirements.

“The freedom to follow my curiosity meant I could spend weeks diving into something that fascinated me,” one graduate explained. This depth of engagement, they noted, cultivated intrinsic motivation and a lasting love of learning that persisted well beyond their school years.

Several graduates emphasized how self-directed learning taught them to identify their own learning needs and seek out resources independently. Rather than waiting for a teacher to explain something, they developed the habit of figuring things out—whether through books, mentors, online resources, or hands-on experimentation.

However, this freedom also came with challenges. Some graduates admitted struggling initially with the absence of external structure, particularly when they transitioned to conventional universities or workplaces. “I had to learn how to meet deadlines I didn’t set myself and complete assignments I didn’t choose,” shared one participant. Yet most felt that the self-knowledge and internal discipline they’d developed ultimately served them well, even if the adjustment required effort.

Democratic Participation: More Than Student Council

What distinguished these schools most sharply from conventional education was genuine democratic participation. Students weren’t given token choices or symbolic representation—they held real power in school governance alongside staff.

Graduates described participating in school meetings where everyone, regardless of age, had an equal vote on decisions affecting the community. They debated and established rules, resolved conflicts, managed budgets, hired staff, and shaped the school’s direction. This wasn’t preparation for democracy; it was democracy in practice.

“Learning to articulate my perspective, listen to others who disagreed, and negotiate toward solutions we could all live with—that’s been invaluable,” one graduate reflected. Multiple participants noted that their experience with democratic process gave them unusual confidence in civic participation and collaborative decision-making as adults.

The graduates also spoke about learning to handle responsibility from a young age. When decisions affected everyone, they felt the weight of their choices and witnessed the consequences—both positive and negative—of collective decision-making.

Navigating the “Real World”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation centered on how democratic school graduates navigate conventional institutions and societal expectations afterward.

Several graduates described experiencing culture shock when entering traditional universities or workplaces. The hierarchical structures, lack of voice in decision-making, and expectation of compliance without question felt foreign and sometimes stifling. “I kept wanting to ask ‘why are we doing it this way?’ and suggest alternatives, which wasn’t always appreciated,” one participant noted with a laugh.

Yet most felt their democratic school background gave them distinct advantages. They were comfortable with ambiguity, skilled at self-motivation, and experienced in collaborative problem-solving. They knew how to advocate for themselves and weren’t intimidated by authority figures. Several mentioned being sought out as leaders in group projects or community organizing because of their facilitation and consensus-building skills.

The academic transitions varied. Some graduates found conventional academic requirements initially challenging, particularly standardized testing or rigid curricula. Others transitioned smoothly, having prepared themselves when they were ready. What united them was resilience and adaptability—they’d learned how to learn, which meant they could acquire whatever knowledge or skills they needed.

Challenges They Identified

The graduates were refreshingly honest about difficulties. Several mentioned:

Social pressure and misunderstanding: Constantly having to explain and justify their educational background to skeptical relatives, employers, or peers grew exhausting.

Gaps in conventional knowledge: Some felt self-conscious about not knowing things their conventionally-schooled peers took for granted, though most found these gaps easy to fill when motivated.

Isolation: Particularly for those from smaller democratic schools, finding community with others who shared their educational values wasn’t always easy.

Economic realities: Some noted that the flexibility and idealism of democratic education didn’t always prepare them for navigating bureaucratic systems or credentialism in professional contexts.

Internal pressure: Ironically, some felt pressure to be “successful” to validate democratic education to skeptics, which sometimes created stress.

Possibilities They See

Despite challenges, the graduates were overwhelmingly positive about their educational experiences and passionate about the possibilities they represent.

They see democratic schools as models for developing engaged citizens who don’t just accept systems as given but actively work to improve them. Multiple graduates are now involved in educational innovation, social justice work, or community organizing—directly applying the democratic skills they developed.

They envision a future where more children experience education as empowering rather than constraining, where young people are treated as capable participants in shaping their communities rather than passive recipients of adult decisions.

“Democratic education showed me that another world is possible,” one graduate reflected. “Not just in theory, but in lived practice. I experienced from childhood that people can govern themselves collectively, that freedom and responsibility go together, and that learning can be joyful. That’s shaped everything about how I move through the world.”

A Different Foundation

What emerged from this conversation was a portrait of young adults who see themselves as active agents rather than passive subjects. They expect to participate in decisions that affect them. They trust their own judgment while valuing others’ perspectives. They’re comfortable with ambiguity and change because they’ve practiced navigating both since childhood.

Are democratic school graduates perfectly prepared for every conventional expectation? No—and they’d likely argue that perfect conformity to conventional expectations isn’t the goal. What they offer instead is a living demonstration that education can cultivate autonomy, democratic competence, and intrinsic motivation when it’s designed around respect for young people’s capacity to direct their own learning and participate meaningfully in their communities.

