By David Bornstein

The participation of the Indonesian military in this summer's wave of massacres in East Timor is a reminder that dictatorships do not readily transform themselves into peaceful democracies. Just as it was impossible to predict that the reforms in Yugoslavia in the 1980's would open the door to Slobodan Milosevic's butchery, the future of post-Suharto Indonesia remains uncertain today. The habits of democracy must be instilled in citizens from an early age. Given the state of many of the world's democracies, we must continue to explore the question: How do we break the habits of prejudice, passivity, fear and authoritarianism that nourish demagoguery and undermine democracy?

This issue of Changemakers profiles three social entrepreneurs who have established educational systems that instill in young citizens the skills, attitudes and beliefs that will enable them to help build healthy democracies. All three – Alicja Derkowska in Poland, Peter Lazar in Hungary and Sofyan Tan in Indonesia – believe that recent social and political changes have prepared the way for broad and penetrating reforms in their countries.

Consider a New York Times article titled "Earthquakes Help Warm Greek-Turkish Relations" (Sept. 13, 1999), which describes how Greece and Turkey, long the bitterest of enemies, recently improved relations "with a suddenness that no one had expected." Greece was under Turkish rule for centuries and fought against the Turks in the 1820's. The two countries also opposed each other in World War I.

In recent months, Greek-Turkish relations had been improving slowly, the Times reported, but the earthquakes jolted the countries towards a "heart-felt friendship." Each country sent rescue teams to assist the other, gestures that were greeted by "waves of ecstatic publicity and popular emotion."

Since then, a Greek naval vessel has called at a Turkish port for the first time in more than 25 years, a dormant office for business cooperation has been revived and news agencies have begun exchanging journalists' columns across borders. Diplomats refer to the phenomenan as "seismic" diplomacy. One Turkish journalist called it a "fresh beginning."

The earthquakes gave Greeks and Turks a chance to work side by side in emotional rescue operations. More important, they revealed a willingness not just among politicians but among millions of Greek and Turkish citizens to leave old hatreds behind. This is significant, particularly because it caught everybody by surprise. The social entrepreneurs profiled here sense similar stirrings in their countries.

In Indonesia, Sofyan Tan sees advances in literacy, an increase in wealth and the spread of international ideas and values as factors that have made it possible to bridge the ethnic divide that separates Chinese Indonesians from the majority. He has created a school in Medan that is unique because it brings together Chinese and non-Chinese students in equal proportions to break down prejudices while providing top quality education.

In Poland, Alicja Derkowska's objective is to prepare students to thrive in a democratic system. The legacy of Communist rule has left Polish citizens poorly prepared for the challenges of democracy, including organizing around common goals and achieving decisions through consensus building. Schools remain authoritarian, hierarchical and inward-focused. Derkowska's educational system, by contrast, stresses participation, internationalism and cross-disciplinary learning.

Peter Lazar has undertaken the design of a new educational approach that is appropriate for Hungary's Gypsy (Roma) minority. The Roma in Hungary constitute one of the most oppressed minorities in Europe. Recently, due to pressure from Hungarian human rights groups and the European Commission, the government has begun to respond.

To date, however, public schools in Hungary remain wholly inadequate for Roma children. Only one Roma in a hundred holds a secondary-school diploma. Roma children are often thrown indiscriminately into schools for the mentally handicapped. Though Roma represent less than one-twelfth the population, they make up more than 50 percent of children in such schools. A problem of this magnitude has many causes: poverty, prejudice, social exclusion, cultural differences. Lazar sees a national crisis unless the educational system can break the pattern.

Lazar, a Roma himself, began working with Roma children in a traditional elementary school but soon found that he had to rethink his approach. He decided to take the teaching out of the classroom, to draw upon the children's strengths and cultural knowledge and to build an environment around them conducive to study. He established Dear House, a dormitory-style arrangement where elementary students live during the week in order to benefit from a quiet, structured environment with a daily schedule, clearly defined rules, shared responsibilities and educational aids not available at home.

