Democracy in Miniature: Youth Agency and Junior Republics | A Conversation with Jennifer Light

Introduction: A Crossover Conversation

Peter Stiepelman: Today on An Imperfect Leader, we are trying something we’ve never done before. It’s a crossover episode with my friend Mason Pashia from the Getting Smart Podcast, a member of the PodcastAll network. And together, we get to speak with Dr. Jennifer Light, professor of History of Science and Technology and professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.

She’s also the author of The State of Childhood, which examined youth-led Junior Republics. And you might be wondering, what is a Junior Republic? You will soon find out. Professor Light is also involved in the MIT Project on Embodied Education, focusing on how movement and physical activity can be integrated into academic instruction to enhance learning.

So I’m really excited to jump into this conversation. Jen, welcome to both An Imperfect Leader, and I guess, if it’s OK, Mason, I get to welcome her to Getting Smart.

Peter Stiepelman: For those who are watching the video, it’s a perplexing background, but one that is enticing, no doubt. Yeah, exactly. So this conversation came about because I was taking a walk with Mason last year in West Seattle, and he was telling me about Junior Republics.

To our listeners, if you haven’t had a chance to listen to Mason’s episode on this, I’ll put a link in the show notes. He dives right into Junior Republics, but then, on a lark, I asked a friend of mine, Dave Sue, who’s a professor at MIT, if he knew you, Jen, and he texted back, “She’s in my department.” So I thought, what luck.

So, if it’s all right, we’ll start with Mason. How did you find The State of Childhood? Talk a little bit about that.

Mason Pashia: This might be one of the rare pro-social AI results, is meeting Jen today. I was chatting—I think with one of the, maybe it was ChatGPT at the time—and I was asking a bunch of questions about youth agency, specifically around youth movement-building.

So young people who have really lived democracy in a meaningful way. And it just kept digging a little deeper and a little deeper, and it was like, “Give me a tangible example. Give me a tangible example.” And eventually it gave me these Junior Republics as a tangible example of youth democracy. And, of course, like you, Peter, I had never heard of them.

I was a little surprised I hadn’t heard of them, because we live in a space that talks so much about youth agency and real-world learning and all these other things. And then I was like, “Who’s an expert on this? I want to talk to them.” And so it gave me Jen’s name and the book, and so I was like, “Oh, this is kind of cool.”

I should reach out and make something happen. And sort of fortuitously, and in a roundabout way, we came together today. But yeah, I think it was just a rogue curiosity that I was following at the time.

Jennifer Light: Yeah. Because I know this is sort of—in the MIT context, this project is about as far away from that as I could imagine.

Mason Pashia: Totally.

Peter Stiepelman: Yeah. It’s totally human-driven, right? And dependent on human interaction and cooperation and connection. Mason, if you don’t mind, why don’t you go off with the first question?

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Jen, just in order to really dig in today, I would love to know how you came to Junior Republics, Jen, and really what they are.

What Are Junior Republics?

Jennifer Light: Sure. So maybe let me start with what they are, and then I can tell you how I got into it.

A Junior Republic is a miniature city or state or nation run by kids, and the first self-titled Junior Republic appeared in 1895 in Freeville, New York.

It was organized by a guy named William George, who was a businessman-philanthropist in New York City, and he owned some farmland in upstate New York. He was also part of the good government movement, which, in the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era, was getting worried that the swelling populations of immigrants in US cities—who came from countries where there was autocratic or monarchical rule—didn’t quite understand how democracy works.

And there needed to be some way to fix what he thought was a problem, because many immigrant groups were fine with political bosses. He saw this—and many others in the good government movement saw this—as corrupt, something they wanted to move away from.

In any case, adults were not amenable to being told what to do. But kids, especially poor immigrant kids in New York City’s worst neighborhoods, were excited when he said, “Hey, I’m going to take you into the countryside for the summer. There’s no charge, and we’re going to have fun.”

