Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  His ‘junk playground’ was a resounding success, on an average day attracting two hundred kids to Emdrup. And even with quite a few ‘troublemakers’, almost immediately it became apparent that ‘the noise, screams and fights found in dull playgrounds are absent, for the opportunities are so rich that the children do not need to fight’.24 A ‘play leader’ was employed to keep an eye on things, but he kept himself to himself. ‘I cannot, and indeed will not, teach the children anything,’ pledged the first play leader, John Bertelsen.25

  Several months after the war ended, a British landscape architect paid a visit to Emdrup: Lady Allen of Hurtwood admitted she was ‘completely swept off my feet’ by what she encountered there.26 In the years that followed, she wielded her influence to spread the gospel of junk, chanting, ‘Better a broken bone than a broken spirit.’27

  Soon, bombsites were being opened up to children all across Britain, from London to Liverpool, from Coventry to Leeds. Joyful shouts now sounded in places that only recently had reverberated with the death and destruction of German bombers. The new playgrounds became a metaphor for Britain’s reconstruction and a testament to its resilience.

  True, not everybody was enthusiastic. Adults always have two objections to these kinds of playgrounds. One: they’re ugly. In fact, they’re an eyesore. But where parents see disorder, kids see possibilities. Where adults can’t stand filth, kids can’t stand to be bored.

  Objection two: junk playgrounds are dangerous. Protective parents feared that Emdrup would lead to a procession of broken bones and bashed brains. But after a year, the worst injuries required nothing more serious than a sticking plaster. One British insurance company was so impressed that it began charging junk playgrounds lower premiums than standard ones.28

  Even so, by the 1980s, what in Britain became known as adventure playgrounds began to struggle. As safety regulations proliferated, manufacturers realised they could make a killing marketing self-styled ‘safe’ equipment. The consequence? These days there are considerably fewer Emdrups than there were forty years ago.

  More recently, however, interest in Carl Theodor Sørensen’s old idea has revived. And rightly so. Science has now supplied a mountain of evidence that unstructured, risky play is good for children’s physical and mental wellbeing.29 ‘Of all the things I have helped to realise,’ Sørensen concluded late in life, ‘the junk playground is the ugliest, yet for me it is the best and most beautiful.’30

  4

  Could we take this a step further?

  If kids can handle greater freedom outdoors, what about indoors? Many schools are still run like glorified factories, organised around bells, timetables and tests. But if children learn through play, why not model education to match? This was the question that occurred to Sjef Drummen, artist and school director, a few years ago.

  Drummen is one of those people who never lost his knack for play, and who has always had an aversion to rules and authority. When he comes to pick me up from the railway station, he leaves his car parked flagrantly across the bike path. With me as his captive audience, he launches into a monologue that doesn’t let up for the next few hours. Now and then I manage to get in a question. Grinning, he admits he’s notorious for pushing his point.

  But it wasn’t Drummen’s gift of the gab that got me on a train to the city of Roermond, in the southern reaches of the Netherlands. I came because something extraordinary is happening here.

  Try to picture a school with no classes or classrooms. No homework or grades. No hierarchy of vice-principals and team leaders–only teams of autonomous teachers (or ‘coaches’ as they’re called here). Actually, the students are the ones in charge. At this school, the director is routinely booted out of his office because the kids need it for a meeting.

  And, no, this isn’t one of those elite private schools for offbeat students with zany parents. This school enrols kids from all backgrounds. Its name? Agora.

  It all started in 2014, when the school decided to tear down the dividing walls. (Drummen: ‘Shut kids up in cages and they behave like rats.’) Next, kids from all levels were thrown together. (‘Because that’s what the real world is like.’) Then each student had to draw up an individual plan. (‘If your school has one thousand kids, then you have one thousand learning pathways.’)

  The result?

  Upon entering the school, what first comes to mind is a junk playground. Rather than rows of seats lined up facing the board, I see a colourful chaos of improvised desks, an aquarium, a replica of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Greek columns, a bunk bed, a Chinese dragon and the front half of a sky-blue ’69 Cadillac.

  One of the students at Agora is Brent. Now seventeen, until a few years ago he attended a bilingual college prep school where he was earning good grades in everything except French and German–which he was failing. Under the Dutch three-track system, Brent was transferred down to a general secondary education track and then, when he continued to lag behind, to a vocational track. ‘When they told me, I ran home, furious. I told my mother I was getting a job at McDonald’s.’

  But thanks to friends of friends, Brent wound up at Agora, where he was free to learn what he wanted. Now he knows all about the atomic bomb, is drafting his first business plan and can carry on a conversation in German. He’s also been accepted on an international programme at Mondragon University in Shanghai.

  According to his coach Rob Houben, Brent felt conflicted about announcing his admission to college. ‘He told me, “There’s still so much I want to give back to this school for everything it’s done for me”.’

  Or take Angelique, aged fourteen. Her primary school sent her to vocational education, but the girl I meet is terrifically analytical. She’s obsessed with Korea for some reason and set on studying there, and has already taught herself quite a bit of the language. Angelique is also vegan and has compiled an entire book of arguments to fire at meat-eaters. (Coach Rob: ‘I always lose those debates.’)