Using Common Techniques to Build Strong Communities

Though these three entrepreneurs struggle with different problems in different contexts, their approaches share a number of themes. Each is working to transmit ideas to larger communities through the "entry points" of children and teenagers and, in very specific ways, is responding to the needs of each community. Alicja Derkowska is working to inculcate a sense of civic responsibility in students: students volunteer in hospitals, homes for the elderly, recycling projects and other areas of public service. Peter Lazar designed Dear House in response to the lack of structure and private study opportunities in poor Roma communities. More specifically, each has undertaken steps to minimize resistance, maximize impact and spread quickly and efficiently.

Involve parents from the outset. All three entrepreneurs work with parents in important ways. For Lazar the key was gaining the trust of parents in the Roma community. Parents feared that their children would be taken from them. He visited the communities over and over to reassure them and slowly developed personal relationships with many parents. Today parents are routinely invited to Dear House, where they can take part in educational and reading workshops alongside their children. Alicja Derkowska began the process of building her school by asking parents what they wanted (smaller classes, more languages, instruction in religion) and later recruited parents to sit on the school's governing board. Sofyan Tan focused first on attracting support by satisfying parents' academic priorities and standards. He also established a foster parent program in which Chinese parents pay to send non-Chinese children from low-income families to school, and vice versa. By winning over the parents early, both Derkowska and Tan have been able to support their schools largely through tuition fees.

Have students work in teams and participate in meaningful democratic processes. Derkowska's students, for example, participate in an exercise called Village, in which groups of 10-to-13-year-olds, under the guidance of trained instructors, build a village at 1/25th scale. The undertaking rests on the students' ability to organize and make informed decisions as a group. The task involves knowledge of math, physics, shop work, civics and many other subjects. Her school's governance committee includes students, parents and teachers. Students also participate in a school court to address grievances, hear cases and implement solutions. Similarly, in Dear House's "Room of the Law," students gather each night before bed to discuss the day's events, hash out problems and make collective planning decisions.

In his classic study, "The Nature of Prejudice," one of the leading social psychologists in the United States, Gordon W. Allport, observed that while "casual contact" did little to dispel prejudice, contacts that led to "true acquaintanceship" were often successful at lessening bias.¹   Studies of white students who made exchange visits to the homes of African-Americans led to the whites espousing more favorable attitudes towards the African Americans in more than 80 percent of the cases.²   Similarly, white American soldiers in World War II who were closely associated with African-American soldiers under combat conditions had markedly more positive attitudes toward them than those who had no common participation.³   Allport noted that the best gains were made in cases of sustained acquaintanceship among individuals who regarded themselves of roughly equal status.

"To be maximally effective," he wrote, "contact and acquaintanceship programs should lead to a sense of equality in social status, should occur in ordinary purposeful pursuits, avoid artificiality and if possible enjoy the sanction of the community in which they occur. The deeper and more genuine the association, the greater its effect. While it may help somewhat to place members of different ethnic groups side by side on a job, the gain is greater if these members regard themselves as part of a team."⁴  

Sofyan Tan makes use of these insights in his work. In class, he begins by sitting his students literally side-by-side one Chinese, one non-Chinese, at double desks, where they spend a year together. Outside class, Sofyan provides Chinese and non-Chinese students with extensive opportunities in sports, hiking, camping and tough wilderness excursions to work and struggle together toward shared and meaningful goals, not unlike the Greek and Turkish rescue workers mentioned above.

Develop a curriculum to build on what the students already know. One of Lazar's insights was that public schooling simply took no account of the living circumstances of Roma children. They had difficulty sitting quietly and paying attention for 45 minutes at a time in a classroom setting. At the same time, their knowledge, habits, family histories and personal experiences were accorded no value. He began taking children on long walks where the classroom would not inhibit them. It turned out they knew a great deal about their environment. For example, they could recognize subtle differences in plants. They may not know the Hungarian or Latin names, but they knew whether the plants could be eaten or used medicinally. Lazar believed that the way to teach Roma children was to begin with what they already knew and build from there.

In Tan's approach, students study and celebrate many religious holidays: Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu. They explore the implications of negative stereotyping and are encouraged to discuss their feelings openly in class. Each student is given the opportunity to teach others from his or her cultural knowledge. Derkowska has created an exercise entitled "My Five Minutes," in which each graduating senior prepares a speech to share a private opinion on an issue that he or she cares deeply about.

