Screenshot: Yaacov Hecht addressing the Opening Plenary of the World Forum for Democracy 2016 on democratic schooling.To me it’s very difficult to sit and talk. I need to move. Hello everyone, my name is Yaacov Hecht and I am from Israel and 30 years ago I built a new kind of school in Israel and I called this a ‘democratic school’; and from the moment I called it thi people started to ask me why I called it a ‘democratic school’. They said, “Maybe all the schools that exist in democratic countries are democratic schools?” To me it was clear that what we call ‘school’ in all our countries is something that doesn’t understand clearly where it has come from. It has taken me some time to understand that the school that we see today is coming from the ideas of one hundred years ago; that people who want to promote undemocratic ideas built this hieratic school to prepare people to work in the factories, and be like slaves. They had the idea to build this school as we see it today. But when I say I want to build a democratic school today, I mean that in the big puzzle of our democratic societies, I feel that there is a missing piece of the jigsaw – and that this is the education, an education that promotes democracy and prepares people for the future. I fear that in schools today they prepare us for the past. But how do we build a school that prepares us for the future? That was the idea behind my democratic school.
And then, for me it was like magic. Once I’d built this school there was immediately a huge waiting list. And I found myself building another, and then another, another. I found myself building 30 democratic schools in Israel, and then I realised that I wanted to understand what had happened in the world, and so I founded an international conference, and I call it IDEC, the international democratic education conference, and I called on innovative democratic schools from around the world to come to this conference. And today, we have more than 1,000 democratic schools from all over the world in more than fifty countries. It is an annual event, running in different countries ever year. Last year IDEC was in Finland: this year in April it will come back to Israel and all of you will come!