  Every student has a story. Rafael, also fourteen, loves programming. He shows me a security leak he discovered on the Dutch Open University website. He notified the webmaster, but it hasn’t been fixed yet. Laughing, Rafael tells me, ‘If I wanted to get his attention, I could change his personal password.’

  When he shows me the website of a company he’s done some front-end work on, I ask if he shouldn’t be billing them for his trouble. Rafael gives me an odd look. ‘What, and lose my motivation?’

  More than their sense of purpose, what impresses me most about these kids is their sense of community.

  Several of the students I talk to would probably have been picked on mercilessly at my old school. But at Agora no one gets bullied, everybody I talk to says so. ‘We set each other straight,’ says Milou, aged fourteen.

  Bullying is often regarded as a quirk of our nature; something that’s part and parcel of being a kid. Not so, say sociologists, who over the years have compiled extensive research on the places where bullying is endemic. They call these total institutions.31 Sociologist Erving Goffman, writing some fifty years ago, described them as follows:

  • Everybody lives in the same place and is subject to a single authority.

  • All activities are carried out together and everybody does the same tasks.

  • Activities are rigidly scheduled, often from one hour to the next.

  • There is a system of explicit, formal rules imposed by an authority.

  Of course, the ultimate example is a prison, where bullying runs rampant. But total institutions show up in other places, too, such as nursing homes. The elderly, when penned together, can develop caste systems in which the biggest bullies claim the best seats and tables at Bingo time.32 One American expert on bullying even calls Bingo ‘the devil’s game’.33

  And then there are schools. Bullying is by far the most pervasive at typical British boarding schools (the kind that inspired William Golding’s Lord of the Flies).34 And little wonder: these schools resemble nothing so much as prisons. You can’
t leave, you have to earn a place in a rigid hierarchy, and there’s a strict division between pupils and staff. These competitive institutions are part and parcel of Britain’s upper-class establishment–many London politicians went to boarding school–but according to education scientists, they thwart our playful nature.35

  The good news is things can be different. Bullying is practically non-existent at unstructured schools like Agora. Here, you can take a breather whenever you need one: the doors are always open. And, more importantly, everyone here is different. Difference is normal, because children of all ages, abilities and levels intermingle.

  ‘At my old school,’ says Brent, ‘you didn’t talk to kids in vocational ed.’ Then he and Joep (fifteen) tell me about the time Noah (fifteen, originally placed in a vocational programme) gave them a lecture on a skill they sorely lack: planning. ‘Noah had planned out the whole next year and a half of his life,’ explains Joep. ‘We learned a lot.’

  The longer I walk around Agora, the more it hits me how crazy it is to corral kids by age and ability. Experts have for years been warning about the growing gap between well-educated and less educated segments of the population, but where does this rift actually begin? Jolie (fourteen) says, ‘I don’t see the difference. I’ve heard vocational students say things that make much more sense than the so-called honours kids.’

  Or take the customary way schools chop days up into timed periods. ‘Only at school is the world divided up into subject chunks,’ notes Coach Rob. ‘Nowhere else does that happen.’ At most schools, just when a student finds their flow, the bell rings for the next class. Could there be a system more rigged to discourage learning?

  Before you get the wrong idea, it’s important not to exaggerate Agora’s laissez-faire philosophy. The school may promote freedom, but it’s not a free for all. There’s a minimal yet vital structure. Every morning, a student opens the school day. There’s one hour of quiet time daily, and every student meets with their coach once a week. Moreover, expectations are high, the kids know it, and they work with the coaches to set personal goals.

  These coaches are essential. They nurture and challenge, encourage and guide. In all honesty, their job looks harder than ordinary teaching. For starters, they have to unlearn much of their training as teachers. ‘Most of what kids want to learn, you can’t teach them,’ explains Rob. He doesn’t speak Korean, for example, and knows nothing about computer programming, but nonetheless he’s helped Angelique and Rafael on their respective paths.

  The big question, of course, is: would this model work for most children?

  Given the incredible diversity in the student body at Agora, I see every reason to believe it might.36 The kids say it took some to get used to, but they’ve learned to follow where their curiosity leads. Sjef Drummen compares it to caged chickens at battery farms: ‘A couple years ago I bought some off a farmer. When I let them out in my yard, they just stood there for hours, nailed to the spot. It took a week before they found the courage to move.’

  And now the bad news. Any kind of radical renewal inevitably clashes with the old system.

  In truth, Agora is educating kids for a very different kind of society. The school wants to give them room to become autonomous, creative, engaged citizens. But if Agora doesn’t meet standardised testing criteria, the school won’t pass inspection and can wave its government funding goodbye. This is the mechanism that’s consistently put the brakes on initiatives like Agora.

  So maybe there’s an even bigger question we should be asking: What’s the purpose of education? Is it possible we’ve become transfixed on good grades and good salaries?

