In high schools and in some middle schools, most education models have students elect class presidents. In my high school, the class president got involved in decisions like where the prom would be held. I actually remember one of our first meetings with the entire freshman class, about 135 of us, most of them new to me, and I asked our advisor what it was the president actually did. She replied, “If you were presidential material, you‘d know what to do.“ And the entire class roared. In unison.
So not only was there going to be no real power for the president, but the job would include working beside an advisor who chose to dodge a sensible question and humiliate a student to get a cheap laugh. Very empowering.
What most class presidents certainly DON’T get involved in are issues like: how the school budget should be spent, what staff should be hired or fired (I know one lady I wanted to fire), what curriculum should be used, what the school rules should be and how rules should be enforced. The students and their elected official are excluded from all the essential mechanisms of the school community, and instead given authority over matters like where the prom will be held. Why?
I think the common answer is that kids can’t handle the power well enough. Although at The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, kids run their community. Not just the teenagers, but even 4 year olds get one equally powerful vote on any issue they’re interested in. This school has been around since the 60’s and has been featured in the main stream media like CBS’s “60 Minutes” and on the front cover of “Psychology Today.”
So how come that even after the proven success of that education model, we still have most class presidents limited to superficial power? I’m not saying that proms and dances aren’t important, they are. But what about the essential dynamics of the community? Presidents with real decision-making power in the community would foster lessons about responsibility, compassion, politics, relationships, that would go far beyond the academic lessons of math and English.
Leadership is both a blessing and a burden, and to fully feel the weight of both, a leader needs to be given significant responsibilities that have significant consequences. Which building the prom will be held in doesn’t matter nearly as much as how much teachers are going to get paid, which teachers are going to work at the school next year, what the rules are the frame clashes between students, and so on.
On the other hand, systematically excluding our class presidents from the mechanisms that drive the community also has big consequences. Giving an elected president superficial power undermines self-esteem. It sends a message to the students that their voices don’t matter; the person elected is a puppet. This creates apathy towards the community and government. I mean, if they’re getting excluding from making the rules, why SHOULD kids care about the school? This policy produces the apathy that results in so few people voting in adult elections; people feel like their voices don’t matter much, because that‘s what they‘ve always experienced in school.
Perhaps schools shouldn’t even have class presidents; if the school is small enough, that school might be better served through direct democracy, where the students vote directly on the issues instead of voting for people to represent them. Sudbury Valley has about 200 students, and use direct democracy. I’m not sure how big the numbers should get before switching to representative democracy, although I wish we had more schools experimenting with this model so that we could find out.
In the end, if students grow up in a school community with rigid hierarchy and no meaningful power in how that community is run, these people are more likely to leave that school for a job where they also have a sense of meaningless contribution. Even if these traditionally educated new graduates WANT to fully contribute to the community, they haven’t had any significant practice, so they have to start from step one.
It seems to me that our schools MUST give more power to students in every way they can. One easy place to start is with the class president. Let that person sit in on the important school meetings and slowly get involved. Everybody benefits when more people feel empowered.
(c) 2008, Brooks Elms All rights reserved. Reprint rights granted so long as article and by-line are published intact and with all links made live.
Brooks Elms fiercely writes, directs and produces films, winning awards and thrilling audiences around the globe for the last 20 years. His latest film, "Schooled" is like "Kid Nation" meets "Dead Poets Society" and it fundamentally changes the way people think about education: http://www.schooledthefilm.com/
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