What he did when he took about 150 kids up to Freeville in 1895 is he gave them a constitution and said they were going to run a miniature version of the United States. He started out as president, but the kids were going to be the senators, the House of Representatives. They were businesspeople, and there were a few supervising adults, but the idea was to give as much power as possible to the kids to create a miniature society, mostly focused on the politics, to help them understand how American democracy works.

And to his tremendous surprise, given the problems he’d seen with immigrant adults in his home terrain, these kids were incredibly patriotic, super passionate, and studied the minutiae of civil service regimes so that they could sit exams to become police officers and other members of the Republic civil service.

So he was stunned, and as he saw what the kids could do, he gradually took a more and more hands-off approach and gave them opportunities to both have political debates and to create new things in the republic.

For example, one of the super interesting topics of debate was female suffrage. George himself was not in favor of it. He asked the kids what they thought. The kids decided that they wanted to try it, and it actually convinced George himself that female suffrage was a good idea.

And not only that, outside observers came to watch in later years. The republic’s use of kids in this way—girls as political citizens and also in political office—was actually used to argue for women’s suffrage in the United States.

There was also an economic system. Kids started businesses: hotels and restaurants, a barbershop, contracting businesses. It was the kids who basically built up the republic campus through these businesses.

Peter Stiepelman: It makes me think about when I was a third-grade teacher. We used to read the book Roxaboxen, and this is sort of—if you’re ever familiar with the book—it’s like the kids create a society on their own without adult intervention. It’s a picture book, and it’s exactly what you’re describing.

And I’m thinking to myself, what a unique idea. What a thoughtful, interesting—I’m certain that the author must have had some sort of understanding or knowledge of the Junior Republics.

So I’m curious: Where did you learn about them?

Jennifer Light: This comes out of a very personal interest when I became a parent. I’m trained as a historian, so I walk around the world saying, “How did we get things that operate like this today?” And so I was interested: Why do we parent the way we parent? Why do schools look the way they do?

I started reading books in the history of childhood and the history of education, and I noticed both genres often had one sentence—possibly a paragraph, but usually one sentence—mentioning there was this guy named William George. He ran a reformatory that was modeled on the United States.

Now, I work at MIT, and many of my colleagues in the education space are working on video games and virtual worlds as educational simulations. And something was like, ding, ding, ding: This is like a virtual world circa 1895. What is this?

And then I just started reading. And what is mentioned in basically one sentence in these books turns out to have been a massive movement that rapidly escaped William George’s efforts to control it. It impacted schools. It impacted youth-serving institutions like boys clubs and settlement houses. And I loved weaving these strands together.

Youth Agency and Modern Schools

Peter Stiepelman: Well, it seems the total antithesis to Frederick Taylor’s thoughts on how to create schools, which are very much built into the factory model. And so it’s almost like all of these kids are now entitled to come for a free and public education, and why don’t we control it by having them sit in rows and walk in lines?

Schools still look so similarly today. And Mason’s done some work around microschools, which seems, in a lot of ways, to be a departure from what has become such traditional schooling.

Sometimes I joke that Frederick Taylor could come back to this world and say, “Oh, the 2 institutions that still look so familiar to me are prisons and schools.”

But microschools are a way to say, “We want something very different.” So I’m curious: From your own coverage of microschools, Mason, and community-centered learning environments, do you see parallels between that and what Jen just described as Junior Republics?

Mason Pashia: Great point. I think that’s really interesting. There’s certainly an iterative approach to both of them. I think that microschools, kind of at their best, are rapid learning environments to kind of meta-learn about themselves and then change on the fly and adapt to the learners.

I think fewer and far between, there are microschools that are actually co-designed with the young people, which sounds a little bit more in step with what a Junior Republic might have been, but I still think that’s super rare.

I think it’s very hard for educators and learning designers to really pass over co-authoring rights to students to help them construct what it means to have a day.

So there are versions of this for sure, but that movement—aside from the flexibility—I think the flexibility is really the core similarity between the 2, and that they both are places where you can incubate an idea and then run with it.

