Our government has just announced some long-awaited democratic reforms. Unfortunately, they are similar in nature to the so-called reforms they are imposing on public education – tinkering with a broken system rather than fixing it.

But I shouldn’t be surprised. In the same way that children in school are ruled and regulated by a group of friendly “experts”, we are governed by a professional class of politicians and in some cases media. Instead of self-government, we have a representative democracy in which the elite have centralized power for their own benefit, just as power is centralized in school. And that is the way those in charge like it. It is easier to tell us what is good for us and sell us something than to have us meddling in education, politics or economics.

In this kind of democracy, a citizen’s role is not to author public policy, but merely to influence or comment on it. The object of political debate in a schooled society is not to discuss but to persuade, in the same way that a child wheedles and pouts and throws a tantrum in order to get her way. Because we have never learned to take the initiative to make change, we resort to criticizing and complaining...or to misbehaving when the teacher is looking the other way.

Physical domination because of size, age or gender has taught us that power flows from the top down. Big kids bully little kids, teachers and principals have power over their students, strong men abuse physically weaker women and children, big countries invade smaller ones and everyone trashes the environment. Most of us accept this distribution of power, as well as its often brutal consequences. Those who do protest are made to feel like rebels and outsiders.

Sometimes the protesters are successful. We change a program here, save a building from demolition there, secure some extra funding for our favorite issue, protect a park from a road being widened, persuade politicians to amend a few pieces of legislation. But even when these activities accomplish what they were designed to do, they are just fighting symptoms and effects, rather than the root cause, which is misuse of power.

We can look at power negatively, or as the ability to control what happens to us, or at least to propose alternatives. Unfortunately, many of us have never even experienced the kind of collective power that can be used to build alternative institutions. Our schooling has led us to misunderstand the difference between the power to do something and the force that makes us do something. We were told one too many times to sit in our seats and listen, to put up our hands when we had to go to the bathroom, to buy what we were offered and that children should be seen and not heard.