The EUDEC Blog

This week Leonard spent a few days in Leipzig, and we had a few meetings with him.

Leonard Turton was one of the people who first thought up the ideas that later became EUDEC (both the Conference and the Community). He is vice-Chairman of the EUDEC Council, and a teacher at Summerhill School in England. While in Leipzig, he gave a talk and a presentation at the student-run seminar on democratic education in the University of Leipzig. The main theme of his presentation was the history of democratic education, and the fact that it is not a progressive new idea at all. He also told the story of how he started a free school in Canada in 1971, how he later started a fad of democratic classrooms in a Canadian state school, and how his classroom at Summerhill works.

Leonard’s visit was a good opportunity to get Conference planning and Council work done. He attended the planning team’s meeting and some of us got together the next day to work out some of the details of the upcoming EUDECommunity website. We hope the site will launch within a few months. The following day, Leslie and I met with Leonard to work out some more details of the website content and to brainstorm about some of the tasks and questions before the Council right now. Much of the Council’s work for the next months will be in preparation for the conference. The Council is trying out different online solutions to enable closer cooperation and good flows of work and information among the council members, who are located in six different places in three different countries.