But it’s definitely interesting. I’m curious how many—I think the Waldorf schools are probably an extension of this as well. Those are a national network that have been doing really experiential learning for a long time, that are very student-led and very focused on a community approach in the classroom, which I think is maybe the most radical innovation to me of these Junior Republics: the fact that they were communal and not individualistic.

Giving the student the ability to do personalized learning is one thing, but doing that in a way that actually has all of these touchpoints with other students, and so you’re all sort of rising at the same time, is really unique to, I think, this movement.

But Jen, I’d be curious if you’ve seen other stuff that it rhymes with for you, or—

Jennifer Light: Actually, I wanted to pick up on something Peter said about factories and prisons, because on the one hand, I was endlessly fascinated—and I still am, even years after the book has come out—by these institutions, because on the one hand, you’re exactly right: They’re giving kids tremendous agency that they don’t have in other settings.

And yet this agency was designed to discipline them toward a particular mode of behavior, which—as I was explaining who William George was and what he thought was wrong with how immigrants thought and acted.

And so the prison and factory connection is super interesting. William George and a number of the folks associated with the republic movement also advised factory owners and, in even more numerous examples, prison administrations, to create self-government within their institutions as a way to move away from militaristic styles of discipline and essentially use democratic participation as a form of disciplining, because democracy—the practice of democracy, of course—can look like a lot of different things.

Junior Republics were very diverse, but by and large, for example, they couldn’t have labor unions for the businesses. They couldn’t be socialist. They had to be Democratic or Republican, and so on and so forth.

So there’s this weird feature. And I think that’s part of why republics were so popular, because you could argue for them on these more radical—John Dewey, new educations, follow the child—these kinds of arguments, and then also some more conservative social-efficiency proponents at the turn of the last century, when I’m thinking about different educators. So, endlessly interesting.

Peter Stiepelman: Well, it sounds like it was potentially—instead of an autocratic “one person is going to determine a punishment or consequence”—the introduction of due process, or a jury of peers, and things like that become valued.

One of the big themes in your book is this radical youth agency: the idea that young people were literally the entire electorate and the governing body.

And I started to think to myself, as you were just talking, about what that might look like in schools today. We’ve seen a real increase in things like restorative justice, restorative practices, peer court—things like that—to give agency and ability for your peers to play a role in creating the cultural field that exists within the school: “These are our norms,” or “These are our values,” or “This is how we want to be together.”

It’s not necessarily always going to be the adult that issues a consequence, but rather your peers are going to listen. For the low-level—right? Kid brings a knife to school, they don’t bring them in front of their peers to say, “What do you think we should do?” But rather, some of the pieces that really disrupt the cultural field of respect and those types of things.

So I’m curious—what can we take away from Junior Republics and maybe see its application within schools today?

Jennifer Light: Yeah, absolutely. I think we can take away both the specific activities, like you’re mentioning peer courts. We can also take away the ideas about youth capacity, which looked quite different in the 1890s and even the 1910s from today.

Remember I said I got interested in this because I’m a historian and I’m like, “Where did these ideas come from?” Parenting young kids—while I was writing the book, my son is 6 and I’m reading about kids working in the mines and they’re 6 years old. And I’m like, I can’t imagine this. But that was normal then, right?

So what can we take for today? I’m not saying send our children back to the mines, but what I’m saying is the idea that, yes, a kid is perfectly capable to serve on the peer court.

Or actually, my son, who is now 14, is at a high school where kids write the cell phone policy and the dress code. They’re scaffolding skills for the real world and also extremely invested in the policy that results, and have a much more nuanced understanding of individual versus collective needs and how to balance them. I mean, things like that do exist.

Peter Stiepelman: I love it. It makes me think about school boards that allow or invite a student representative. I was sometimes lobbied to do that, and I never really saw how it would work because of certain confidentiality things.

