Outline of the concept of free democratic schools

Abstract

Abstract This article is focused on the idea of free democratic schools, institutions of informal education, emerging as a result of a grassroot initiative. This educational phenomenon is an effect of pedagogical innovation and parents, gathering in the communities, who, as they say, want to create a place where children will have the opportunity to grow up in happiness and fulfilment. Such schools also known as quasi-schools, they are not formalised educational institutions, they do not have the school status and, thus, they remain on the edge of the education system, acting on the rights of home education. This article aims at presenting the main pedagogical concepts of such schools. Over the last few years in Poland we have observed the creation of more than a dozen of democratic schools gathered around the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC). These new institutions represent the idea of a new, emancipated education. The initiators of free democratic schools resign from adaptive didactic strategy characteristic of public schools towards emancipation modelled on the first democratic school founded in Summerhill. Free democratic schools prioritise students’ individual, subjective needs, such as the need of autonomy, cognitive activity, interaction with the environment, expressing their own attitudes towards the learnt concepts or cooperation in the search for knowledge.