Voice ≠ Power: From Speaking Up to Shaping Together
Student voice doesn’t matter much if no one is listening. Even if someone listens, it doesn’t guarantee that what is voiced will be taken in, digested, or make any difference in what happens in a school. “Giving students voice,” in spite of its well-meaning considerations, paradoxically reinforces existing authoritarian structures and power dynamics because it cannot get away from the reality that “he who giveth student voice can also taketh it away.” If you really want students’ perspectives and potentials to be considered and enacted, you need to give students a seat at the table. But as Malcolm X said, “sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate.” And even that assumes the table itself wasn’t built to exclude. Radical changes in schools will not come from new curricula or re-worked competency frameworks alone. They require flattened and reconfigurable hierarchies, co-created with students, that foster a deep sense of culture, place and community.
As critical educators from Paulo Freire to Ivan Illich to Henry Giroux have pointed out, schooling has too often been something done to students, not created with them. For some unfathomable reason, educators almost never question why schools are allowed to operate without taking into account their most important constituencies: young people. Most major decisions are made behind closed doors, certainly doors closed to students and often to teachers. Curriculum, facilities, and school culture are shaped without meaningful engagement with student potentia (their capacity to reconfigure the very conditions of their experiences). Students are rarely partners in the system—they are its objects, kept at a distance that sanitizes and dehumanizes. If students are denied the food on the plate, “student voice” is a form of domination masquerading as progressivism.
Schools—and therefore the societies in which they are embedded—stand at the intersection of two terminal crises: the uncertainty of what social futures will look like, and the certainty of impending climate collapse. I won’t revisit here how technological and ecological disruptions will affect our societies. The perturbation and angst are palpable, and they increase the risk of falling for palliative, off-the-shelf solutions and purified narratives of care and hope. But tending to community and place is never off the shelf.
Incremental changes won’t resolve the crisis we face. Adding this or subtracting that will address neither our uncertainty nor our certainty of what is to come. Schools must reckon with how the systems they enact are held together by power and reconfigure the relationships through which power emerges so that curriculum shifts (and, all the more SEL and eco-warriors) gain new potentialities. Radical change means going to the root, not of the purpose for school, but of the systems of power that give rise to school in the first place. It means imagining shifts as extreme as the crisis itself.
Radical change in school begins with flattening hierarchies, with school communities opening themselves to previously marginalized actors (in this case, students), new ways of teaching, and reconsidered understandings of learning’s purpose and value.
Schools can make immediate moves to flatten hierarchies. They can make moves that require only courage and conviction. We can share stories to learn from one another and find new protrusions that need flattening. I would like to tell the story of the Green School Student Association, a story that is still being written.
The Spots to Which We Are Blind
Green School Bali lives for its culture of advocacy. The school prides itself on educating future change-makers. While I am not entirely comfortable with this positioning (because we participate in change now), I appreciate the spirit of determination, perseverance, and courage that it nurtures. Green School’s reputation is built on students standing up for what they believe in, voicing their opinions, and taking action. Yet even within this fertile environment, none of this goes very far unless students eat at the community table of decision-making. That is to say, Green School promises to develop young activists, yet if it excludes them from power, it risks not enacting its promises within its own walls.
In the months leading up to my first official day as Head of Upper School at Green School in 2023, I invited teachers to Zoom with me, to get to know one another and help me better understand the school landscape so I could notice patterns. The intention was to come into the job with an understanding of the school’s recent history, where the pressure and leverage points were, and the lessons from previous change management efforts. Through what came out of these conversations, leaders and teachers thought of shorter- and longer-term initiatives to respond to some of the issues that came up again and again in our conversations. While the initiatives themselves were easy to design conceptually, we found the student body was resisting those changes.
One early anecdote-as-symptom was the day we communicated that we were rolling out a new off-campus lunch pass policy. Grade 11 and 12 students had off campus lunch privileges, but they were often late to come back and tardiness was an issue. Moreover, we had no way of knowing who was off campus in case of an emergency. In spite of us taking the time to explain the reasoning, we could sense the disgruntlement, the energy waiting to be released. A part of me yearned for this release, frankly, because I didn’t understand what the problem might be. All we asked the students to do was drop their lunch passes off at the gate when they left and collect them when they returned. We had spent a fair amount of time explaining the reasoning: safeguarding, the importance of knowing who was on campus and who wasn’t, and making sure only Grades 11 and 12 left campus. Something was afoot that we were missing, something beyond the expected adolescent resistance.
But perhaps resistance isn’t quite the right word. Perhaps resistance was what we assumed was in the students’ reaction, a sweeping opposition to change and authority. The energy we misread as resistance was actually friction, the point of contact between their worlds and ours. We adults designed the lunch pass policy drawing from our perspectives, from our interpretations of what was needed to optimize lunchtime as a social, nutritional, safeguarded and time-bound experience. When we ignore student experiences, shaped by how they experience the day and how this molds their perception of self—as well as their relationship with others and the school—we miss significant blind spots regarding those we are supposed to serve. The friction did not come from lunch passes, it came from the process of creating policies and procedures (in their minds, rules) without consultation and without taking into account that by trying to solve problems of tardiness and safeguarding, we created other problems for students such as having to deal with longer lines at the local restaurants, not being able to go out (or in some cases eat) if they forgot their pass, and the confusion around who would be responsible for the physical passes themselves.