But yet I’m seeing more and more examples: You can actually have authentic representation and have clear guidelines. They can’t obviously be in executive session when you’re talking about teachers’ employment. Yet at the same time, there’s so much more that goes on in a school district that they can play an active role in guiding policy and practice.

Mason, I want to turn it to you.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think 2 things.

One is just a provocation that I think we can keep taking the Junior Republics into the present with, which is: When I was in school, we did something that was called Exchange City. It was like a one-day city simulation where everybody occupied a business role or something, and it was fine.

Peter Stiepelman: Or like Junior Achievement.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, Junior Achievement. It’s like a Junior Achievement extension. It’s a cool program, and it was useful in terms of some visualization and really living in an environment, but it was completely lacking in all of the things that I think made the Junior Republics so useful, which was this consensus-building, this democracy piece, this understanding of the collective.

Instead, I think I was a lawyer and I just sat in an office and people brought me sandwiches sometimes. And that was my memory of it.

Peter Stiepelman: If I want to be a lawyer, you get sandwiches.

Mason Pashia: I mean, I’m shocked I did not become one because of the awareness built on that day.

So I think it’s a little bit of a yes-and: There are people that are starting some of this work, but I think there’s a way to make it really rich, powerful learning experiences that extend beyond the 4-hour project or whatever simulation they’ve designed.

And 2, we’re working on a project right now with some of Jen’s colleagues, actually from MIT, using their tool Cortico, which is a really cool oral history AI tool that lets you do community conversations and have a more democratized consensus-making process.

So we’re working with students at a high school to basically host conversations with their peers, record them, and then work with AI to identify patterns in all the conversations they’re having to see what is actually happening.

And as a result of that, they’re going to have to design either a policy or make a recommendation to the school board on: We should change this because of all of this data that we’ve collected.

And I think we are getting to a place where smart tools are actually making these things easier. Parsing tons of data and letting that be something that is owned by the students is just easier than I think it’s ever been before.

So that’s another soft plug for Cortico, MIT, but also just an exciting development, I think, in this space of practicing democracy at a grain size that you can put your arms around, rather than just saying it in a more highfalutin 4-year-cycle term.

Jennifer Light: Yeah. That’s super interesting. And I want to go back and reemphasize: We have a sense of what kids can do. It’s a historical thing. It changes over time.

Understanding that gender and race are socially constructed—they have changed over time, our expectations about what people in different categories are capable of or allowed to do. We understand that’s changed.

I think it’s not as widely understood that that goes for age as well. And so I’m not quite sure how one changes the common wisdom. I mean, I wrote a history about how it changed. There are a lot of threads, but that’s a piece of it.

Kids are capable of amazing things still, even if we don’t always allow them to do it.

The Decline of Junior Republics

Mason Pashia: Jen, can I ask a quick follow-up? It sounds like this was part of a broader self-directed research study—just sort of the history of childhood learning, etc.

Why did this stop? When did Junior Republics stop spreading specifically in the United States? Because I think they had a little bit of a longer life in Europe, if I remember correctly.

Peter Stiepelman: Probably when a random guy couldn’t say to these kids, “Come with me up to upstate New York for the summer.”

Mason Pashia: But we do it. We have summer camps, we have all kinds of ways in which you have this kind of—

Peter Stiepelman: No, it’s true. It’s true. And parents sign their kids up. Yeah, I was just thinking about who participated, and it was children who were in poverty, recent immigrants. It wasn’t necessarily—families maybe were like, “Thank God there’s some place my kid can go for the summer.”

Jennifer Light: So actually, yeah, you’re exactly right, Mason. The history of Junior Republics is part of the story I was telling about the transformation of childhood, and I will get to that in a sec.

Junior Republics specifically started for immigrant and indigent youth, but, like I was saying, quickly attracted all kinds of supporters. The Freeville Republic became a tourist attraction. I mean, literally, if you read guidebooks from 1903, it’s listed: Go look at it.

And the idea spread to rural youth. Willis Brown, based in Indiana, was the chief architect of what he called boys’ cities, which were the equivalent—sometimes in YMCAs, sometimes at schools, sometimes summer camps.