As one graduate concluded: “Democratic education didn’t prepare me for the world as it is—it prepared me to help create the world as it could be.”

Special thanks to Niko, Selva, Baran, Matylda and Ishaan! :)

Democratic schools worldwide vary in their specific approaches, but share core commitments to self-directed learning and democratic governance. This article reflects themes from one conversation and doesn’t represent all democratic school experiences.

Let’s join forces!

Ready to engage in building a learning environment where young people’s voices are heard, their interests supported and they learn about democracy by experiencing it? Let’s get in touch! Unmute Learning is ready to engage in meaningful collaboration to create and consolidate learning environments which are truly learner-centered!

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

The real question isn’t what skills we should teach. It’s what kind of learning environments will equip young people to navigate a world where the ground keeps shifting beneath their feet.

The Limits of the Skills-Based Response

Research on AI’s labor market impact reveals a consistent pattern. Rather than wholesale job elimination, AI is transforming work by automating routine, codifiable tasks while expanding demand for non-routine cognitive and interpersonal capacities. Studies across OECD countries show that AI tends to augment high-skill workers while automating tasks in lower-skill positions, contributing to growing inequality. In China, robot-based AI has actually increased total employment through productivity gains, particularly benefiting labor-intensive industries and women workers.

The dominant educational response to these findings has been predictable: lists of skills to emphasize. AI literacy. Data analysis. Critical thinking. Creativity. Emotional intelligence. Adaptability. These competencies matter, certainly. International curriculum reviews now highlight AI literacy as foundational, emphasizing not just technical understanding but also awareness of AI’s limitations, biases, and ethical implications. Educational frameworks identify “prime skills” like prompt engineering and critical evaluation of AI outputs as essential for students.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth embedded in Amodei’s warning: by the time we update our curricula to teach the skills employers need today, those needs will have shifted. AI models are being used mainly for augmentation now—helping people do jobs—but this “is going to tip more and more toward automation,” according to Amodei, who warns this shift could happen “in as little as a couple of years or less.”

The skills gap isn’t just about what we’re teaching. It’s structural—a fundamental mismatch between education systems designed for stability and a labor market characterized by exponential change.

What Schools Actually Need to Cultivate

If we accept that the specific skills required will continue to evolve faster than institutions can adapt, our educational priorities must shift. Rather than focusing primarily on what students learn, we need to ask: What kind of learners are we cultivating? What dispositions, capacities, and relationships will support young people through continuous disruption?

This is where participatory governance, self-directed learning, and restorative relationships move from educational philosophy to economic necessity.

Learner-Initiated Projects: Building Agency in Uncertain Times

Research consistently emphasizes adaptability and lifelong learning as critical for navigating AI-driven change. But adaptability cannot be taught through lectures or assigned readings. It emerges from repeated experiences of facing uncertainty, making decisions, encountering obstacles, and adjusting course.

Learner-initiated projects—where students identify problems that matter to them, design their own approaches, and take ownership of outcomes—create precisely these conditions. When a student pursues a passion project, they’re not just acquiring content knowledge. They’re developing:

• Self-authorship: The capacity to define their own questions and standards of success, rather than waiting for external direction

• Resourcefulness: The ability to identify what they need to learn and figure out how to learn it

• Resilience: The practice of working through setbacks without an authority figure solving problems for them

• Metacognition: The habit of reflecting on their own learning process and adjusting their strategies

These aren’t abstract virtues. They’re the core capacities required when, as Amodei describes, workers need to understand that AI can be used for “summarizing, brainstorming, reading documents, reviewing legal contracts, and delivering specific (and eerily accurate) interpretations of medical symptoms and health records”—and then must figure out how to position themselves in this transformed landscape.

Consider what happens when a traditional school responds to AI disruption by adding an “AI literacy unit” to the curriculum. Students learn to use ChatGPT for research, perhaps explore some basics of machine learning, complete an assignment on AI ethics. They’ve been given information about AI. But have they developed the capacity to recognize when their own work is threatened by automation, identify adjacent opportunities, teach themselves new tools, and pivot their career path accordingly?

Now consider a learning environment where students regularly initiate and drive projects. A student passionate about environmental justice learns basic data analysis to map pollution patterns, discovers AI tools that can process satellite imagery, teaches themselves Python to automate parts of their analysis, connects with community organizations, and produces actionable recommendations. They haven’t just learned about AI—they’ve practiced the cycle of autonomous learning that will serve them through countless technological shifts.

Participatory Governance: Preparing for Economic Citizenship

Amodei calls for “speed[ing] up public awareness with government and AI companies more transparently explaining the workforce changes to come,” suggesting we need informed public debate about economic policy responses to AI displacement.