It was when I spoke to students individually and in informal groups that these mistakes appeared so starkly. Students weren’t against the need for a new lunch pass policy—they were in friction with the problems in implementation they identified (but we hadn’t noticed) and how they experienced the flow of school. In other words, they knew what would work, what wouldn’t, and what was needed based on how they knew lunch happened for them.
Fast forward: we re-shaped the lunch pass policy, taking into account student input through a consultative process. I will spare you two other stories: the re-design of the timetable and the drafting of a policy for Independent Study Courses. Suffice to say that both these stories (and others putatively less critical to school operations) involved inviting students as consultants in the drafting process and ensuring their input was central to the outcome. But this wasn’t enough. This consultative approach felt ad hoc, somewhat inequitable, and required we bring all students new to the process up to speed.
Reimagining the Green School Student Association (GSSA)
We needed something more robust, something that could gain traction and didn’t require a restart, which is what happened when we brought together student volunteers haphazardly. The GSSA was used to meeting at lunch, one day a week, a form of scheduling and organization that might be familiar in many schools. And, as in many schools, this meant the GSSA was largely toothless. It had trouble attracting and retaining students and focused on initiatives that could fit within a 30-minute weekly window: event planning, fundraising, picking out which new cut of uniforms to choose for the volleyball team. Without the structures within which a coherent group of students had the time to delve into matters of concern within the school community, the GSSA couldn’t do much more.
So we turned the GSSA into a class, one that met twice a week for two hours and for which learners received credit. We told the GSSA that they would have the space to propose any initiative they felt was worth pursuing and would participate in its implementation. We signaled that they would not have free reign—they would have to negotiate everything with other constituents, as happens in every organized body. In other words, we made the class about learning and doing through engagement with student potentia. We told them that we would start from YES and take it from there.
None of this was immediately successful. The students didn’t have a schema or habits from which to work. For the first semester, the GSSA organized the Halloween haunted house and sports day. There was a proposal to give all High School students outside lunch passes, but that died quickly when 11th and 12th graders refused to give 9th and 10th graders the same privileges for which they had waited two years. All in all, this wasn’t meeting the ambitions we had set. Moreover, if we gave the GSSA this space, we could still taketh it away. Not much changed.
So we decided to write the GSSA into governance policy. We declared that no policy in High School could be decided without the equal approval of GSSA, teachers, and leadership. Even eliminating this policy required agreement from all three parties. Now we had something to work with.
Today, as a high school, four representatives from the GSSA, four rotating teachers, and two members of leadership meet twice a term. Anyone can table any proposal that is discussed, and a policy draft is sent out to attendees within 48 hours, inviting comments and edits based on the initial meeting and drawing from community input that attendees are responsible for socializing and gathering. The group meets again and finalizes the policy, which is enacted immediately.
And guess what? The first policy had to do with lunch passes. Two years later, we’re still talking about lunch passes. We still had unresolved issues and tensions that never subsided because what we thought was a solid plan left many elements that learners found arbitrary in terms of rules, stipulations, and measures (who decides and based on what?). If lunch passes were a privilege, who had the right to decide to take that privilege away and for what reasons? There was too much vagueness. By including the students in drafting the new lunch policy (that is, the one written in the 2025-2026 academic year), students were able to stress test scenarios. More than anything, they were able to advocate for themselves and their sense of fairness and clarity. We now have a lunch pass policy that has the buy-in of all parties.
Is the work done? Of course not. But it reconfigures power by sharing the plate, and that changes everything. The flattened hierarchies create the conditions for self-organization. This doesn’t mean the hierarchies will remain flat, but it does mean they can form around matters of concern.
The two terminal crises school faces—the uncertainty of what social futures will look like, and the certainty of impending climate collapse—won’t be addressed through replicable, sweeping or cosmetic changes. Radical change means getting at the roots, where habits and culture form one another and create potential for a different kind of response.
Saying that we want to elevate student voice does not mean much unless we are willing to bring students into policy- and decision-making. You do not have to be a school in the jungle to do this. Every school can make the conscious decision to include students at all levels (barring any child protection or confidentiality issues). This is what differentiates performative discourse from action that leads to change, through flattened and self-organizing hierarchies. If schools really want to live up to their missions and stated purposes, they should begin within their own spaces, opening up to possibilities and to student potentia.
Benjamin Freud, Ph.D., is Head of Upper School and Strategic Lead for Regenerative Education at Green School Bali. A historian by training, his work bridges philosophy, ecology, and design to explore how education can work in reciprocity with the living systems that sustain us. He leads the BiRD Lab (Biomimicry for Regenerative Design), where students engage in learning&doing that connects ideas to practice in service of life. Benjamin also founded Coconut Thinking, a regenerative education consultancy and podcast that partners with schools and organizations to reimagine learning for a living world. Both scholar and practitioner, he is dedicated to building educational futures that nurture curiosity, care, and meaningful participation across human and more-than-human communities.