Citizenship 101: Teaching Kids How, Not What, to Think : Education: Advocates of democracy in the classroom advocate emphasizing self-government, instead of programming students for a robotic adulthood.

Thus, when children are reminded day after day, year after year, that the most important thing they can do in school is to sit quietly, obey the teacher, and repeat back verbatim what they have been told, they are learning patterns of thinking and behavior that will stay with them for life.

--From “Schools That Work” by George Wood

All right, faithful readers, time for a pop quiz. Let’s see if you’re awake this morning.

What is the connection between comic books and democracy?

OK, OK, so it seems an absurd question. But it begins to make sense in Mike Manczarek’s sixth-grade class at Torrance’s Madrona Middle School.

The class’s 11- and 12-year-old students recently worked in groups of four and five to produce their own comic books. Not surprisingly, the results would have been familiar to any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan. Virtuous super-type heroes with names such as Mega Kids and Power Force took on conglomerates of evil such as the Synisters. BOOM! BASH! BANG!

But beneath the pop-culture veneer, advocates of a small, loosely knit educational reform movement known as democracy in education would recognize certain principles at work: The handmade comics required cooperative effort. Students had to develop a story, come up with pictures and words and meet a deadline. The group experience exposed them to the processes of working together, developing a consensus and taking joint responsibility for completing a project.

The comics project also is instructive of what the kids did not do: They did not sit in rows of seats facing a lecturing teacher. Rather they worked at clusters of desks grouped around a large open space, a less-regimented arrangement better suited to small groups. They did not memorize facts mainly for the purpose of taking tests. They did not, in short, behave like human microchips being programmed for a robotic adulthood.

So, in a small, limited way the comic book project symbolizes the democracy movement’s claims that schools should mold individuals who think for themselves, believe learning is a lifetime activity and that “democratic classrooms” will produce not only better-educated students, but better citizens.

“I believe I should be a facilitator,” says Manczarek, explaining that he encourages students to learn partly through following their own curiosities. “What I say should not be God’s truth.”

Several of his students say his methods have helped improve their work habits and performance. And generally they say the classroom is more user-friendly.

“I like the way this is” says Marcos Hand. “He’s more like a kid, he blends in with us.”

Adds Issica Baron: “You choose what you know you can do. He doesn’t make it too hard or too easy like some teachers.”

That’s more or less the way it should be, says Cynthia McDermott, an assistant professor of education at Cal State Dominguez Hills who introduced Manczarek to democracy concepts when he was her student. But McDermott also has more cosmic concepts in mind.

“Democratic classrooms could be as satisfying as what kids get from gangs,” McDermott maintains. “ . . . One of the most powerful things (President Bill) Clinton said when he was running was we have to start caring about each other--and you can do that in a democratic classroom.”

Indeed, democracy in education theorists meld education, political and social reform into a single, seamless unit.

George H. Wood, a 39-year-old Ohio University education professor and a founder of the Institute for Democracy in Education, is the apparent guru--or at least a prominent spokesman for the movement. Last year Wood published “Schools That Work: America’s Most Innovative Public Education Programs.” Both a manifesto and a survey of innovative, democratic-style teaching in a wide variety of schools, the book unabashedly takes a teacher and student view of education.

Perhaps most notably, the book exhibits an abiding faith that teachers and students can create wholesome learning environments even in the most inhospitable climates, including inner-city schools where fear, apathy and anarchy may reign.

Wood takes pride that he and five other teachers founded the Institute for Democracy eight years ago to assist teachers in the Appalachian region of southeastern Ohio where poverty has long been entrenched. Since then the institute has grown to about 2,000 members networked through about 20 offices nationwide, and publishes a quarterly teacher-written journal. In one way or another, Wood estimates that about 500,000 students are annually exposed to the institute’s ideas and practices.

However, Wood notes, the institute is not the only organization promoting democracy in education. Several other groups such as the Coalition of Essential Schools at Brown University, and Educators for Social Responsibility promote similar ideals.

But Wood clearly has big ambitions.

He used earnings from his book to buy a 110-acre site in Ohio where he eventually hopes to “build a place where teachers can come together” and exchange ideas. The institute already runs an Ohio summer camp where teachers and students, ages 5 to 18, spend several weeks trying out new ideas. Projects have ranged from studying wetlands to making animated films to younger students building their own indoor play area, Wood says.

“The emphasis really is on experience rather than exhortation or memorization,” he says.

As do others in the movement, Wood firmly opposes the “legislated-excellence” drive of the past few years. His book asserts that recent emphasis on mandated education objectives achieved largely through “drill-and-kill exercises” is aimed at preparing students for an “onslaught of (standardized) tests.”

Furthermore, Wood argues, the “legislated-excellence movement is primarily concerned with the American economy, not with the lives of our children.” And he contends that schools are not the place to solve economic problems, especially “the greed that led to the savings and loan crisis, or tax policies that encourage leveraged buyouts instead of capital investment.”

Rather, he writes, schools should concentrate on not only the basics but also how to “find and evaluate information . . . to sort the useful from the superfluous, the clearly propagandistic from the approximate truths.”

Ideally, students who have learned to think critically in a democratic school will become citizens who care about their communities. “People have to have a sense of the common good,” he says. “You can’t have a policeman following every citizen.”

As a practical matter, teaching good citizenship means allowing students to help run the classroom, even the school, Wood and others say. Sometimes that means students discuss classroom rules; sometimes that means students, teachers and administrators thrash out school problems together.

While such exercises in self-government are relatively rare, educators are generally encouraged by the results. For instance, a 1989 university study found that “the students in democratic schools rated their schools more highly” than non-democratic schools. Even in large schools, though, students, teachers and administrators sometimes break themselves down into smaller units that are more easily governable.

Advocates concede that democratic methods seems to work best in smaller schools and school districts. Still, Wood and others note, many school districts, including Los Angeles and Chicago, are considering or implementing downsizing. In at least some states, legislatures and education departments are backing away from “top-down” reforms in favor of more local autonomy.

Sacramento schools have involved administrators, teachers, students and parents in “site-based decision-making,” says Robert Howard, director of that district’s grant-writing and foundations office.

Obviously, Wood says, not everyone will embrace democratic education. Many believe that schools should emphasize discipline and educate for the job market, he concedes.

John Orr, former dean of USC’s School of Education, agrees that the democracy movement seems vulnerable to criticism, principally from feminists, immigrants and the religious right.

Feminists and immigrants could argue that democratic classrooms could tend to favor male viewpoints and the cultural majority, Orr says. Feminists might look askance at classrooms where “deal-making” determines classroom rules or course content, he explains, because such environments favor more aggressive male behavior. Minorities might also feel that cultural diversity would be overwhelmed by majority rule, he adds.

Moreover, Orr notes, the religious right has attacked the philosophical basis of the democracy movement, arguing that it is thinly disguised “secular humanism.”

And some educators, he says, are particularly wary of autonomous schools, which they see as an abdication of administrative and classroom responsibility: “It’s kind of throwing in the towel. If you don’t know what else to do, send it down there.”

Wood, meanwhile, regrets that one of the prime promoters of the democracy movement was recently involved in a scandal that received national attention. Eliot Wigginton, a former national teacher of the year who founded the innovative Foxfire educational project in Rabun Gap, Ga., pleaded guilty late last year to molesting a 10-year-old boy. Wigginton was sentenced to a year in prison, 19 years probation and fined $10,000.

Wigginton’s individual failure should not detract from Foxfire’s accomplishments, Wood says.