But how do we prepare young people to engage meaningfully in these debates? Not through civics classes that teach about governance structures, but through lived experience of genuine participation in decisions that affect their lives.

Schools practicing participatory governance—where students have real voice and vote in matters of policy, resource allocation, and community norms—are rehearsal spaces for democratic citizenship. Students learn to:

• Articulate their interests and values clearly

• Listen to perspectives different from their own

• Negotiate conflicts and build coalitions

• Understand trade-offs and make collective decisions

• Hold institutions accountable

These are the exact capacities required to participate in the policy discussions Amodei envisions. When communities debate whether to implement a tax on AI companies, universal basic income, or expanded retraining programs, we need citizens who can think critically about competing interests, evaluate evidence, and engage constructively in collective decision-making.

A student who has helped decide how to allocate a school’s budget, mediated conflicts through restorative processes, or participated in hiring decisions for teachers arrives at economic policy debates with embodied knowledge of governance, not just abstract concepts.

Strong Positive Relations: The Connective Tissue of Adaptation

Perhaps most critically, research shows that AI disproportionately threatens entry-level positions—exactly the roles young people traditionally use to build professional networks, gain references, and learn workplace norms. Hundreds of technology companies are racing to produce “agents” or “agentic AI” that can do work “instantly, indefinitely and exponentially cheaper” than humans. If these entry points disappear, how do young people build the relationships and reputations that lead to opportunities?

This makes the relational environment of schools more important than ever. Strong, positive relationships with adults and peers aren’t a nice supplement to academic learning—they’re infrastructure for navigating economic disruption.

Research on skill transformation in AI-shaped labor markets emphasizes emotional intelligence, collaboration, and social skills as increasingly valuable. But these capacities develop through relationship, not instruction. A school organized around restorative circle practices, where students regularly experience being truly heard and seeing the humanity in others, cultivates exactly these competencies.

Moreover, the relationships young people build during their education often become the professional networks that sustain them later. In a labor market where traditional career ladders are crumbling, personal connections—people who know your capacities, vouch for your character, and alert you to opportunities—become more valuable than credentials.

This is why schools focused on relational depth over test scores may produce graduates better positioned for AI’s disruptions. When a student has spent years in learning communities characterized by authentic relationships, they’ve built:

• Social capital: A network of people who know and trust them

• Emotional regulation: The capacity to manage anxiety and maintain relationships under stress

• Collaborative competence: Experience working effectively with diverse others

• Ethical groundedness: Practice navigating complex human situations with integrity

The Research Supports Relational, Autonomous Learning

The extensive research on AI and education, while focusing heavily on skills, repeatedly gestures toward these deeper priorities. Studies emphasize that “reskilling occurs” through “structured pathways” that support “well-being,” not just technical training. Reviews call for “continuous skill adaptation built into education and training systems” and “lifelong learning mindsets”—exactly what emerges from self-directed learning environments.

Stakeholder interviews in Ireland highlight the need for “both soft skills (collaboration, ethics, judgment) and hard skills (STEM, digital)” with “stronger school-industry partnerships.” But perhaps we need to reframe this. Rather than partnerships where industry tells schools what skills to teach, we need educational environments that produce young people capable of building their own partnerships, advocating for themselves, and creating value in ways not yet imagined.

The most revealing finding in the research is this: across sectors, while AI causes significant displacement in manufacturing and retail, it creates net job growth and role transformation in healthcare, education, and IT—sectors characterized by complex human interaction, ethical judgment, and continuous adaptation. These are exactly the domains where self-directed, relationally grounded learners thrive.

A Different Kind of Preparation

Amodei acknowledges the contradiction between warning about AI’s dangers while actively building the technology, saying workers are “already a little bit better off if we just managed to successfully warn people.” But what does meaningful preparation look like?

Not another skills checklist. Not AI literacy modules added to an already overcrowded curriculum. Not more standardized testing to ensure students meet benchmark competencies.

Instead, we need learning environments where young people:

• Experience genuine autonomy: Regular opportunities to initiate projects, make decisions, and take responsibility for outcomes

• Practice self-directed learning: Repeated cycles of identifying what they need to learn, finding resources, acquiring knowledge, and applying it to problems they care about

• Engage in authentic governance: Real participation in decisions that affect their community, with all the negotiation, compromise, and collective responsibility that entails

• Build deep relationships: Learning communities characterized by trust, mutual support, and restorative approaches to conflict

• Develop metacognitive awareness: Habits of reflecting on their own learning process and adjusting their strategies

These aren’t preparations for a specific labor market. They’re preparations for being human in a world of continuous change.

The Urgency of the Moment

Amodei frames his warning as an attempt to “steer” a train that cannot be stopped. The question for educators is: What are we steering toward?