  In 2018 two Dutch economists analysed a poll of twenty-seven thousand workers in thirty-seven countries. They found that fully a quarter of respondents doubt the importance of their own work.37 Who are these people? Well, they’re certainly not cleaners, nurses, or police officers. The data show that most ‘meaningless jobs’ are concentrated in the private sector–in places like banks, law firms and ad agencies. Judged by the criteria of our ‘knowledge economy’, the people holding these jobs are the definition of success. They earned straight As, have sharp LinkedIn profiles and take home fat pay cheques. And yet the work they do is, by their own estimation, useless to society.

  Has the world gone nuts? We spend billions helping our biggest talents scale the career ladder, but once at the top they ask themselves what it’s all for. Meanwhile, politicians preach the need to secure a higher spot in international country rankings, telling us we need to be more educated, earn more money and bring the economy more ‘growth’.38

  But what do all those degrees really represent? Are they proof of creativity and imagination, or of an ability to sit still and nod? It’s like the philosopher Ivan Illich said decades ago: ‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.’39

  Agora, the playing school, proves there is a different way. It’s part of a movement of schools that are charting an alternative course. People may scoff at their approach to education, but there’s plenty of evidence it works: Summerhill School in Suffolk, England, has been demonstrating since 1921 that kids can be entrusted with an abundance of freedom. And so has the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, where since the 1960s thousands of kids have spent their youth–and gone on to lead fulfilling lives.40

  The question is not: can our kids handle the freedom?

  The question is: do we have the courage to give it to them?

  It’s an urgent question. ‘The opposite of play is not work,’ the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith once said. ‘The opposite of play is depression.’41 These days, the way many of us work–with no freedom, no play, no intrinsic motivation–is fuelling an epidemic of depression. According to the World Health Organization, depression is now the number one global disease.42 Our biggest shortfall isn’t in a bank account or budget sheet, but inside ourselves. It’s a shortage of what makes life meaningful. A shortage of play.

  Visiting Agora has made me see there’s a ray of hope. Later, when Sjef Drummen drops me off back at the station, he gives me another grin. ‘I think I talked your ear off today.’ True, but I have to hand it to him: walk around his school for any length of time and you’ll feel quite a few old certainties start to crumble.

  But now I understand: this is a journey back to the beginning. Agora has the same teaching philosophy as hunter-gatherer societies. Children learn best when left to their own devices, in a community bringing together all ages and abilities and supported by coaches and play leaders.43 Drummen calls it ‘Education 0.0’–a return to Homo ludens.

  15

  This Is What Democracy Looks Like

  1

  It was an unlikely setting for a revolution. The municipality in western Venezuela had a population of less than two hundred thousand, and a small elite had been calling the shots for hundreds of years.1 Yet it was here in Torres that ordinary citizens found an answer to some of the most urgent questions of our times.

  How can we restore trust in politics? How can we stem the tide of cynicism in society? And how can we save our democracy?

  Democracies around the globe are afflicted by at least seven plagues. Parties eroding. Citizens who no longer trust one another. Minorities being excluded. Voters losing interest. Politicians who turn out to be corrupt. The rich getting out of paying taxes. And the growing realisation that our modern democracy is steeped in inequality.

  Torres found a remedy for all these problems. Tried and tested now for twenty-five years, the Torres solution is mind-bogglingly simple. It’s being adopted around the world, yet rarely makes the news. Perhaps because, like Buurtzorg and Agora, it’s a realistic initiative premised on a fundamentally different view of human nature. One that doesn’t see people as complacent or reduce them to angry voters, but instead asks, what if there’s a constructive and conscientious citizen inside each of us?

  Put differently: what if real democracy’s possible?

&
nbsp; The story of Torres began on 31 October 2004. Election day. Two opposing candidates were running for mayor of the Venezuelan municipality: The incumbent Javier Oropeza, a wealthy landowner backed by the commercial media, and Walter Cattivelli, who was endorsed by reigning president Hugo Chávez’s powerful party.

  It wasn’t much of a choice. Oropeza or Cattivelli–either way, the corrupt establishment would continue to run the show. Certainly there was nothing to hint that Torres was about to reinvent the future of democracy.

  Actually, there was another candidate, albeit one hardly worth mentioning. Julio Chávez (no relation) was a marginal agitator whose supporters consisted of a handful of students, cooperatives and union activists. His platform, which could be summed up in a single sentence, was downright laughable. If he was elected mayor, Julio would hand over power to the citizens of Torres.

  His opponents didn’t bother to take him seriously. Nobody thought he stood a chance. But sometimes the biggest revolutions begin where you least expect them. That Sunday in October, with just 35.6 per cent of the vote in this three-way race, Julio Chávez was narrowly elected mayor of Torres.2

  And he kept his word.

  The local revolution began with hundreds of gatherings. All residents were welcome–not only to debate issues, but to make real decisions. One hundred per cent of the municipal investment budget, roughly seven million dollars, was theirs to spend.

  It was time, announced the new mayor, for a true democracy. Time for airless meeting rooms, lukewarm coffee, fluorescent lighting and endless bookkeeping. Time for government not by public servants and career politicians, but by the citizens of Torres.

  The old elite looked on in horror as their corrupt system was taken apart. ‘[They] said that this was anarchy,’ recalled Julio (everybody calls this mayor by his first name) in an interview with an American sociologist. ‘They said that I was crazy to give up my power.’3