CYIL vol. 10 (2019)

DALIBOR JÍLEK CYIL 10 ȍ2019Ȏ autonomy and the respect for children’s rights. Children enjoy procedural and substantive rights sans rigid educational paternalism. The piece revives a somewhat forgotten topic in the context of participatory rights of the child. It could seem that the project is a lifeless part of the past that no longer requires any deconstruction. On the contrary, the Court of Peers experiment can still inspire pedagogy and brings structural impulses to respect for right of the child to be heard within schools and childcare institutions 1 . 2. Forms of children’s self-government Self-government was in part practiced in higher education at the turn of the penultimate and last century. Pupils were not to be unilaterally led to accept overwhelming, compelling, and often arbitrary, external institutional authority. Self-government began restricting school paternalism. It introduced an innovative element into the communication between teachers and pupils: democracy. Each pupil was allowed to assume personal responsibility and their equal share of decision-making in school matters based on ethical individualism. They could independently shape the dynamic ribbing of social relationships in the school environment. At the time, school self-government was viewed as a participatory structure that served several objectives. Its purposes were to support the harmonious development of each pupil and to stimulate their self-development, encourage them to perception and satisfying their own, independent of adults, interests and needs, as well as to inculcate them into democratic citizenship. Symbiotically, this should activate a pupil’s responsibility for their own conduct, and a respect, in terms of observantia , for law and order. Self-government was not exclusively centred on the individual pupil. It also pursued the collective interest: the well-being of the school community as a whole. By self-government, the school was meant to turn itself into a form of active public life. Children were to adopt democratic principles of self-government. In particular, pupils should participate in making, interpreting, and enforcing the internal laws of the school. 2 In this way children were to perform still unknown social roles: shaping school norms and applying them to everyday situations. Self-government introduced pupils to a new social and moral status. However, their status was not authoritative in nature but rather a consultative one. Children with compulsory school attendance could only use their own social personality in the firmly defined framework. By practicing self-government, they transformed themselves into the position of active social agents. Pupils learned to manage school affairs by free activity rather than acting on the basis of external orders, commands, prohibitions, and school punishments, the common objective of which is to subordinate, suppress, and discipline. 3 School’s self-government brought pupils closer and closer to gaining individual autonomy. 1 See Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child commonly abbreviated as the CRC or UNCRC. UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), General comment No. 12 (2009): The right of the child to be heard, 20 July 2009, CRC/C/GC/12, pp. 22-25. 2 WALKER, P. A. Self-Government in the High School. The Elementary School Teacher , 1907, Vol. 7, No. 8, p. 452. 3 Ibidem.

168