We need to know what's going to happen, to agree on what's going on. Let us help decide. Let us approve.

- HS student in Denver, Colorado

If you had a problem in the Black community, and you brought in a group of White people to discuss how to solve it, almost nobody would take that panel seriously. In fact, there’d probably be a public outcry. It would be the same the for women’s issues or gay issues. But every day, in local arenas all the way to the White House, adults sit around and decide what problems youth have and what youth need, without ever consulting us.

- Jason, 17-year-old activist in New York City, as quoted here.

All young people need a quality education and to get one students must be behind it. Youth involvement is the missing element in education reform.

- Eric Braxton, Founder, Philadelphia Student Union

We need to know what’s going to happen, to agree on what’s going on. Let us help decide. Let us approve.

– HS student in New York

We can give you respect. We are able to understand the issues. We can think for ourselves. It’s our education. If we have a say, it will make a difference.

- HS student in Colorado

No one ever asks us our opinion. The truth is, we have the most to lose when our schools aren’t working right, and the most to gain when they are.

- HS student in California

There are 48,000 youth in Oakland’s schools that are experts – who are in class every day and who have a lot to say about how the schools are run and how to improve our education… [E]veryone wants to hear from the teachers and parents - but what about the students? Who asks our opinion? Why do we feel shut out, like no one cares what we think?

- Student-created report from Oakland, California

If students feel some ownership in the school where they learn, we might have better attendance, fewer suspensions and more respect for keeping our building clean. Also, having a choice in how we are taught might make most students more enthusiastic about learning.

- A student activist statement

Go to the district and make a change, you say, but you gotta be prepared to take the responsibility of making that change. It's not easy to make a change. You gotta stick to it. And oftentimes, as youth, we feel that we can't do it, so we just give up.

- HS student in California

Adults Talking About Student Voice

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. - Richard Shaul (1970)

Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.

– Paulo Freire (1970)

Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.

– Alfie Kohn (1993)

There’s a radical – and wonderful – new idea here… that all children could and should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people’s ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on the world.  Its an idea with revolutionary implications.  If we take it seriously.

- Deborah Meier (1995)

I have heard teachers give it up after a single attempt, saying, ‘Children cannot behave responsibly,’ then remove all further opportunity for students to practice and grow in their responsible behavior. I have also heard teachers say, ‘Children cannot think for themselves,’ and proceed thereafter to do children's thinking for them. But these same teachers would never say, ‘These children cannot read by themselves,’ and thereafter remove any opportunity for them to learn to read.

- Selma Wassermann, as quoted by Alfie Kohn (1996)

Inclusive and welcoming management and curricular practices are… the most powerful means by which to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to be successful…

- Barbara McEwan (2000)

When adults think of students, they think of them as potential beneficiaries of change… they rarely think of students as participants in a process of school change and organizational life.

- Michael Fullan (2001)

Education should not be the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

- William Butler Yeats

Schools are compulsory for about ten years of a person’s life.  They are, perhaps, the only compulsory institutions for all citizens, although those with full membership in schools are not yet treated as full citizens of our society...

– Marie Brennan (1996)

Because of who they are, what they know, and how they are positioned, students must be recognized as having knowledge essential to the development of sound educational policies and practices.

- Alison Cook-Sather (2002)

Including students as representatives on boards and committees takes classroom learning into the community and opens the door for many more students to become involved in the policies and practices that shape their schools… Student board representatives play a valuable role in helping locally elected school boards understand how their decisions affect the [students] they serve and provide our young people with an opportunity to learn about the important debate and compromise that shape school policy.

- Wisconsin State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster (2004)

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Somehow educators… listen to outside experts to inform us, and consequently, we overlook… our students. As teachers, we need to find ways to continually seek out these silent voices because they can teach us so much about learning and learners.

-Suzanne SooHoo (1993)

From my experience of hundreds of children, I know that they have perhaps a finer sense of honour than you or I have. The greatest lessons in life, if we would but stoop and humble ourselves, we would learn not from grown-up learned men, but from the so-called ignorant children.

– Mahatma Gandhi (1931)

We must recognize that students’ ideas and experiences, as varied and complex as those of adults, require a thorough and rigorous analysis that respects but does not romanticize students and student voices.

- Beth Rubin and Elena Silva (2003)

Teachers must resist the temptation to glamorize student voices, and recognize that the multiple voices that students bring to the classroom, while potentially possessing some elements of resistance and transformation, are likely to be imbued with status quo values.

- Michael O’Loughlin (1995)

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

- Paulo Freire (1970)

Learning from children’s voices allows us to know a deeper level of who children are as learners and, because we have that knowledge, to expand and enrich our sense of what it means to teach.

- Penny Oldfather (1995)

Students often find themselves preached to about values instead of practicing them.  That’s why our efforts have been to focus on practice rather than exhortation.  Everything we do, including classroom teaching practices, school governance, students’ experience… out of school, assessment, even the organization of the school day, is done with an eye toward developing democratic community.

- George Wood (2000)

To teach is to learn twice.

– Joseph Joubert (1782)

...School can be far more than a place that allows only some students to serve on the student council... School can be a place whose very mission is to ensure that everyone becomes a school leader in some ways and at some times in concert with some others.  

- Roland Barth, Improving Schools from Within (2001)

It is tempting to think that if you just pay attention to students’ voices, you will hear what you already know. Secretly, adults – outside schools as well as in – generally believe that they know best.

 – Barbara Cervone & Kathleen Cushman (2002)

The evidence increasingly points to an innate disposition [in students] to be responsive to the plight of other people… Creating people who are socially responsive does not totally depend on parents and teachers. Such socializing agents have an ally within the child.

– Martin Hoffman (1967)