Wilson Gill spread the idea in New York City, then to many other urban districts, starting with immigrant districts, but then shifting to middle-class youth. They called them school cities, school republics. So they don’t all have exactly the same name, but they’re part of a family tree of institutions.

We were talking about factories and prisons—that’s part of the branching of the family tree, serving all kinds of different populations. There were even women’s clubs prior to female suffrage who would “play city” or do some sort of political simulation, in part inspired by the girls at the George Junior Republic. So this idea was everywhere.

But Mason, your question is: Why did they disappear?

The backdrop to the story of the Junior Republics is the question about basically why would we let our 6-year-old go to the mine in 1870, and why do we barely let them out of the house in 2025?

Part of that is about the rise of what scholars call the sheltered childhood, which was a contrast from prior ways of doing things. The rise of the sheltered childhood is very much connected to transformations in the American economy, where we moved from the family economy—mother, father, children creating goods at home—to a wage economy where the expectation (not the ideal expectation) is the man goes off to work, the woman maintains the household, the kid goes to school.

Of course, not every family conformed to that anyway, so schools were foundational to this idea of sheltering. But in order to get new kinds of populations into the school system—Mason, you guys being in the education world, you know this—the numbers of Americans who went to school after sixth grade or eighth grade at the turn of the last century was much lower than now.

And how did we entice people to continue their education? Well, before there were laws for compulsory schooling, part of it was updating the curriculum to map onto the needs of an industrializing society and also appeal to children who ordinarily would be in the workforce.

And so schools add vocational and manual training at this time, and then they’re starting to add some of the components of Junior Republics because what would a kid who is not in school do other than be in the labor force making money, which is very appealing?

They might be roaming the streets, have a lot of autonomy. Who wants to sit in a classroom all day?

So these kind of active learning opportunities where kids have a lot of agency—back to what I was saying about disciplining, there are 2 sides to this, right? There’s an effort to bring kids into the school system, to discipline them through these things that seem to give them a lot of agency, but it’s within a more sheltered, protected, adult-supervised space.

In any case, as republics and their component activities play out in the first couple decades of the 20th century, we go from having things like student senates that are direct simulations of the US government to things like student councils, which are more watered down.

This is tracking with that larger story of the sheltering of American youth, where gradually their connection to the outside world is reduced. And these simulated activities are replaced with kind of educational or recreational—

Peter Stiepelman: Right. Well, a textbook, you know, and they’re going to tell you how democracy works as opposed to allowing them to get messy, because it’s messy. Democracy’s messy.

Jennifer Light: Exactly. So I was on the student council in high school in my freshman year, and we planned a movie night, right? That was our grand achievement.

Peter Stiepelman: That was about it. You got to meet with the principal once in a while, and they would tell you what was happening, and they wouldn’t really solicit any advice except maybe some question where they needed to say, “Did you talk to any students about this?” And you’d go, “Yeah, I brought it up at my student council.” Yet you had no real agency.

Although, I’ll tell you, I have a child right now who’s a senior in high school who’s very involved with Model UN. And Model UN, as I observe, is incredibly student-led and really fascinating just to sort of see how—I wonder if someone who participated in Junior Republics would see that as, like, “Oh yeah, I could see how there are similarities,” or why that works in this sheltered setting: creating guardrails, but allowing anything to happen within them.

Jennifer Light: Yes. The predecessor to Model UN is Model League of Nations from the 1920s. It’s another branch of the tree, and it’s one of the ones that survives today. Amazing.

Looking Forward: Student Voice Today

Peter Stiepelman: This has been fascinating, and I know that those who are interested in student agency, student voice, really elevating the role that students get to play within their schools—and almost not even saying “students,” but “children,” because “students” is also sort of a factory term. It pulls away that every child is an individual with their own dreams and abilities and things like that.

But I certainly want to recommend that people check out The State of Childhood and maybe start to think about its historical context and then what that might look like in schools today.