If we steer toward updating curricula with the latest in-demand skills, we’ll always be behind. The students graduating in 2026 may face exactly the crisis Amodei predicts—entering a labor market where, as one analysis notes, CEOs will “quietly stop hiring, then replace humans with AI the moment it becomes viable to do so, a shift [that] could unfold almost overnight.”

But if we steer toward creating learning environments that cultivate autonomous, relationally grounded, self-aware learners, we give young people something more valuable than the right skills for this moment. We give them the capacities to navigate whatever comes next.

This isn’t a romantic rejection of skills or content knowledge. Students absolutely need to learn about AI, develop technical competencies, and understand the labor market they’re entering. But these learnings gain power when embedded in educational environments organized around learner initiative, participatory governance, and strong relationships.

The research on AI and employment makes one thing clear: the future belongs to those who can continuously adapt, learn autonomously, collaborate effectively, and navigate uncertainty with resilience. These aren’t skills we can teach through instruction. They’re capacities that emerge from years of practice in learning communities that trust young people with real agency, real participation, and real relationships.

As unemployment potentially spikes and traditional career paths dissolve, the young people most likely to thrive won’t necessarily be those with the most credentials or the most current technical skills. They’ll be the ones who learned, through daily practice over years, how to learn, how to collaborate, how to create value in relationship with others, and how to maintain their sense of agency and purpose through disruption.

That’s the kind of education we need to be building. Not because it sounds nice, but because the alternative—preparing students for jobs and careers that may not exist—is no preparation at all.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

References

Acemoglu, D., Autor, D., Hazell, J., & Restrepo, P. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Jobs: Evidence from Online Vacancies. Journal of Labor Economics, 40, S293-S340. https://doi.org/10.1086/718327

Babashahi, L., Barbosa, C., Lima, Y., Lyra, A., Salazar, H., Argôlo, M., Almeida, M., & Souza, J. (2024). AI in the Workplace: A Systematic Review of Skill Transformation in the Industry. Administrative Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci14060127

Brynjolfsson, E., & Mitchell, T. (2017). What can machine learning do? Workforce implications. Science, 358, 1530-1534. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8062

Bukartaite, R., & Hooper, D. (2023). Automation, artificial intelligence and future skills needs: an Irish perspective. European Journal of Training and Development. https://doi.org/10.1108/ejtd-03-2023-0045

Cramarenco, R., Burcă-Voicu, M., & Dabija, D. (2023). The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on employees’ skills and well-being in global labor markets: A systematic review. Oeconomia Copernicana. https://doi.org/10.24136/oc.2023.022

Georgieff, A., & Hyee, R. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Employment: New Cross-Country Evidence. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2022.832736

Jadhav, R., & Banubakode, A. (2024). The Implications of Artificial Intelligence on the Employment Sector. International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research. https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2024.v06i03.22716

Marguerit, D. (2025). Augmenting or Automating Labor? The Effect of AI Development on New Work, Employment, and Wages. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5169611

Maria, S., Purwinahyu, P., Fitriansyah, F., Rachmawaty, A., & Aini, R. (2025). Artificial Intelligence and Labor Markets: Analyzing Job Displacement and Creation. International Journal of Engineering, Science and Information Technology. https://doi.org/10.52088/ijesty.v5i2.830

Nair, R., & Khan, K. (2025). Implications of Artificial Intelligence Revolution on Labour Market: A Macro Level Study. International Journal of Research in Commerce and Management Studies. https://doi.org/10.38193/ijrcms.2025.7303

Ng, D., Su, J., Leung, J., & Chu, S. (2023). Artificial intelligence (AI) literacy education in secondary schools: a review. Interactive Learning Environments, 32, 6204-6224. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2023.2255228

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Parents across Europe who have chosen democratic education for their children share remarkably similar stories: initial uncertainty, moments of doubt, and ultimately, profound transformation—not just for their children, but for entire families.

The Journey Begins: From Doubt to Discovery

For many families, the path to democratic education starts with struggle. A parent from Poland describes watching her son suffer in a traditional school system before making the leap to a democratic alternative. An Estonian mother stumbled upon the model almost by accident within her municipal school system. An Austrian mother transitioned from self-directed learning to full democratic education in the Netherlands, embracing collaborative partnerships between parents and schools.

What unites these diverse journeys is often desperation meeting curiosity—parents seeking something better for children who didn’t fit conventional molds, or families committed to educational philosophies that prioritize autonomy and voice.

The Trust Challenge: Letting Go of Control

The most significant hurdle for parents isn’t their children’s adaptation—it’s their own.

