Parenting & Family Quote by Dora Russell

“Great innovation” lands with the dry understatement of someone who knows she’s poking a polite society in the eye. Dora Russell is talking about self-government and a school council for young children as if it’s an administrative tweak; the subtext is far more radical. In an era when childhood was routinely treated as a training ground for obedience, giving kids institutional voice wasn’t just progressive pedagogy, it was a miniature political revolution.

Russell’s intent reads as both validation and provocation. She’s arguing that democracy isn’t a subject you memorize; it’s a habit you practice, even (especially) before you’re “ready.” The phrase “such young children” acknowledges the predictable objection - that children lack the rational capacity for governance - and then breezes past it, reframing youth not as a deficit but as the point. If you wait until adulthood to teach agency, you’ve already taught submission.

Context matters: Russell’s educational experiments (and her broader feminist, anti-authoritarian commitments) sit in a 20th-century landscape where schools were factories for social order. A school council threatens that order by shifting power from adult fiat to collective negotiation. It asks children to handle conflict, rules, and accountability in public, where authority can be questioned and revised. That’s why it’s “innovation”: not because kids suddenly become legislators, but because adults must accept being answerable.

The line also telegraphs Russell’s broader politics: the private sphere (childrearing, classrooms) is political infrastructure. Change the classroom, and you change the citizen.