Mason, is there anything that you’d like to say as we conclude this portion?

Mason Pashia: Just in the way that some of this stuff is cyclical, I think it’s always useful—and we always think we invent stuff in education and education innovation. A lot of the time it’s beneficial to look backward and recognize: The microschools movement is kind of the same thing. That was where schools started. It was basically homeschools. So we sort of recreate solutions, and over time, hopefully they’re getting stronger and better, but it’s always worth checking in with the past.

Jennifer Light: I love that. And I’ll just say for your listeners, my book is available for free on the MIT Press website. So you can buy it, but please take a free copy.

Embodied Education at MIT

Peter Stiepelman: We’re back for segment 2 of this crossover episode of An Imperfect Leader and Getting Smart, and our guest today is Jennifer Light, professor of History of Science and Technology and professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and the author of The State of Childhood.

I mentioned in the opening introduction that you’re involved in the MIT Project on Embodied Education, focusing on movement, physical activity, and how it could be integrated into academic instruction to enhance learning.

When I was superintendent, in one of my elementary schools, the principal and the director of PE (physical education) dedicated a space in their building—one of my 22 elementary schools—for children to engage in intentional exercises. One that comes to mind is crossing the midline with their arms to build stronger connection.

And I’m wondering if you could tell us about the MIT Project on Embodied Education.

Jennifer Light: So you guys sit in the education space where there has been an emerging body of research about how we don’t just think in here, but the rest of our bodies are involved in making knowledge.

And also some education research finding, exactly as your colleague did, that when students move their bodies, it enhances executive function. It can tap a second memory system in the body. It can increase creativity.

The way I see it sitting at MIT is that if there were a technology that could do all the things for learning that movement could do, we would have it in every school.

And so the Project on Embodied Education is about the why and the how.

My colleagues and I are trying to design curriculum. Some are formal lesson plans; others are lesson ideas. We put them all up for free on our website. We are happy to crowdsource new ideas. If anyone in your audience is doing this and wants to share, that would be awesome.

But in addition to showing curriculum ideas, I’m trying to show institutionally how this could happen.

I sit on the academic side of Mass. Ave., which is the big street that bisects the campus—academic from the dorms and the athletic center. And so my collaborators are all in our athletic department, our Physical Education and Wellness group.

They have a tremendous amount of movement expertise, and our classes are cross-listed. We’re trying to help students learn both the brain science and the education science and how to move, and then they create curriculum.

Yesterday actually was our final class of the semester. We had about 20 visitors from the Cambridge Public Schools who teach math and science. And my student projects were games to teach the Algebra 1 curriculum, which would blow your mind.

We had a tug-of-war to teach linear and exponential growth. That kind of thing. It was very joyous and very quick. I mean, I’ve been an educator for more than 30 years. I’m trying to make this as easy as possible for someone to adopt.

Peter Stiepelman: My brain as a risk manager was like, “Tug-of-war.” I hope there was a lot of pre-teaching before they even started that, if you were to do that in a school.

Jennifer Light: It was the soft floor. It was just the floor. There was a lot of giggling.

So, yeah. If education can have more giggling in the Algebra curriculum, it will be more memorable. And the physical activity—

Mason Pashia: True. It made me think 3 things.

One, your background is making more sense—your virtual background.

Two, I think there is something about that that is super connected to the interest in Junior Republics. Kinetic movement learning is one way to make it sticky and bring joy, and then there’s another to do more real-world.

The Junior Republics: You’re doing things in the real world with your real body in a way that feels like there are stakes for it.

And then I have another question for you. I’m curious if this shows up within your department, but I know you’re in Urban Studies and Planning as well, which is a personal interest of mine.

I’m thinking about how this connects to place-based education. Is embodied learning just within your own body, or is it actually within the context of place?

I’m thinking of songlines in Australia—the kind of walking and singing as a way of navigating and remembering. How do you think about kinetic movement with relationship to place as either a context or a thing that can teach you?