“We had to learn to trust,” reflects a mother from Estonia. Parents accustomed to tracking homework, managing schedules, and measuring progress through grades found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Students voted in school meetings. They chose what to study, when to study, and sometimes, whether to study at all.

A Turkish educator working in cooperative democratic education notes that his greatest concern wasn’t the children, but the parents’ doubts about the approach; for example, Could children really direct their own learning? Would they be prepared for the “real world”? The answer, consistently, has been yes—but not in the ways traditional education defines success.

Addressing the Hierarchical Home Problem

One critical insight emerged repeatedly: democratic education cannot thrive in isolation. If schools practice democratic decision-making while homes maintain authoritarian structures, children receive contradictory messages about their agency and worth.

Parents described transformative shifts in family dynamics. Regular family meetings became common. Children who practiced consent-based decision-making at school brought those skills home. One Polish mother noted how democratic education forced her to become “less protective and more observant,” fundamentally changing her parenting approach.

A parent from Austria living in the Netherlands, drawing on sociocratic practices common in the latter country, emphasized the importance of horizontal decision-making both at school and at home—not as chaos, but as structured equality where children’s voices carry genuine weight.

The Transition Question: Can Democratic Students Succeed Elsewhere?

A persistent concern haunts democratic education: what happens when students transition to conventional high schools or universities?

The evidence from parents is striking. A student from Poland who left his democratic school for traditional high school navigated the system with remarkable ease, proactively managing workload and teacher relationships. Turkish students from a democratic cooperative school consistently scored above national and city averages, with first graduates excelling in challenging country-wide exams.

An Estonian alumni gathering revealed former students attending various conventional high schools demonstrating exceptional self-confidence and initiative. They hadn’t just survived the transition—they thrived.

The Unexpected Challenge: Exams and Conventions

Yet parents acknowledge real challenges. Students from democratic schools, unfamiliar with conventional testing formats, sometimes struggle initially with exams. The artificial pressure, the emphasis on memorization over understanding, the competitive rather than collaborative structure — these can feel foreign.

Some students respond by setting minimal thresholds for passing required subjects, applying effort strategically rather than comprehensively. Others, driven by natural curiosity and interest-based learning, surprise themselves with academic success despite never “studying” in traditional ways.

The key difference? These students possess metacognitive skills — they know how to learn what they need, when they need it.

What Democratic Education Actually Teaches

Beyond academics, parents consistently describe deeper transformations:

Life Skills Over Test Scores: Children learned to navigate complex social dynamics, resolve conflicts through dialogue, and take genuine responsibility for their communities and choices.

Self-Direction: Students developed the ability to choose what they want to learn and pursue it independently. They didn’t wait for teachers to assign work—they identified their interests and created their own learning paths.

Democratic Citizenship: Children who practice voting, debate policy, and experience true decision-making power develop understanding of democracy that transcends elections. They learn that democracy is daily practice, not just political theory.

Emotional Intelligence: Open communication between children and adults, horizontal rather than hierarchical relationships, and emphasis on consent over compliance fostered emotional literacy and relational skills.

When Democratic Education Isn’t the Answer

Parents were clear-eyed about limitations. Democratic education isn’t universally suitable. Some families genuinely prefer traditional, authoritarian approaches. Some children, at certain times, need or want more structure than democratic schools typically provide.

Several families described children choosing to leave democratic schools—not from failure, but from conscious decision-making. A daughter returned to democratic education after trying public school. Others moved to conventional schools seeking different social environments or specific academic programs.

The crucial point: these were the students’ choices, reflecting the very autonomy democratic education cultivates.

The Ripple Effect: Transformation Beyond Students

Perhaps the most unexpected outcome is how democratic education transforms parents themselves.

Families described improved dynamics, better communication, deeper trust. Parents learned to listen differently, to recognize their children’s competence, to step back and observe rather than control and direct.

One parent noted that democratic education taught him to be a better listener. Another described learning that relationships — not curricula, not testing, not hierarchy — form the foundation of meaningful education.

Looking Forward: Spreading the Message

Despite proven success, democratic education remains marginal in European education systems. Parents emphasized the importance of sharing experiences, supporting each other, and advocating for educational alternatives.

The evidence from Turkey is particularly striking: a cooperative school that grew from 11 to 180 students demonstrates both demand and viability. When given the choice, families increasingly seek education that respects children as capable, autonomous learners.

Conclusion: A Different Definition of Success

Democratic education succeeds not by producing higher test scores — though students often achieve these anyway — but by developing self-directed, confident, emotionally intelligent young people prepared for uncertain futures.

Parents across Europe — from Poland to Estonia, Austria to Turkey, the Netherlands to beyond — discovered that trusting children with genuine agency doesn’t lead to chaos or failure. It leads to young people who know themselves, navigate complex systems with ease, communicate across differences, and approach life with curiosity rather than fear.

