2. Literature Review

2.1 The Democratic Classroom

Among a number of scholars and theoreticians, there was a strong tendency augmenting the spread of democracy beyond its immediate political applications, but the close articulation of school and society. For example, Jasminka Kocoska (2009) posits, in his study, that the democratic classroom conduces to the development of the students’ personality as well as the critical thinking.

The democratic classroom is primarily demonstrated by John Dewey(1916) through his book Democracy and Education. According to Dewey, there’re two traits that precisely characterize democracy. The first signifies not only common interests, but also great reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as one of the factors in social control. In line with this, Hur, Glassman and Kim (2013) illustrate that inspiring interest would lead to a higher sense of democratic atmosphere, which engage more students in class activities. The second means both freer interaction between social groups and change in social habit. Videlicet, a society which takes all its members’ interests into consideration on equal terms and which assures flexible readjustment through interaction of varied forms of associated life is in so far as democratic. Otherwise a criterion for democratic education can only be inconsistently applied.

The idea of democratizing the classroom is also based on the work of Lewin, Lippitt and White, famous analysis of leadership patterns in boys’ clubs. In the experiment, they pided participants, ten and eleven years of age, into two separated groups with one autocratic and one democratic adult leader (two atmospheres). The autocratic leader took active control of both aims and means within the group. Meanwhile, the democratic leader focused minimally upon content, but actively fostered the development of group control procedures. As a result, two groups reacted totally differently to each other. The children in the democratic group were more matter-of-fact, more co-operative, and submissive toward their equals. What’s more, every inpidual showed a relatively greater inpiduality (Lewin, 1939).