Bring an international and multicultural scope to the work. Many of Lazar's methods and techniques have been developed and enhanced through his cooperation with teachers from California, who themselves have extensive experience working in Central America and elsewhere. One of his exercises is called "KWL." K stands for knowing. In the first stage, students, Roma and non-Roma, are asked to explain what they know about a particular culture. Second is W for what, and the question here is: "What don't you know about that culture that you would like to know?" L is for learning, where questions are explored like: "When did the Roma come to Europe?" Or: "Why do they have large families?"

As an important component of their education, Derkowska's students also exchange visits with students from neighboring countries, study other cultures and learn foreign languages. The multinational scope helps teachers gain access to pedagogical tools that are developed elsewhere, helps students place themselves in contexts (e.g., a village in Hungary, in the European Union, in the world) that make it easier to grasp concepts like the regional or global spread of democracy and provides an environment in which they can encounter cultural differences without feeling threatened.

Develop effective teacher training networks to spread the idea. Both Derkowska and Lazar have made teachers' training the major focus of their work as they have moved beyond the initial demonstration of their ideas. They are now building and strengthening teacher networks. Both have struggled through trial and error to develop training programs and materials that are cost-effective and achieve sustainable reforms without their direct involvement. Derkowska has experimented with a variety of approaches and has determined that the key is to find highly motivated individuals in other schools – the principal, if possible – who will champion the reforms. It is also essential to invite enough participants to create an "innovative core" of support in a school. Training must be scheduled to allow time for participants to develop meaningful relationships so they enjoy a sense of mutual support. This is what will carry the work forward. As for focus, Derkowska is targeting a small number of committed schools over a broad geographical area, rather than a large number of schools where interest would necessarily be weaker. Lazar is working through a network of influential liaisons in schools, with the objective of bringing them together for "pinnacle" training programs and reforming the national curriculum.

The structure of the training also reveals common elements. The programs begin with broad questions – how to deal with overcrowding, encourage student participation and overcome isolation from the educational establishment – and move to specific solutions developed through democratic methods. They aim to create for the teachers an atmosphere of trust that gives permission to experiment.

Lazar, for example, forms groups of teachers (or students in his classes) and gives them the task of constructing a tower out of various materials, but the players are not allowed to speak to one another. With this "Tower of Babel," he has been able to show many teachers how difficult and frustrating it can be for Roma children to try to communicate in school, not only because they may not speak Hungarian well, but also because they are unfamiliar with many of its terms and concepts. He sees three major functions of an effective training: To get schools to learn how to respond to the needs of the communities they serve; to provide teachers with experiences that can change their attitudes and prejudices; to give teachers new tools and methods that work.

Biases Born of Insecurity

One of Gordon Allport's most intriguing findings is the high degree of overlap between what he calls the "prejudiced" personality and the "authoritarian" personality. "When students are asked to list the names of great people they most admired," Allport wrote, citing a psychological study that examined personality factors in anti-Semitism, "prejudiced students usually give names of leaders who had exercised power and control over others (Napoleon, Bismark) whereas the unprejudiced listed more typically, artists, humanitarians, scientists (Lincoln, Einstein)."⁵  

"This need for authority reflects a deep distrust of human beings," he concluded. Prejudiced people, for example, are more likely to agree that "the world is a hazardous place where men are basically evil and dangerous" than non-prejudiced individuals.⁶   But democracy requires that we trust others, indeed that we engage in a whole series of tacit agreements and working arrangements with them. If prejudice and authoritarianism, then, are grounded in fear, Allport reminds us that this is not unnatural; in fact fear of difference may be innate.

We must acknowledge this basic human tendency and work without illusions to build trust among people, allay fears and expose the false generalizations and untested assumptions that lie at the heart of prejudice and authoritarianism. These three social entrepreneurs are demonstrating that an effective way to do this is through education systems that teach children how to respect and nurture both their individual and their collective voices.

Epilogue

In Indonesia's first fully democratic elections, held on Oct. 20, Abdurrahman Wahid, a respected Muslim leader, won the presidency on a campaign platform of tolerance, inclusion and self-respect. The election was marked by some outbursts of violence in the streets of Jakarta but, The New York Times reported, the armed forces "were careful to stay out of the political fray" and "pledged support" to the new president.