The transformation isn’t just educational—it’s fundamentally human. And that, parents suggest, is exactly what education should be.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

These stories illuminate what we at Unmute Learning have long witnessed: when adults shift from controlling to facilitating, from lecturing to listening, from hierarchy to circle, profound change becomes possible. The practices we teach — participatory governance that gives young people genuine decision-making power, self-directed learning that honors individual paths and paces, circle practice that creates space for every voice — are not experimental ideals. They are proven approaches with measurable outcomes in both academic achievement and human development.

For teachers considering participatory structures in their classrooms, for youth workers seeking to deepen young people’s agency, for parents wondering if there’s an alternative to authoritarian parenting — these European families offer both inspiration and practical wisdom. The journey requires courage, patience, and willingness to examine our own assumptions about power, learning, and childhood itself.

But as these parents demonstrate, the rewards extend far beyond individual children. Democratic education transforms families, communities, and our collective understanding of what young people are capable of when we finally trust them.

Education is not something done to young people, but a collaborative journey shaped with them. If you’re ready to explore participatory governance, self-directed learning, or circle practice in your context, Unmute Learning is here to support your journey. Because the future of education isn’t about better control — it’s about shared power, authentic relationships, and learning communities where every voice matters.

Every teacher knows the Monday morning reality: you stand at the front of the classroom with a textbook chapter that needs to be “covered” before the next standardized assessment. The curriculum is set, the timeline is rigid, and your students are checking the clock. You didn’t become an educator to watch young people passively wait for the bell to ring, yet here you are, trapped in a system that measures learning by test scores rather than genuine understanding or curiosity.

The students, meanwhile, have learned to play the game. They memorize what they need to pass, forget it after the exam, and rarely ask questions that aren’t directly related to “Will this be on the test?” They have no voice in what topics matter, no choice in how they demonstrate understanding, and no control over the pace of their learning. It’s a system designed to produce compliance, not engagement—and everyone involved feels it.

The Motivation Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

What we’re witnessing isn’t a failure of students or teachers. It’s a predictable outcome of over-relying on extrinsic motivation—grades, test scores, external rewards—while systematically denying the conditions that foster intrinsic motivation. Research across educational psychology shows us why this matters more than we might think.

Studies involving thousands of students reveal that while extrinsic motivators like grades can produce short-term performance gains, they fail to sustain deep learning, long-term retention, or genuine engagement. Intrinsic motivation—the drive that comes from interest, curiosity, and the satisfaction of understanding—consistently shows stronger and more durable associations with meaningful learning outcomes.

Even more striking is what happens when these two types of motivation interact. In a longitudinal study of nearly 14,000 students, researchers found a multiplicative effect: when students already feel intrinsically motivated, piling on external rewards and pressures can actually become detrimental to their performance. The extrinsic motivators don’t add to their engagement—they crowd it out (References below).

The Hidden Cost of Silencing Students

When students have no say in their learning, we’re not just limiting their engagement in the moment. We’re teaching them that education is something done to them rather than something they actively pursue. We’re reinforcing the belief that learning requires external pressure rather than internal drive.

This matters because the conditions that support intrinsic motivation are precisely the ones we systematically deny in test-focused environments. Research on self-determination theory has identified three fundamental needs that must be met for intrinsic motivation to flourish:

**Autonomy**: Students need meaningful choices, opportunities to exercise their voice, and freedom from purely controlling directives. When every decision about what, how, and when to learn is predetermined, autonomy disappears.

**Competence**: Learners need optimal challenge and feedback that focuses on growth and strategies, not just grades. But when the stakes are high and errors are treated as failures rather than valuable learning opportunities, students become risk-averse and surface-level in their thinking.

**Relatedness**: Emotional connection, belonging, and supportive relationships fuel motivation. Yet when learning becomes a competitive race for test scores, these connections often take a back seat.

What Transformation Actually Looks Like

The research offers us a roadmap, but it also requires courage. Moving from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation isn’t about eliminating structure or standards—it’s about redesigning the learning environment so that structure serves growth rather than compliance.

This means creating low-stakes, feedback-rich spaces where mistakes are normalized and explored rather than punished. Studies on errorful learning show that when students make errors with feedback in non-graded contexts, they develop stronger metacognitive skills, greater persistence, and deeper understanding. But this can only happen when we stop tying every learning moment to a grade.

It means using external motivators strategically—as temporary entry points to spark initial engagement, not as the permanent engine of learning. The goal is to progressively emphasize mastery, meaning, and autonomy so that students internalize their motivation over time.

Most importantly, it means genuinely including student voice in the learning process. When students have meaningful input into what they study, how they demonstrate understanding, and how they collaborate with peers, they begin to see themselves as active agents in their education rather than passive recipients.

