The Bullring

The Bullring: A Classroom Experiment in Moral Education describes a way in which the principle of encouraging children to find out for themselves and to conduct their experiments with the raw material of common everyday objects—so well understood in the earlier years of schooling—may be adapted to help older children understand the world of persons. The Bullring is a free-discussion lesson; in it the children push the desks to one side, and, with the teacher, sit around in a circle facing one another. Their task is to study their behavior as it occurs and the teacher's task is to help them to do this. What distinguishes the Bullring from an ordinary discussion period is the freedom of students to say what they like and just about do what they like. The Bullring tries to provide a safe area in which young adolescents could find out for themselves what sort of persons they and their friends and their enemies were in relation to one another. It thus attempts to extend the principle of free discovery into the realm of personal relationships, to help children to discover themselves and to discover a morality by which to live.