Jennifer Light: That is incredibly interesting. I see 2 connections.

One is that the cognitive science that looks at what’s happening below the neck has also ventured into how we think with our environment. That’s not my personal specialty, but there’s a great book by a science journalist, Annie Paul, that talks about this. It’s the best digested synthesis I know.

Since I’m at MIT, when I talk to people about embodied education, I do tend to emphasize the cognitive science, learning science piece. But the truth is, learning with our bodies, thinking with our bodies, knowing the world with our bodies—that is the most ancient practice, right?

And so it is absolutely place-based. One of the things that I think is super interesting is the way that movement can help us access Indigenous or alternative epistemologies, and that those are often place-based.

Mason Pashia: I’ll check out that book. That sounds super interesting, and totally agree. Again, things are cyclical.

Jennifer Light: Exactly. Yeah.

Peter Stiepelman: We’re coming toward the end. Between Getting Smart and An Imperfect Leader, we have thousands of regular listeners, and I’m curious from the work that you do: What advice would you give to an aspiring leader?

Jennifer Light: I’m going to go back to one of the things I said right at the outset, which is: I’m a historian, and I see the world saying, “Huh, why do we do things that way?”

And of course, leaders are often thinking about the future, designing the future. So I invite them to think historically about the world they’re in. How did we get to things being this way? Could they be different? Because it’s important to understand how we got to where we are if you’re going to change it, at least, I think.

And then I think the point that Mason and I were just talking about is that sometimes the best ideas are in the past, and we pushed them aside for understandable reasons at the time we pushed them aside, but they are worth revisiting.

Peter Stiepelman: I love it. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Scott Nearing’s work. From 1910 to 1912, he traveled the country. He was paid by a women’s magazine to go look for new ways of doing education. So it was called The New Education.

It’s very funny to me because, as Mason pointed out and as you confirmed, what we’re doing right now around place-based learning or project-based learning is exactly what he was advocating for based on what he observed all across the country.

And I’m curious—I’m going to go back and look at the book to see what kind of references he might have made to Junior Republics, because so much of what he elevates for the reader is basically this foundational question: Are schools designed for children, or are children designed for schools?

And depending on how you answer that question really reveals your values about what you expect—and can expect—from children.

Really grateful for your time today. Our guest today was Jennifer Light, professor of History of Science and Technology and professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the author of The State of Childhood. It examined youth-led Junior Republics.

Mason, I’m grateful for your time. This was great fun. I really thank you for joining me and for letting me be a part of your network as well for a moment.

Mason Pashia: Likewise. Thanks for making this happen, Peter. Great to be—

Jennifer Light: Yeah, Mason, great to meet you. This was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Peter Stiepelman: Jen, thank you so much for making the time. Really grateful.

---

Guest Bios

Jennifer Light

Jen Light’s teaching and research aim to close the gap between the growing body of research on movement and the learning process and the pedagogical strategies that educators use, finding ways to integrate physical activity and academic instruction at all levels. She offers three courses in collaboration with MIT and Boston-area coaches, physical education and wellness instructors, and movement artists: Embodied Education: Past, Present, Future; Exercise is Medicine: From Ancient Civilizations to Modern Healthcare Systems; and Thinking on Your Feet: Dance as a Learning Science. She is concurrently writing a book about the ancient wisdom and modern science of embodied education. Find out more about the MIT Project on Embodied Education here.

Light holds degrees from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of the Professional Preparatory Program at Esh Circus Arts and an American Council on Exercise certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor. Professor Light has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and the Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and awarded the Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association (Sociology of Children and Youth), the Catherine Bauer Wurster Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and an honorary doctorate from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Light currently serves on the board of the Boston Circus Guild and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute. She has participated on the editorial boards of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; Information and Culture;  Journal of Communication, and Journal of Urban History. Previously, she was head of the MIT Program on Science, Technology and Society and on the faculty of the School of Communication and the Departments of History and Sociology at Northwestern University.