An Invitation to Reimagine

If any of this resonates with your daily reality as an educator or your vision for what learning could be, you’re not alone. The transformation from compliance-based to engagement-based learning environments is already happening in pockets around the world—in classrooms where circle practice creates space for authentic dialogue, where self-directed learning projects give students agency, and where participatory governance ensures that young people have real say in the decisions that affect them.

At Unmute Learning, we work with educators, schools, and communities to make this shift practical and sustainable. Through participatory governance structures, self-directed learning frameworks, and circle practice for authentic relationship-building and conflict resolution, we help create the conditions where intrinsic motivation can thrive.

This isn’t about abandoning accountability or rigor. It’s about building learning environments where students develop the self-direction, critical thinking, and genuine engagement that standardized tests were never designed to measure—but that life absolutely demands.

**Ready to unmute the voices in your learning community?** Visit us at Unmute Learning to explore how participatory approaches can transform motivation, deepen learning, and restore the joy that brought you to education in the first place. zBecause when students have voice, they find their motivation. And when they find their motivation, they discover what learning can really be.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

References

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Bardach, L., & Murayama, K. (2025). The role of rewards in motivation—Beyond dichotomies. *Learning and Instruction*. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.102056

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Liu, X. (2024). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Affecting Learning Effectiveness in Physical Education of Junior College Students in China. *International Journal of Social Sciences and Public Administration*. https://doi.org/10.62051/ijsspa.v3n2.07

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Tulis, M., & Dresel, M. (2024). Effects on and consequences of responses to errors: Results from two experimental studies. *The British Journal of Educational Psychology*, 95, 143 - 161. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12686

Wannas, A., & Alshaye, R. (2024). Integration of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in Second Language Acquisition: Magnetism as a Proposed Theory. *World Journal of English Language*. https://doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v14n4p76

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The disconnect is stark. Employers want critical thinking, collaboration, and adaptability. Students need socio-emotional skills and creative problem-solving. Yet many schools remain locked into systems designed for a different era—standardized curricula, rigid age-segregated timetables, and top-down authority structures that actively work against developing these capacities.

The Skills Gap Isn’t What We Think

When we talk about preparing students for the future, we’re not just talking about adding coding classes or updating textbooks. The competencies that matter—critical thinking, genuine collaboration, digital literacy that goes beyond tool use, socio-emotional awareness, and adaptability—require fundamentally different learning environments than most schools provide.

Consider collaboration. Schools claim to value it, yet most assessment remains fiercely individual. Group work is often teacher-directed rather than genuinely co-created. The message students receive is clear: cooperation is fine as long as you can prove you did it alone.

Or take critical thinking. When curricula emphasize coverage and comparison through standardized tests, they inevitably reward memorization and “right answers” over inquiry, experimentation, and the kind of divergent thinking that leads to innovation.

The pattern repeats across every skill cluster identified as essential for future work and democratic life. Schools say they want these outcomes while maintaining structures that make them nearly impossible to achieve.

The Root Problem: Three Structural Constraints

Three interrelated features of conventional schooling create this contradiction:

Standardization as organizing logic. When systems prioritize measurement, comparison, and competition, they narrow what counts as learning. The focus shifts to testable knowledge at the expense of creativity, collaboration, and whole-person development. Standardization can offer clarity, but without balance it reduces flexibility and stifles exactly the capacities it claims to foster.

Age-segregated time regimes. Rigid age-graded structures and segmented schedules enforce uniform pacing—”keeping step” across classes and cohorts. This privileges speed over depth, disconnects learning from authentic contexts, and problematizes anyone who doesn’t fit dominant temporal norms. Extended projects, reflection, community engagement, and non-linear development become nearly impossible.

Adultist power structures. Knowledge, evaluation, and rules flow one way: downward. Students demonstrate what teachers already know. “Participation rights” are constrained and instrumental—students may have voice, but only to help fulfill pre-set institutional objectives, not to co-determine them. The persistent power asymmetry directly undermines the agency, voice, and collaborative capacity that future skills require.

What Actually Works: Self-Determination Theory in Practice

Self-Determination Theory offers both diagnosis and direction. When environments support three basic psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—students develop intrinsic motivation, socio-emotional skills, and life competencies.

Autonomy means students experience genuine choice in what, how, and why they learn. Not token choice, but meaningful input into learning processes.

Competence means feeling effective and capable—supported through clear expectations, optimally challenging tasks, and useful feedback rather than just grades.

Relatedness means experiencing care and connection through trusting relationships and positive community rather than competitive comparison.

The evidence is compelling. Teacher support for these needs predicts higher socio-emotional skills across all five core domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Need-supportive environments enhance teamwork, leadership, and communication. They build the flexible learning competencies essential for adapting to change.

