Towards a more democratic Europe? We’re in!
From 7th to 14th April, school student activists, members of OBESSU from all over Europe, transformed the fourth floor of the Council of Europe’s European Youth Center in Budapest into an ancient Greek agora – an assembly filled with heated debates, new ideas and plans for more participatory and democratic Europe. Why? It was the week of the Study Session on Democracy and Participation: A Legal framework for school student rights.
‘The word “Democracy” originates from the Greek δημοκρατία “rule of the people”, which was coined from δῆμος (dêmos) “people” and κράτος (kratos) “power” or “rule”’ – this is something Wikipedia and many of our textbooks start with when talking about what democracy is. Not OBESSU, though. Through a variety of non-formal education methods, participants of the study session had the chance to explore different forms of democratic practices, rethink what are the existing ones in their organisations and reflect on what we can do to trigger change that would make our schools, organisations and communities more democratic.
Every day the discussions went on from early morning till late night, tackling topics from whether non-participation is a form of participation to those about whether true love really exists. Great debates, shared ideas, new information and perspectives, guidelines for the future political and structural work and a stronger network are just some of the outcomes of the inspiring week in Budapest.
Rethinking home organisations
“Be the change you want to see in the World” is what we often hear and promote, but it is very easy to get comfortable with the set way of working and not give a second thought on whether our organisations are the most democratic and participatory. That is why a great part of the Study Session was dedicated to learning from each other and explore what different alternatives there are and what is the structure of work that fully meets the needs and aims of our organisations. The organisations’ structures, projects, events and school visit systems are just some of the day-to-day activities of school student unions: peers from all over Europe offered different perspectives from their daily practices which paved the way to enter a process of improving our structures and consequently our work.
Democratic Schools
After looking into our own organisations, it was important to open a space for debating how a school needs to be in order to be equally accessible for everyone, offer equal opportunities, include everyone and properly transform our interest and talents into desirable learning outcomes. This is why we all together dig into the concept of democratic schools and also took the initiative to build a model of a school that we can then aim to develop in our realities. Different ideas on the work of a school student council, a school council, school staff, and classrooms were brought up in relation to the one final model of the learners-friendly school that we want to see in our society. Furthermore, we opened a space for everyone to raise a debate on any other related topics they found relevant. In this process, we had a lot of participants taking the initiative to start and facilitate discussions on secular education, private education, school student activism and vocational education and training – just to mention few.
Participation 2.0
From the organisational and school perspective, we climbed to the next step: democratic society as a whole. The current crisis affects the lives of young people greatly and it is a fact that youth rights have most often been taken away from the political agendas and that young people have very limited opportunities to change this. As unfortunate as it is, we luckily know that if opportunities to make a change are not offered, we create them! This why in the last years a lot of different forms of participation appeared in Europe – the occupy movement, social media campaigns, petitions, artistic expressions, street actions and blogs for example. Knowing that many of our member organisations can benefit from exploring these alternative ways of participation, we introduced a space where in smaller groups the participants could have hands-on experience with different forms of participation and then trade the ideas and methods with other participants in a plenary exposition of all the alternatives explored. Addressing this issue surely raised the spirit of the participants! Moreover, being part of these actions provided our activists with many new ideas on how can we ensure our stronger presence in decision-making processes on a national level and mobilize more peers to take an active part in shaping society.
Vote at 16
Should the voting age be lowered to 16? A hot debate all over Europe! Already at the OBESSU’s Council of Members in December 2012, school student representatives from around Europe raised the debate and opened a long democratic process of agreeing on OBESSU’s position on this important issue. In this framework, we re-started the debate at the Study session and what a debate that was! People chose to advocate for 3 different options:
- YES, the voting age should be lowered and this should apply to all levels of elections
- YES, but only for certain elections
- NO, the voting age should not be lowered to 16.
There we no member organisations wanting OBESSU not to address this matter as a part of our advocacy work. In order to explore as many different perspectives and arguments as possible, several ways of debating were in place: debating within the group of representatives with the same position , one-on-one confrontation of opinions and debating with representatives of different stances in plenary. Also, room for contra-arguments, additional questions and clarifications was opened in order to have as high quality discussion as possible. Moreover, in order to also have quantitative results, we organised a referendum where everyone was asked to anonymously vote for their own option, both individually and as representatives of their national school student organisation. The results are presented in the graph bellow:
Do you have three hours?
A final inspiration came from our guest speaker Asa Gunven, who introduced the participants to several social movements and campaigns. Asa claims that it takes a three hour engagement by as many people as we can reach to make the difference in our society. Three hours of lobbying, sharing information, provoking actions, presenting strong arguments, in different words: three hours of active participation to really bring change and get closer to the society that we want to live in.
Next steps
With fresh inspiration, new network, new ideas on organisational structures, a new model for the perfect participatory school and new arguments for debates – whether with friends, school principals or the education minister – we continue to work towards a more democratic and participatory Europe! Besides the activities planned by the participants to implement in their organisations, in OBESSU we will continue to actively work on the issues addressed by the Study Session in the future as well. We will aim to provide information on the various topics by including this as a focus on our social media channels; we will work through our Platform for the European Parliament Elections – School Students’ Europe 2019; and finally, from 29th July to 2nd August we will gather all our Member and Observer Organisations in Estonia for the 4th OBESSU Summer School that will open broader discussions on democracy, participation and citizenship and we look forward to seeing you there!
A big Thank you to Viktor, Larissa, Jaime, Munir, Alba, Zara, Javier, Tobias, Anne Sofie, Matic, Lele, Karl, Christoffer, Karolina, Brendan. Laslo, Rajmund, Zsofia, Sara, Krista, Jenni, Musa, Toty, Andri, Henni, Santeri, Lucia, Stanislav, Jakob, Fahredin, Asa, Sebastien, Pierre, Darko, Stefan, Judith and Ferre for all your engagement, passion and ideas that made this Study Session amazing and very fruitful! Good luck with the upcoming activities!
Written by Dejan Bojanic, OBESSU Board Member
