On French democratic schooling:
“In France, we went from two schools last year to 15 democratic schools this year. So there is some kind of explosion going on there. And a lot of interest. Maybe it does come accompanied by quite a bit of frustration from some parents with the conventional system. It hasn’t transformed much in the past few decades whereas in other European countries there has been a bit more effort to improve the pedagogy and the wellbeing of the students in the classroom, as well as the relationships between the teachers and the students. Finland is the best example, but in Germany and the UK I feel there has been more progress and that we [in France] are still a quite traditional system. We have a very vertical transmission of the curriculum, of explanations and theories, and not much relationship-building and doing stuff together.”