But here’s the catch: standardized curricula, rigid timetables, and adultist authority typically thwart all three needs. Autonomy is constrained by externally set content and high-stakes assessment. Competence gets defined narrowly as test performance. Relatedness is undermined by competition, tracking, and segregation.

The good news? When schooling designs align with Self-Determination Theory—through autonomy-supportive teaching, community-based projects, or structured life-skills work—students’ interest, identity, and capacities grow.

Participatory Governance and Circle Practice: Concrete Pathways Forward

Moving from theory to practice requires specific structures. Two approaches show particular promise:

Participatory governance means shared decision-making that goes beyond consultation. Students have voice in rules and norms. They co-design projects with teachers and community partners. They engage in real problem-solving that connects to their lives and contexts. This isn’t about adding student councils that rubber-stamp adult decisions—it’s about genuinely distributed authority.

Circle practice operationalizes these principles through structured, egalitarian dialogue. Whether in pedagogical circles, classroom councils, or restorative processes, circles create space where:

• Students articulate their needs and help shape learning

• Mutual listening and emotional sharing build relatedness

• Surfacing challenges and co-constructing supports develops competence

• Everyone practices active listening, perspective-taking, and shared decision-making

Research on circle practice in health professions education shows lower stress, higher feelings of support, and more collaborative, psychologically safe environments. Similar approaches can transform entire school cultures.

Reimagining School Structures

The research points toward three fundamental shifts:

From standardization to balanced design. Keep core guarantees and equity protections while enabling personalization, project-based learning, and community engagement. The goal isn’t chaos—it’s intentional flexibility that serves learning rather than comparison.

From rigid segregation to responsive time and grouping. Allow multi-age collaboration, extended projects, and authentic participation rather than tight, age-segregated pacing that privileges speed over understanding.

From control to facilitative leadership. Reframe adult authority from top-down management to need-supportive guidance, where teachers intentionally share power and use processes like circles to cultivate agency, voice, and relational competence.

The Implementation Challenge

Understanding what needs to change is one thing. Actually changing it is another. Teachers face enormous pressures—accountability systems, curriculum mandates, limited time, established norms. Moving toward participatory governance and need-supportive practice requires more than good intentions. It requires concrete skills, ongoing support, and safe spaces to practice new approaches.

This is where Unmute Learning’s expertise becomes essential. Rather than offering one-off workshops that leave teachers wondering how to translate theory into Tuesday morning, Unmute Learning provides sustained support through:

• Coaching and mentorship that meets teachers where they are and helps them develop autonomy-supportive practices in their specific contexts

• AI-powered role-play simulations that allow teachers to practice difficult conversations, experiment with new facilitation approaches, and receive feedback in low-stakes environments

• Teacher training grounded in Self-Determination Theory that builds the capacities needed to support student autonomy, competence, and relatedness

The goal isn’t to add more to teachers’ plates—it’s to help them work in ways that are more sustainable, more aligned with their values, and more effective at building the skills students actually need.

From Theory to Transformation

The convergence is remarkable. Research on future skills, Self-Determination Theory, participatory governance, and circle practice all point in the same direction: toward learning environments that honor students as whole people with agency, that build capacities through genuine collaboration and shared decision-making, and that connect learning to authentic purposes.

Schools don’t need to choose between rigor and relationships, between standards and student voice, between structure and flexibility. But they do need to examine whether their current structures serve their stated purposes—or actively undermine them.

The work of reimagining schooling is complex. It requires questioning deeply embedded assumptions about time, authority, knowledge, and development. It demands practical skills in facilitation, circle practice, and need-supportive teaching. And it needs sustained support to navigate the inevitable tensions between old systems and new possibilities.

This is precisely the kind of transformation that Unmute Learning helps schools achieve. Through evidence-based approaches to teacher development, ongoing coaching, and innovative simulation tools, Unmute Learning partners with schools to build environments where both students and teachers thrive—where the daily practice of education aligns with the skills and capacities we claim to value.

Because in the end, preparing young people for an uncertain future means creating schools where they can practice autonomy, collaboration, and creative problem-solving today. Not as add-ons or electives, but as the foundation of how learning happens.

The question isn’t whether schools should change. It’s whether they’ll change intentionally, with support and evidence to guide them—or continue adapting reactive measures while the fundamental contradictions deepen.

For schools ready to take this work seriously, Unmute Learning stands ready to help.

Charlie Moreno-Romero, Ph.D

Unmute Learning CEO

Interested in exploring how participatory governance, Self-Determination Theory, and circle practice can transform your school? Contact Unmute Learning to learn more about our teacher training, coaching, and AI-powered simulation tools designed to support sustainable school wellbeing.

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