HEAD SHOTS

Reflections on democracy with Peter Sturrup, Head of School

It seems that democracy is a little wobbly these days. Around the world and close to home, democracies are facing internal and external challenges from many sides. So it is timely to have an issue of The Pillars entitled “Democracy in Action.”

At first glance, I thought of the idea of democracy in action as an examination of where democratic principles are being applied to ensure that decisions are in the hands of people; or that democracy in action can be personified by social activists bringing the ideal of democracy to societies where it has not existed before, nurturing democracy in its infancy to bring it to maturity.

After reflecting on the state of the world these days, I think that democracy in action in today’s world needs to focus a little bit more on those places where democracy has already taken root and flourished, but where it is now under pressure or attack. Many formerly democratic countries have become more authoritarian. Even the birthplace of modern democracy—the United States—is facing some significant challenges.

American historian and journalist Jill Lepore wrote in a column in The New Yorker last year that, “It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent.” In this sense, true democracy in action is about constantly questioning, challenging, testing, debating, listening, accepting, revising and renewing the very foundation of the principle of democracy. This process, Lepore argues, is the way to fix democracy. It is not easy, it is not clean, it is not happy, nor is the outcome ever certain. But it may be the only way to identify what a country or society values and what it is prepared to do to achieve that outcome.

An alumnus once told me that Headmaster Joe McCulley (’27-’47) believed in the ‘perfectibility of the human spirit.’ This ideal of the perfectibility of the human spirit obviously needs the right environment in which to grow and thrive—an environment that believes in the ‘perfectibility of society.’ Coincidentally, in the very same era that McCulley was inspiring his charges at Pickering College, Winston Churchill was writing, “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” For me, that captures the essence of democracy in action—the recognition that the concept of democracy is imperfect, and that only way to perfect it is to continue to challenge it.

Perhaps the reason this all resonates so deeply with me is that this idea of democracy parallels the idea of education. Transformational education, is a process of questioning, challenging, testing, debating, listening, accepting, revising and renewing. Those are the skills we want to be instilling in our students in their time in school; those are the skills we want our students to be taking into the world to address the issues they will face; those are the skills that can support a fledgling democracy in other societies; and those are the skills that can preserve democracy in our own countries. Education, done right, is the path to the perfectibility of the human spirit and to the perfectibility of our society. What an overwhelming responsibility. What an inspiring cause.

Peter Sturrup, Head of School