Intermezzo: “Kids are people, too” ...right?

Some truths are so simple that we forget how radical they are. Kids are people, too: four words that, said out loud, draw easy nods. Of course. Obviously. How could it be otherwise? Who would disagree that kids are people? And yet, in so many classrooms, playgrounds, homes, and policies, those words are not lived. They are a promise half-kept or never made at all.

Manifesto 25 states it clearly: every student is a human being with the same rights to dignity, safety, and self-determination as anyone else. They must be free to make meaningful choices about their learning, their communities, and their lives, provided they respect the equal rights of others to do the same.

It’s a principle that feels natural to those who have grown up with it; but, for many, the realization comes late, and often with a jolt.

A YOUDEX focus group on Manifesto 25 took place on a summer afternoon on August 6, 2025 in Belgium, bringing together young people engaged in democratic education from across different contexts around the world. While the agenda included reviewing selected manifesto points, the real work of the session unfolded in the personal accounts and lived experiences shared around those principles.

“It seems like common sense to me now,” one young woman said, “but that’s obviously not always the reality. In our society, children are definitely not treated as equals. Oftentimes our opinions are not valued, or adults think they know better.”

Her own jolt came the day she saw corporal punishment for the first time, not in a news story or a book, but in raw display in front of her.

“They wouldn’t treat another adult like this,” she said sternly. “So why treat a child that way? It didn’t make sense to me.”

The room was still for a moment, the weight of her words settling in. The atmosphere reflected the unspoken agreement that such things were normal, permissible, even deserved in many mainstream contexts.

Others spoke about the subtler forms this inequality takes and the ways adults can chip away at a child’s selfhood without even noticing.

“I was maybe five or six,” another participant remembered. “An adult spoke to me like I was stupid. I understood perfectly well what he was saying, but the way he said it made me angry. Why talk to me like that? Even now, when I see people speak to younger people like that, I think, why? They’ll understand you if you just talk normally.”

No punishment. No raised voice. Just a small act of dismissal that still stings today.

Beyond the student

Respect cannot stop at the student. If a school claims to honor the humanity of its learners but treats its teachers as replaceable cogs, the culture will hollow out from the inside.

A teacher from Taiwan had worked for two years in a democratic school. Next year, she was moving to a public school “to see the environment of how lonely I will be.” She meant it half in jest, half in warning.

“If a student has different values or needs, the teacher faces obstacles. You think, ‘How will my colleagues see me if I give them more space?’ In many schools, so much is already decided… Sometimes if you say something different, maybe the student will lose hope to create another way to go.”

Even in open schools, she said, there were quiet ways to exclude students who didn’t fit. A child who struggled to communicate in a certain way could be labeled shy, lazy, or uncooperative.

“They want to join the community,” she said, “but they don’t have the ability or confidence yet. And there aren’t enough teachers to accompany them.”

Her point was clear: you cannot expect students to flourish in freedom if teachers are themselves hemmed in. Teacher agency is the ground on which student agency stands.

Trust over fear

If respect is the principle, trust is the practice. And trust does not thrive in the climate of fear that pervades so much of mainstream education. These are fear of failure, fear of disobedience, fear of anything that cannot be measured on a test.

One participant described a place that operated on a different frequency entirely: a summer camp in Belgium with only one rule: respect others and the materials.

“Every week, 120 children come; different ones each time. They can do whatever they want. There’s no wall, no one stopping them if they run away. But no one runs away. There’s never been bullies. If you give a rule, it’s like a button. People want to press it. But if you give awareness instead… they don’t press it.”

It wasn’t lawlessness. It was the kind of freedom that carries its own gravity, a shared understanding that the space exists because everyone chooses to make it work.

The long work ahead

Nobody will disagree with the phrase “kids are people, too,” but it is not a slogan meant to sit still on posters.  It is a long, daily discipline. It shows up in the way a teacher pauses to listen, in the trust extended to a student to make their own choice, in the willingness to change course when the current one no longer serves. It requires that we always hold open the possibility that the way we do things now is not the way we must do them tomorrow.

It is also a reminder that the culture of a school is a single ecosystem. Respect for students, respect for staff members, trust among all do not survive in isolation. If one falters, the rest will follow.

The promise is simple. The practice is anything but. Yet in every story shared (e.g., the memory of a teacher’s tone, the shock of punishment, the courage to give space, the quiet success of a ruleless camp) the same truth emerges when we act as if kids are people too, they rise to meet us as equals. And that is where the future begins.